|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
In "The Work of Self-Representation" Ivy Schweitzer examines early
American poetry through the critical lens of gender. Her concern is
not the inclusion of female writers into the canon; rather, she
analyzes how the metaphors of "woman" and "feminine" function in
Puritan religious and literary discourse to represent both the
"otherness" of spiritual experience and the ways in which race and
class function to keep the "other" in marginalized positions.
Schwetizer argues that gender was for seventeenth-century new
England -- and still is today -- a basic and most politically
charged metaphor for the differences that shape identity and
determine cultural position. To glimpse the struggle between gender
ideology and experience, Schweitzer provides close readings of the
poetry of four New Englanders writing between the Great Migration
and the first wave of the Great Awakening: John Fiske, Edward
Taylor, Anne Bradstreet, and Roger Williams.
Schweitzer focuses exclusively on lyric poetry, she says, because a
first-person speaker wrestling with the intricacies of individual
consciousness provides fruitful ground for exploring the politics
of voice and identity and especially problems of authority,
intertextuality, and positionality. Fiske and Taylor define the
orthodox tradition, and Bradstreet and Williams in different ways
challenge it. Her treatment of the familiar poetry of Bradstreet
and Taylor is solidly grounded in historical and literary
scholarship yet suggestive of the new insights gained from a gender
analysis, while discussions of Fiske and Williams bring their
little-known lyric work to light.
Taken together, these poets' texts illustrate the cultural
construction of a troubled masculinity and an idealized, effaced
femininity implicit in the Puritan notion of redeemed subjectivity,
and constitute a profoundly disturbing and resilient part of our
Puritan legacy.
Afterlives of Indigenous Archives offers a compelling critique of
Western archives and their use in the development of "digital
humanities." The essays collected here present the work of an
international and interdisciplinary group of indigenous scholars;
researchers in the field of indigenous studies and early American
studies; and librarians, curators, activists, and storytellers. The
contributors examine various digital projects and outline their
relevance to the lives and interests of tribal people and
communities, along with the transformative power that access to
online materials affords. The authors aim to empower native people
to re-envision the Western archive as a site of community-based
practices for cultural preservation, one that can offer indigenous
perspectives and new technological applications for the imaginative
reconstruction of the tribal past, the repatriation of the tribal
memories, and a powerful vision for an indigenous future. This
important and timely collection will appeal to archivists and
indigenous studies scholars alike.
For the 250th anniversary of the founding of Dartmouth College, the
Political Economy Project at Dartmouth assembled a stellar cast of
junior and senior scholars to explore the systemic conditions
facing those seeking to found a new college two hundred fifty years
ago. What were the key political, economic and religious parameters
operating in the Atlantic world at the time of the College's
founding? What was the religious scene like at the moment when the
Rev. Samson Occom of the Mohegan nation and the Rev. Eleazar
Wheelock of Connecticut, two men from very different backgrounds
whose improbable meeting occurred during the Great Awakening of the
early 1740s, set about establishing a new school in the northern
woods in the 1760s? How were the agendas of contemporaries
differently mediated by the religious beliefs with which they
acted, on the one hand, and the emerging thought world of political
economy, very broadly understood, on the other? These are among the
rich and variegated topics addressed in Dartmouth and the World,
which breaks the mold of the traditional commemorative volume.
Contemporary notions of friendship regularly place it in the
private sphere, associated with feminized forms of sympathy and
affection. As Ivy Schweitzer explains, however, this perception
leads to a misunderstanding of American history. In an exploration
of early American literature and culture, Schweitzer uncovers
friendships built on a classical model that is both public and
political in nature. Schweitzer begins with Aristotle's ideal of
""perfect"" friendship that positions freely chosen relationships
among equals as the highest realization of ethical, social, and
political bonds. Evidence in works by John Winthrop, Hannah Foster,
James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Sedgwick confirms that this
classical model shaped early American concepts of friendship and,
thus, democracy. Schweitzer argues that recognizing the centrality
of friendship as a cultural institution is critical to
understanding the rationales for consolidating power among white
males in the young nation. She also demonstrates how women,
nonelite groups, and minorities have appropriated and redefined the
discourse of perfect friendship, making equality its result rather
than its requirement. By recovering the public nature of
friendship, Schweitzer establishes discourse about affection and
affiliation as a central component of American identity and
democratic community.
|
You may like...
The High Notes
Danielle Steel
Paperback
R340
R266
Discovery Miles 2 660
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|