Southern Enclosure as American Literature

Black Market ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 138-183
Author(s):  
Aaron Carico
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
New Deal ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Paper Money ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Land Grabs ◽  
Racial History

Set against the backdrop of Southern land grabs in the 1830s and again in the 1930s that were meant to sustain the cotton economy, this chapter studies the literary representation of the poor whites who were side-lined by the slave plantation’s expansion and modernization, and who were then remade into a national folk by literary elites. Facilitated by these Southern enclosures, the ambivalent canonization of poor whites as the nation’s folk would have a decisive and determining influence on the constitution—and the racial covenant—of American literature, and not only on its Americaness but also on its literariness. Slavery was the condition of possibility for this literature, but its role, along with that of the enslaved, was silenced. From frontier humor to the New Criticism, this chapter reveals a submerged racial history beneath the canonization of U.S. national literature, which was undertaken in the early twentieth century in U.S. literary criticism, explainingthe roleof New Deal photography, of paper money and paperwork, and modernism in literary style in the constitution of American literature as both discipline and object.

Newman, Aristotle, and the New Criticism: On the Modern Element in Newman's Poetics

PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-271
Author(s):  
Norman Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Minority Report

Certain Aspects of modern critical theory can be defined in terms of its use—or rather, misuse—of Aristotle's Poetics, especially of Aristotle's conception of plot and his statement that poetry deals with universals rather than particulars. The same, of course, can be said of other periods as well. Sidney's view of Aristotle, for example, was confined to the notion that a poem was an imitation of an action, but he platonized even this conception by claiming that the action imitated was an ideal one—what ought to be rather than what is—and this, as we shall see, became quite a common distortion of the famous passage at the beginning of the ninth chapter of the Poetics. The other side of the coin is found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' concern with the genres and the unities and their supposed rules. It cannot be said that Aristotle has been a vital influence on literary criticism since the nineteenth century, except for the current minority report being filed by the Chicago Critics, but these two aspects of the Poetics nevertheless offered a support and a challenge to certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics for clarifying their own ideas about poetry.

Elizabethan Prose Fiction and Some Trends in Recent Criticism

1984 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. C. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Adequate Response ◽  
Popular Work

Current methodological trends now influence the study of most literature, but as I shall argue, in the future they may alter radically the study of Elizabethan prose fiction. Some works of literature, especially the major ones, may be enjoyed by readers in any age, but many, perhaps now most, depend on literary criticism to be properly understood and fully appreciated. At one time Milton's Paradise Lost was a popular work, requiring of its readers only that their lives be grounded in the Bible to ensure their full response to it. For most readers today, an adequate response to Milton's poem is a product of the historical scholarship and the New Criticism practiced mostly in America in the first half of the twentieth century.

Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful

Philosophy ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 36 (136) ◽  
pp. 71-73
Author(s):  
Anthony Quinton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Academic Philosophy

Burke's Enquiry is one of those books that hovers, importantly but ineffectively, at the fringes of the attention of most modern readers of philosophy. It is something that they have always meant to read some time but yet which they all too seldom get around to actually reading. Its neglect, no doubt, is mainly to be accounted for as part of the generally rather forlorn position of aesthetics in our intellectual landscape. Students of literature disregard aesthetics as at once too schematic and abstract for their purposes and as too often the work of people inadequately equipped for and experienced in the direct criticism of literature and the arts. Although the dominant style of modern criticism had as one of its principal sources a fairly consciously philosophical inquiry into the nature of literature, namely Richard's Principles of Literary Criticism, in its prevailing form, as manifested in the writings of Dr. Leavis and his fol-lowers, it is hostile to any pretensions to critical relevance on the part of academic philosophy. If it rejects impressionism for determinedly intellectual analysis of the detail of literature, it still relies on philosophy only in the loosest and most colloquial sense of the word in so far as it embodies a definitely articulated point of view on questions of morality. (This is not true, it should be added, of the corresponding American New Criticism.) On the other hand, aesthetics has only figured in the most fitful and peripheral manner on the agenda of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

Verán ustedes las chozas más humildes. El discurso de pobreza en la diplomacia pública cardenista dirigida a Estados Unidos

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-281
Author(s):  
Sylvia Dümmer Scheel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Government ◽  
Lazaro Cardenas ◽  
The New Deal

El artículo analiza la diplomacia pública del gobierno de Lázaro Cárdenas centrándose en su opción por publicitar la pobreza nacional en el extranjero, especialmente en Estados Unidos. Se plantea que se trató de una estrategia inédita, que accedió a poner en riesgo el “prestigio nacional” con el fin de justificar ante la opinión pública estadounidense la necesidad de implementar las reformas contenidas en el Plan Sexenal. Aprovechando la inusual empatía hacia los pobres en tiempos del New Deal, se construyó una imagen específica de pobreza que fuera higiénica y redimible. Ésta, sin embargo, no generó consenso entre los mexicanos. This article analyzes the public diplomacy of the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, focusing on the administration’s decision to publicize the nation’s poverty internationally, especially in the United States. This study suggests that this was an unprecedented strategy, putting “national prestige” at risk in order to explain the importance of implementing the reforms contained in the Six Year Plan, in the face of public opinion in the United States. Taking advantage of the increased empathy felt towards the poor during the New Deal, a specific image of hygienic and redeemable poverty was constructed. However, this strategy did not generate agreement among Mexicans.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Shaheen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
First World War ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Prosthetic Devices ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
First World

Drawing on rehabilitation publications, novels by both famous and lesser-known American writers, and even the prosthetic masks of a classically trained sculptor, Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture addresses the ways in which prosthetic devices were designed, promoted, and depicted in America in the years during and after the First World War. The war’s mechanized weaponry ushered in an entirely new relationship between organic bodies and the technology that could both cause and attempt to remedy hideous injuries. This relationship was evident in the realm of prosthetic development, which by the second decade of the twentieth century promoted the belief that a prosthesis should be a spiritual extension of the person who possessed it. This spiritualized vision of prostheses held a particular resonance in American postwar culture. Relying on some of the most recent developments in literary and disability studies, the book’s six chapters explain how a prosthesis’s spiritual promise was largely dependent on its ability to nullify an injury and help an amputee renew (or even improve upon) his prewar life. But if it proved too cumbersome, obtrusive, or painful, the device had the long-lasting power to efface or distort his “spirit” or personality.

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