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From the popular legend of Pocahontas to the Civil War soap
opera Gone with the Wind to countless sculpted heads of George
Washington that adorn homes and museums, whole industries have
emerged to feed America's addiction to imaginary histories that
cover up the often violent acts of building a homogeneous nation.
In Ersatz America, Rebecca Mark shows how this
four-hundred-year-old obsession with false history has wounded
democracy by creating a language that is severed from material
reality. Without the mediating touchstones of body and nature,
creative representations of our history have been allowed to spin
into dangerous abstraction.
Other scholars have addressed the artificial qualities of the
collective American memory, but what distinguishes "Ersatz America"
is that it does more than simply deconstruct--it provides a map for
regeneration. Mark contends that throughout American history,
citizen/artists have responded to the deadly memorialization of the
past with artistic expressions and visual artifacts that exist
outside the realm of official language, creating a counter
narrative. These examples of what she calls visceral graphism are
embodied in and connected to the human experience of indigenous
peoples, enslaved Africans, and silenced women, giving form to the
unspeakable. We must learn, Mark suggests, to read the markings of
these works against the iconic national myths. In doing so, we can
shift from being mesmerized by the monumentalism of this national
mirage to embracing the regeneration and recovery of our human
history.
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Time Out (Paperback)
Rebecca Marks
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R410
R345
Discovery Miles 3 450
Save R65 (16%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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"This well could be the most important book yet published on
Eudora Welty," says noted Welty scholar Noel Polk. "It offers a
revolutionary and convincing reading of Welty's "The Golden Apples"
(1949), but its implications for the study of Welty as a writer go
far and beyond its interpretation of this single text." Until the
recent explosion of feminist critical interest in her work, Welty
criticism was dominated by the narrow and singular perspective of
her as a "white southern lady" writing first-rate "regional
fiction." Today her work is being closely re-examined for its
innovations and artistry. In this revolutionary new way of studying
Welty, Rebecca Mark and other contemporary critics have focused not
upon Welty's southern qualities but upon her total engagement with
literary modernism. Rebecca Mark's study proposes feminist
intertextuality as a reading strategy for a critical study of
Welty. Here Mark directly attacks the problem of literary influence
which for decades has intrigued critics of "The Golden Apples."
Many have focused on its mythical dimensions. Instead Mark finds
allusions that are far more pervasive. These she sees to be a
direct challenge to the dominant cultural voices of literary
tradition. She argues that Welty's text refutes the apocalypse and
despair that are hallmarks in the literary modernism formulated by
Joyce and by Faulkner. She shows indeed that Welty's text confronts
one of the mainstays of western literary tradition--the dominance
and centrality of the indomitable hero. She argues that the
expansive intertextuality in Welty reveals a communal, resonant,
metaphoric narrative that transforms such masculine elements of
rape, domination, and victimization of the feminine into narratives
of engagement, battle, confrontation, fertility, and sexual
exchange between the masculine and the feminine. Mark's reading
shows how Welty has responded not just to literary texts but also
to literary texts but also to cultural forces in creating her
memorable stories. Because Welty has given voice to a range of
silenced people--African Americans, women, old people, and
children--Mark says rightly that Welty's gift lies in the
extraordinary melding of her diverse knowledge of literature, of
history, and of immediate locale.
Faced with Eudora Welty's preference for the oblique in literary
performances, some have assumed that Welty was not concerned with
issues of race, or even that she was perhaps ambivalent toward
racism. This collection counters those assumptions as it examines
Welty's handling of race, the color line, and Jim Crow segregation
and sheds new light on her views about the patterns,
insensitivities, blindness, and atrocities of whiteness.
Contributors to this volume show that Welty addressed whiteness and
race in her earliest stories, her photography, and her first novel,
Delta Wedding. In subsequent work, including The Golden Apples, The
Optimist's Daughter, and her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, she
made the color line and white privilege visible, revealing the
gaping distances between lives lived in shared space but separated
by social hierarchy and segregation. Even when black characters
hover in the margins of her fiction, they point readers toward
complex lives, and the black body is itself full of meaning in her
work. Several essays suggest that Welty represented race, like
gender and power, as a performance scripted by whiteness. Her black
characters in particular recognize whiteface and blackface as
performances, especially comical when white characters are unaware
of their role play. Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race also makes
clear that Welty recognized white material advantage and black
economic deprivation as part of a cycle of race and poverty in
America and that she connected this history to lives on either side
of the color line, to relationships across it, and to an uneasy
hierarchy of white classes within the presumed monolith of
whiteness. Contributors: Mae Miller Claxton, Susan V. Donaldson,
Julia Eichelberger, Sarah Ford, Jean C. Griffith, Rebecca Mark,
Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, David McWhirter, Harriet Pollack,
Keri Watson, Patricia Yaeger.
From the popular legend of Pocahontas to the Civil War soap
opera Gone with the Wind to countless sculpted heads of George
Washington that adorn homes and museums, whole industries have
emerged to feed America's addiction to imaginary histories that
cover up the often violent acts of building a homogeneous nation.
In Ersatz America, Rebecca Mark shows how this
four-hundred-year-old obsession with false history has wounded
democracy by creating a language that is severed from material
reality. Without the mediating touchstones of body and nature,
creative representations of our history have been allowed to spin
into dangerous abstraction.
Other scholars have addressed the artificial qualities of the
collective American memory, but what distinguishes "Ersatz America"
is that it does more than simply deconstruct--it provides a map for
regeneration. Mark contends that throughout American history,
citizen/artists have responded to the deadly memorialization of the
past with artistic expressions and visual artifacts that exist
outside the realm of official language, creating a counter
narrative. These examples of what she calls visceral graphism are
embodied in and connected to the human experience of indigenous
peoples, enslaved Africans, and silenced women, giving form to the
unspeakable. We must learn, Mark suggests, to read the markings of
these works against the iconic national myths. In doing so, we can
shift from being mesmerized by the monumentalism of this national
mirage to embracing the regeneration and recovery of our human
history.
Notions of southern culture run deep and wide through the
American consciousness. Perhaps no region of the United States
conjures up as many images or emotions as does the American South.
Yet despite the stereotypes that resonate throughout society, it
remains nearly impossible to categorize the many shades of culture
found in the history of the southern states. Spanning from Atlantic
coastal ecosystems to the Ozark Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico,
the region is home to orange groves and Creole food; the Gothic
Revival style and the New Urbanism movement; ragtime, Piedmont
blues, and Appalachian folk songs; high school football battles and
Tobacco Road basketball rivalries; the Cajun language, the Gullah
tongue, and the famous Southern drawl. From sartorial fashions to
William Faulkner's Sartoris, this splendid volume documents
southern culture in its many colors and forms.
"The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures" is
the first rigorous reference collection on the many ways in which
American identity has been defined by its regions and its people.
Each of its eight regional volumes presents thoroughly researched
narrative chapters on Architecture; Art; Ecology & Environment;
Ethnicity; Fashion; Film & Theater; Folklore; Food; Language;
Literature; Music; Religion; and Sports & Recreation. Each book
also includes a volume-specific introduction, as well as a series
foreword by noted regional scholar and former National Endowment
for the Humanities chairman William Ferris, who served as
Consulting Editor for this encyclopedia.
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