scholarly journals a Literary History of Mental Captivity in the United States. Blood Meridian, Wise Blood, and Contemporary Political Discourse

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-97
Author(s):  
Manuel Broncano Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Blood Meridian ◽  
The World ◽  
Wise Blood ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
A Chain

On July 15, 2018, US President Donald Trump and Russia President Vladimir Putin held a summit in Helsinki that immediately set off a chain reaction throughout the world. By now, barely two months later, that summit is all but forgotten for the most part, superseded by the frantic train of events and the subsequent bombardment from the media that have become the “new normal.” While the iron secrecy surrounding the conversation between the two dignitaries allowed for all kinds of speculation, the image of president Trump bowing to his Russian counterpart (indeed a treasure trove for semioticians) became for many observers in the US and across the world the living proof of Mr. Trump´s subservient allegiance to Mr. Putin and his obscure designs. Even some of the most recalcitrant GOPs vented quite publicly their disgust at the sight of a president paying evident homage to the archenemy of the United States, as Vercingetorix kneeled down before Julius Cesar in recognition of the Gaul´s surrender to the might of the Roman Empire. For some arcanereason, the whole episode of the Helsinki summit brought to my mind, as in a vivid déjà vu, Cormac McCarthy´s novel Blood Meridian and more specifically, the characters of Judge Holden and the idiotic freak who becomes Holden´s ludicrous disciple in the wastelands of Arizona. In my presentation, I will provide some possible explanations as to why I came to blend these two unrelated episodes into a single continuum. In the process, I will briefly revisit some key texts in the American canon that fully belong in the history of “mental captivity” in the United States, yet to be written. Obviously, I am not in hopes of deciphering the ultimate reasons for current US foreign policy, and the more modest aim of my presentation today is to offer some insights into the general theme of our conference through a novel and a textual tradition overpopulated with “captive minds.”

The Center of the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
June Howard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Color ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Regionalism ◽  
Multiple Media ◽  
The One

The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.

Histoire du mot «démocratie» au Canada et au Québec. Analyse politique des stratégies rhétoriques

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-343
Author(s):  
Francis Dupuis-Déri
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Le Canada

Résumé.L'étude des discours des «pères fondateurs» du Canada moderne révèle qu'ils étaient ouvertement antidémocrates. Comment expliquer qu'un régime fondé dans un esprit antidémocratique en soit venu à être identifié positivement à la démocratie? S'inspirant d'études similaires sur les États-Unis et la France, l'analyse de l'histoire du mot «démocratie» révèle que le Canada a été associé à la «démocratie» en raison de stratégies discursives des membres de l'élite politique qui cherchaient à accroître leur capacité de mobiliser les masses à l'occasion des guerres mondiales, et non pas à la suite de modifications constitutionnelles ou institutionnelles qui auraient justifié un changement d'appellation du régime.Abstract.An examination of the speeches of modern Canada's “founding fathers” lays bare their openly anti-democratic outlook. How did a regime founded on anti-democratic ideas come to be positively identified with democracy? Drawing on the examples of similar studies carried out in the United States and France, this analysis of the history of the term “democracy” in Canada shows that the country's association with “democracy” was not due to constitutional or institutional changes that might have justified re-labelling the regime. Instead, it was the result of the political elite's discursive strategies, whose purpose was to strengthen the elite's ability to mobilize the masses during the world wars.

History, Theory, and Education

2011 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Rury
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Attention To Detail

The distinguished Africanist Robert Harms once observed that “we historians are a practical people who pride ourselves on our attention to facts and our painstaking attention to detail.” If this is the case in other parts of the world, it is certainly true of American historians, who have been periodically admonished for their disinterest in questions of theory and purpose related to their craft. In this issue we have an opportunity to discuss the question of theory as it may pertain to the history of education, with particular attention to the United States. Regardless of whether one believes that historians should be ardent students of social theory, after all, there is little question about whether they should be cognizant of it. Indeed, there is danger in ignoring it. Quoting John Maynard Keynes, Harms suggested that practical people who feel “exempt from any intellectual influences” run the risk of “becoming slaves to some defunct economist.”

The Cambridge History of America and the World

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Power ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
The World ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of

The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.

The Wright Brothers

1948 ◽  
Vol 52 (447) ◽  
pp. 141-150
Author(s):  
Wilbur ◽  
Orville
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wilbur Wright

On 6th January 1916 Lord Northcliffe, seconding a vote of thanks to Mr. Griffith Brewer for his lecture on the Life and Work of Wilbur Wright, said among other things : “The fact remains, however, that after more than one hundred years of experiment with aeroplanes, these two brothers were the first people in the world who made a machine to fly, and flew it. I make that remark emphatically, because there is one point to which Mr. Griffith Brewer did not call attention, and that is the attempt that has been made to rob the Wright brothers of the credit of their invention. We have not heard much of that in England, but ‘a prophet is not without honour save in his own country,’ and in the United States there have been long and persistent attempts to belittle the work of Wilbur and Orville Wright. I have closely read and followed the history of the hundred years of aeroplane experiments, and I am convinced that the credit of the first flying aeroplane is due to the Wright Brothers, and from the point of practical flying to nobody else. As an Englishman I am in an independent position, and I know that these words of mine will go across the Atlantic, and I believe they will assist in stopping the spread of the insidious suggestion that the Wrights did not invent the aeroplane.”

On Fat Clothes: Unraveling Plus-Size Design Discourse

Design Issues ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Lauren Downing Peters
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Disability Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Fashion Theory ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article considers the possibilities and limitations of plus-size clothing— a subcategory of ready-to-wear that is deeply embedded in the history of dieting, exercise, standardized sizing, and the industrialization of clothing manufacturing in the United States. In doing so, it draws on fashion theory and disability theory in exposing how plus-size clothing functions as a normalizing mechanism, thereby inhibiting innovation in this sector. The article concludes with a counterexploration of the possibilities of “fat clothes” and the novel w ays of seeing and existing in the world that they might enable.

Managing Failures

2030 ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rutger van Santen ◽  
Djan Khoe ◽  
Bram Vermeer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Power Supply ◽  
Communication Systems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Payment Systems ◽  
Software Failure ◽  
The World ◽  
The Media ◽  
High Doses

Computers are the engines that drive our society. We get paid via computer, and we use them to vote in elections; computers decide whether to deploy the airbags in our car; and doctors use them to help identify a patient’s injuries. Computers are embedded in all sorts of processes nowadays, and that can make us vulnerable. Because of a single computer glitch, large payment systems can grind to a halt. When computers malfunction, we risk losing our power supply, our railway links, and our communications. Worst of all, we habitually shift responsibility to computers and blindly follow their advice. This is why patients occasionally receive ridiculously high doses of a powerful drug or a car driver who blindly follows his satnav may end up in a ditch. Ubiquitous computer use can cause otherwise responsible people to leave their common sense at home. We’re all too familiar with poorly designed software, computer errors, or—worse still—programs that flatly refuse to function properly no matter what we do. It is hardly surprising then that computer failures cost the world hundreds of billions of dollars a year. In the United States alone, failed computer projects are believed to waste $55 billion annually. And the media only report the tip of the iceberg— the foul-ups that cost millions or result in fatalities. For instance, in the 1980s, several cancer patients were killed by a programming error that caused the Therac 25 radiotherapy unit to deliver excessive doses of radiation. In 1996, Europe’s first Ariane 5 rocket had to be blown up a mere 37 seconds after launch in what might be the costliest software failure in history. In 2007, six F-22 aircraft experienced multiple computer crashes as they crossed the date line, disabling all navigation and communication systems. The list can be extended endlessly, and there are many more failures that we never hear about. Only about a third of all computer projects can be described as successful, and even these are hardly error-free. Why can’t we prevent programming mistakes? Could we improve computers and their software to protect society from the “moods”’ of its digital machines?

Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takayuki Tatsumi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
The Road ◽  
History Of ◽  
On The Road

Literary history has always mirrored discursive revolutions in world history. In the United States, the Jazz Age would not have seen the Herman Melville revival and the completion of Carl Van Doren's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21) without the rise of post–World War I nativism. If it had not been for Pearl Harbor, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) could not have fully aroused the democratic spirit embedded in the heritage of New Criticism. Likewise, the postcolonial and New Americanist climate around 1990, that critical transition at the end of the cold war, brought about the publication of Emory Elliott's The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) and Sacvan Bercovitch's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994–). I would like to question, however, the discourse that narrates American literary history in the globalist age of the twenty-first century.

Literary History of the United States

1949 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 290
Author(s):  
Theodore Hornberger ◽  
Robert E. Spiller ◽  
Willard Thorp ◽  
Thomas H. Johnson ◽  
Henry Seidel Canby ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of

Technology and US Foreign Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Krysko
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us History ◽  
Patterns Of Use ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Us Foreign Relations

Technology is ubiquitous in the history of US foreign relations. Throughout US history, technology has played an essential role in how a wide array of Americans have traveled to and from, learned about, understood, recorded and conveyed information about, and attempted to influence, benefit from, and exert power over other lands and peoples. The challenge for the historian is not to find where technology intersects with the history of US foreign relations, but how to place a focus on technology without falling prey to deterministic assumptions about the inevitability of the global power and influence—or lack thereof—the United States has exerted through the technology it has wielded. “Foreign relations” and “technology” are, in fact, two terms with extraordinarily broad connotations. “Foreign relations” is not synonymous with “diplomacy,” but encompasses all aspects and arenas of American engagement with the world. “Technology” is itself “an unusually slippery term,” notes prominent technology historian David Nye, and can refer to simple tools, more complex machines, and even more complicated and expansive systems on which the functionality of many other innovations depends. Furthermore, processes of technological innovation, proliferation, and patterns of use are shaped by a dizzying array of influences embedded within the larger surrounding context, including but by no means limited to politics, economics, laws, culture, international exchanges, and environment. While some of the variables that have shaped how the United States has deployed its technological capacities were indeed distinctly American, others arose outside the United States and lay beyond any American ability to control. A technology-focused rendering of US foreign relations and global ascendancy is not, therefore, a narrative of uninterrupted progress and achievement, but an accounting of both successes and failures that illuminate how surrounding contexts and decisions have variably shaped, encouraged, and limited the technology and power Americans have wielded.

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