From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park : activism, culture, and American studies
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park : activism, culture, and American studies
(New Americanists)
Duke University Press, 2001
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Paul Lauter, an icon of American Studies who has been a primary agent in its transformation and its chief ambassador abroad, offers a wide-ranging collection of essays that demonstrate and reflect on this important and often highly politicized discipline. While American Studies was formerly seen as a wholly subsidiary academic program that loosely combined the study of American history, literature, and art, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park reveals the evolution of an independent, highly interdisciplinary program with distinctive subjects, methods, and goals that are much different than the traditional academic departments that nurtured it.
With anecdote peppered discussions ranging from specific literary texts and movies to the future of higher education and the efficacy of unions, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park entertains even as it offers a twenty-first century account of how and why Americanists at home and abroad now do what they do. Drawing on his forty-five years of teaching and research as well as his experience as a political activist and a cultural radical, Lauter shows how a multifaceted increase in the United States' global dominion has infused a particular political urgency into American Studies. With its military and economic influence, its cultural and linguistic reach, the United States is-for better or for worse-too formidable and potent not to be understood clearly and critically.
Table of Contents
Part I: Practicing American Studies
1. Reconfiguring Academic Disciplines: The Emergence of American Studies
2. American Studies, American Politics, and the Reinvention of Class
3. Versions of Nashville, Visions of American Studies
4. Culture and Conformity in Wartime America: My Junior High School Songbook
5. Dinosaur Culture: From Mansfield Park to Jurassic Park
Part II: American Studies in a Racialized World
6. American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the Borderlands Crossroads
7. Of Chodors and Capital
8. Fiction as Politics: The Novels of Charles Chesnutt
Part III: Revisiting the Canon: The Question of Modernism
9. Reflecting On The Heath Anthology of American Literature
10. Melville Climbs the Canon
11. And Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, May I Present Miss Amy Lowell
12. Cold War Culture and the Construction of Modernism
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