Allegories Of America

Author : Frederick M. Dolan
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2018-03-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781501726231

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Allegories of America by Frederick M. Dolan Pdf

Allegories of America offers a bold idea of what, in terms of political theory, it means to be American. Beginning with the question What do we want from a theory of politics? Dolan explores the metaphysics of American-ness and stops along the way to reflect on John Winthrop, the Constitution, 1950s behavioralist social science, James Merrill, and William Burroughs. The pressing problem, in Dolan's view, is how to find a vocabulary for politics in the absence of European metaphysics. American political thinkers, he suggests, might respond by approaching their own theories as allegories. The postmodern dilemma of the loss of traditional absolutes would thus assume the status of a national mythology—America's perennial identity crisis in the absence of a tradition establishing the legitimacy of its founding. After examining the mid-Atlantic sermons of John Winthrop, the spiritual founding father, Dolan reflects on the authority of the Constitution and the Federalist. He then takes on questions of representation in Cold War ideology, focusing on the language of David Easton and other liberal political "behaviorists," as well as on cold War cinema and the coverage of international affairs by American journalists. Additional discussions are inspired by Hannah Arendt's recasting of political theory in a narrative framework. here Dolan considers two starkly contrasting postwar literary figures—William S. Burroughs and James Merrill—both of whom have a troubled relationship to politics but nonetheless register an urgent need to articulate its dangers and opportunities. Alongside Merrill's unraveling of the distinction between the serious and the fictive, Dolan assesses the attempt in Arendt's On Revolution to reclaim fictional devices for political reflection.

Author : D. Madsen
Publisher : Springer
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 1995-12-18
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780230379930

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Allegory in America by D. Madsen Pdf

Allegory in America surveys the history of American allegorical writing from the Puritans through the period of American romanticism to postmodernism. In a series of theoretical chapters the cultural function of allegory is discussed in relation to the mythology of American exceptionalism. Each theoretical chapter is followed by a chapter that analyzes a specific text or group of texts. Allegorical indeterminacy is seen to produce a literary tradition that both represents and subverts the ideals of American orthodoxy.

Author : Andrew Newman
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2018-11-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781469643465

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Allegories of Encounter by Andrew Newman Pdf

Presenting an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to colonial America's best-known literary genre, Andrew Newman analyzes depictions of reading, writing, and recollecting texts in Indian captivity narratives. While histories of literacy and colonialism have emphasized the experiences of Native Americans, as students in missionary schools or as parties to treacherous treaties, captivity narratives reveal what literacy meant to colonists among Indians. Colonial captives treasured the written word in order to distinguish themselves from their Native captors and to affiliate with their distant cultural communities. Their narratives suggest that Indians recognized this value, sometimes with benevolence: repeatedly, they presented colonists with books. In this way and others, Scriptures, saintly lives, and even Shakespeare were introduced into diverse experiences of colonial captivity. What other scholars have understood more simply as textual parallels, Newman argues instead may reflect lived allegories, the identification of one's own unfolding story with the stories of others. In an authoritative, wide-ranging study that encompasses the foundational New England narratives, accounts of martyrdom and cultural conversion in New France and Mohawk country in the 1600s, and narratives set in Cherokee territory and the Great Lakes region during the late eighteenth century, Newman opens up old tales to fresh, thought-provoking interpretations.

Author : Ismail Xavier
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0816626766

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Allegories of Underdevelopment by Ismail Xavier Pdf

" 'A camera in the hand and ideas in the head' was the primary axiom of the young originators of Brazil's Cinema Novo. This movement of the 1960s and early 1970s overcame technical constraints and produced films on minimal budgets. In Allegories of Underdevelopment, Ismail Xavier examines a number of these films, arguing that they served to represent a nation undergoing a political and social transformation into modernity. Its best-known voice, filmmaker Glauber Rocha claimed that Cinema Novo was driven by an "aesthetics of hunger." This scarcity of means demanded new cinematic approaches that eventually gave rise to a legitimate and unique Third World cinema. Xavier stands in the vanguard of scholars presenting and interpreting these revolutionary films - from the masterworks of Rocha to the groundbreaking experiments of Julio Bressane, Rogério Sganzerla, Andrea Tonacci and Arthur Omar - to an English-speaking audience. Focusing on each filmmaker's use of narrative allegories for the "conservative modernization" Brazil and other nations underwent in the 1960s and 1970s, Xavier asks questions relating to the connection between film and history. He examines the way Cinema Novo transformed Brazil's cultural memory and charts the controversial roles that Marginal Cinema and Tropicalism played in this process. Among the films he discusses are Black God, White Devil, Land in Anguish, Red Light Bandit, Macunaíma, Antônio das Mortes, The Angel Is Born, and Killed the Family and Went to the Movies." -- Book cover.

Author : Stephanie Pratt
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2013-02-11
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780806188843

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American Indians in British Art, 1700-1840 by Stephanie Pratt Pdf

Ask anyone the world over to identify a figure in buckskins with a feather bonnet, and the answer will be “Indian.” Many works of art produced by non-Native artists have reflected such a limited viewpoint. In American Indians in British Art, 1700–1840, Stephanie Pratt explores for the first time an artistic tradition that avoided simplification and that instead portrayed Native peoples in a surprisingly complex light. During the eighteenth century, the British allied themselves with Indian tribes to counter the American colonial rebellion. In response, British artists produced a large volume of work focusing on American Indians. Although these works depicted their subjects as either noble or ignoble savages, they also represented Indians as active participants in contemporary society. Pratt places artistic works in historical context and traces a movement away from abstraction, where Indians were symbols rather than actual people, to representational art, which portrayed Indians as actors on the colonial stage. But Pratt also argues that to view these images as mere illustrations of historical events or individuals would be reductive. As works of art they contain formal characteristics and ideological content that diminish their documentary value.

Author : Fabio Ferrari
Publisher : Longo Angelo
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : UOM:39015079373018

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Myths and Counter-myths of America by Fabio Ferrari Pdf

Author : J. Elliott
Publisher : Springer
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2008-06-09
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780230612808

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Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory by J. Elliott Pdf

This book argues that popular feminist fiction provided a key means by which American culture narrated and negotiated the perceived breakdown of American progress after the 1960s. It explores the intersection of two key features of late twentieth-century American culture.

Author : Gordon Teskey
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0801429951

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Allegory and Violence by Gordon Teskey Pdf

The only form of monumental artistic expression practiced from antiquity to the Enlightenment, allegory evolved to its fullest complexity in Dante's Commedia and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Drawing on a wide range of literary, visual, and critical works in the European tradition, Gordon Teskey provides both a literary history of allegory and a theoretical account of the genre which confronts fundamental questions about the violence inherent in cultural forms. Approaching allegory as the site of intense ideological struggle, Teskey argues that the desire to raise temporal experience to ever higher levels of abstraction cannot be realized fully but rather creates a "rift" that allegory attempts to conceal. After examining the emergence of allegorical violence from the gendered metaphors of classical idealism, Teskey describes its amplification when an essentially theological form of expression was politicized in the Renaissance by the introduction of the classical gods, a process leading to the replacement of allegory by political satire and cartoons. He explores the relationship between rhetorical voice and forms of indirect speech (such as irony) and investigates the corporeal emblematics of violence in authors as different as Machiavelli and Yeats. He considers the large organizing theories of culture, particularly those of Eliot and Frye, which take the place in the modern world of earlier allegorical visions. Concluding with a discussion of the Mutabilitie Cantos, Teskey describes Spenser's metaphysical allegory, which is deconstructed by its own invocation of genealogical struggle, as a prophetic vision and a form of warning.

Author : David E. James
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 1989
Category : Experimental films
ISBN : 0691047553

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Allegories of Cinema by David E. James Pdf

Discusses avant garde films produced during the sixties, and considers the work of Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol

Author : Maryanne Cline Horowitz,Louise Arizzoli
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 435 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2020-12-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004438033

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Bodies and Maps by Maryanne Cline Horowitz,Louise Arizzoli Pdf

An exploration of the ways early modern European artists have visualized continents through the female (sometimes male) body to express their perceptions of newly encountered peoples. Often stereotypical, these personifications are however more complex than what they seem.

Author : Cindy Weinstein
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 1995-01-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0521470544

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The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature by Cindy Weinstein Pdf

This book juxtaposes representations of labor in fictional texts with representations of labor in nonfictional texts in order to trace the intersections between aesthetic and economic discourse in nineteenth-century America. This intersection is particularly evident in the debates about symbol and allegory, and Cindy Weinstein contends that allegory during this period was critiqued on precisely the same grounds as mechanized labor. In the course of completing a historical investigation, Weinstein revolutionizes the notion of allegorical narrative, which is exposed as a literary medium of greater depth and consequence than has previously been implied.

Author : Kathleen Gough
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2013-11-07
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781135924966

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Haptic Allegories by Kathleen Gough Pdf

Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic advances an innovative and compelling approach to writing comparative studies of performance in transnational, intercultural relation to one another. Its chosen subject in this case is the cultural and political intersection of African and Irish diasporic peoples and movements. Gough approaches her subject via five key flashpoints in Black/Green relations, moving from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. In turn, each of these is related to mediums of performance that were prevalent at the time, such as abolitionist oratory and melodrama, photography and tableaux, architecture and folk drama, television and political demonstrations, and visual art and dramaturgy. By examining the unlikely kinship between social actors such as Ida B. Wells and Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory and Zora Neale Hurston, and Bernadette Devlin and Alice Childress, along with a host of old and new theatrical characters, this book explores how a transmedial investigation of gender, community, and performance allows for a revision of historiography in Atlantic studies, while the study itself revises and reimagines key concepts central to performance studies. In 2014 Kinship and Performance was given the Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theatre from the American Society for Theatre Research.

Author : Dinah Roe Kendall,Eugene H. Peterson
Publisher : ACTA Publications
Page : 100 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2005-08
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0879463074

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Allegories of Heaven: An Artist Explores the ?Greatest Story Ever Told? by Dinah Roe Kendall,Eugene H. Peterson Pdf

Since the earliest frescoes painted by the first Christians, the life of Christ has been portrayed through painting, sculpture and art. Now artist Dinah Roe Kendall offers a vibrant retelling of the full scope of Jesus' ministry, bringing the incarnation to life in ways engaging both the eye and the imagination. Kendall walks readers through the Gospel narratives from Annunciation to Ascension. Accompanied by Eugene Peterson's The Message rephrasing of the Gospel stories, Allegories of Heaven leads readers into a fresh experience of the Jesus story.

Author : Robin Truth Goodman
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2022-11-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501371196

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Feminism as World Literature by Robin Truth Goodman Pdf

The conventional lineage of World Literature starts with Goethe and moves through Marx, Said, Moretti, and Damrosch, among others. What if there is another way to trace the lineage, starting with Simone de Beauvoir and moving through Hannah Arendt, Assia Djebar, Octavia Butler, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Gayatri Spivak? What ideas and issues get left out of the current foundations that have institutionalized World Literature, and what can be added, challenged, or changed with this tweaking of the referential terminology? Feminism as World Literature redefines the thematic and theoretical contents of World Literature in feminist terms as well as rethinking feminist terms, analyses, frameworks, and concepts in a World Literature context. Other ideas built into World Literature and its criticism are viewed here by feminist framings, including the environment, technology, immigration, translation, work, race, governance, image, sound, religion, affect, violence, media, future, and history. The authors recognize genres, strategies, and themes of World Literature that demonstrate feminism as integral to the world-making gestures of literary form and production. In other words, this volume looks to readings and modes of reading that expose how the historical worldliness of texts allows for feminist interventions that might not sit clearly or comfortably on the surfaces.

Author : Paul De Man
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 1979-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0300028458

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Allegories of Reading by Paul De Man Pdf

This important theoretical work by Paul de Man sets forth a mode of reading and interpretation based on exemplary texts by Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. The readings start from unresolved difficulties in the critical traditions engendered by these authors, and they return to the places in the text where those difficulties are most apparent or most incisively reflected upon. The close reading leads to the elaboration of a more general model of textual understanding, in which de Man shows that the thematic aspects of the texts--their assertions of truth or falsehood as well as their assertions of values--are linked to specific modes of figuration that can be identified and described. The description of synchronic figures of substitution leads, by an inner logic embedded in the structure of all tropes, to extended, narrative figures or allegories. De Man poses the question whether such self-generating systems of figuration can account fully for the intricacies of meaning and of signification they produce. Throughout the book, issues in contemporary criticism are addressed analytically rather than polemically. Traditional oppositions are put in question by a rhetorical analysis which demonstrates why literary texts are such powerful sources of meaning yet epistemologically so unreliable. Since the structure which underlies this tension belongs to language in general and is not confined to literary texts, the book, starting out as practical and historical criticism or as the demonstration of a theory of literary reading, leads into larger questions pertaining to the philosophy of language. "Through elaborate and elegant close readings of poems by Rilke, Proust's Remembrance, Nietzsche's philosophical writings and the major works of Rousseau, de Man concludes that all writing concerns itself with its own activity as language, and language, he says, is always unreliable, slippery, impossible....Literary narrative, because it must rely on language, tells the story of its own inability to tell a story....De Man demonstrates, beautifully and convincingly, that language turns back on itself, that rhetoric is untrustworthy."--Julia Epstein, Washington Post Book World "The study follows out of the thinking of Nietzsche and Genette (among others), yet moves in strikingly new directions....De Man's text, almost certain to be endlessly provocative, is worthy of repeated re-reading."--Ralph Flores, Library Journal "Paul de Man continues his work in the tradition of 'deconstructionist criticism, '... which] begins with the observation that all language is constructed; therefore the task of criticism is to deconstruct it and reveal what lies behind. The title of his new work reflects de Man's preoccupation with the unreliability of language. ... The contributions that the book makes, both in the initial theoretical chapters and in the detailed analyses (or deconstructions) of particular texts are undeniable."--Caroline D. Eckhardt, World Literature Today