Author: James M. DennisPublisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299155803
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Renegade Regionalists
Author: James M. DennisPublisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299155803
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Regionalists on the Left
Author: Michael C. SteinerPublisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806148950
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 534
Book Description
“Nothing is more anathema to a serious radical than regionalism,” Berkeley English professor Henry Nash Smith asserted in 1980. Although regionalism in the American West has often been characterized as an inherently conservative, backward-looking force, regionalist impulses have in fact taken various forms throughout U.S. history. The essays collected in Regionalists on the Left uncover the tradition of left-leaning western regionalism during the 1930s and 1940s. Editor Michael C. Steiner has assembled a group of distinguished scholars who explore the lives and works of sixteen progressive western intellectuals, authors, and artists, ranging from nationally prominent figures such as John Steinbeck and Carey McWilliams to equally influential, though less well known, figures such as Angie Debo and Américo Paredes. Although they never constituted a unified movement complete with manifestos or specific goals, the thinkers and leaders examined in this volume raised voices of protest against racial, environmental, and working-class injustices during the Depression era that reverberate in the twenty-first century. Sharing a deep affection for their native and adopted places within the West, these individuals felt a strong sense of avoidable and remediable wrong done to the land and the people who lived upon it, motivating them to seek the root causes of social problems and demand change. Regionalists on the Left shows also that this radical regionalism in the West often took urban, working-class, and multicultural forms. Other books have dealt with western regionalism in general, but this volume is unique in its focus on left-leaning regionalists, including such lesser-known writers as B. A. Botkin, Carlos Bulosan, Sanora Babb, and Joe Jones. Tracing the relationship between politics and place across the West, Regionalists on the Left highlights a significant but neglected strain of western thought and expression.
The Fourth Ghost
Author: Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807148415
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 494
Book Description
In the 1949 classic Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith described three racial "ghosts" haunting the mind of the white South: the black woman with whom the white man often had sexual relations, the rejected child from a mixed-race coupling, and the black mammy whom the white southern child first loves but then must reject. In this groundbreaking work, Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., extends Smith's work by adding a fourth "ghost" lurking in the psyche of the white South -- the specter of European Fascism. He explores how southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s responded to Fascism, and most tellingly to the suggestion that the racial politics of Nazi Germany had a special, problematic relevance to the South and its segregated social system. As Brinkmeyer shows, nearly all white southern writers in these decades felt impelled to deal with this specter and with the implications for southern identity of the issues raised by Nazism and Fascism. Their responses varied widely, ranging from repression and denial to the repulsion of self-recognition. With penetrating insight, Brinkmeyer examines the work of writers who contemplated the connection between the authoritarianism and racial politics of Nazi Germany and southern culture. He shows how white southern writers -- both those writing cultural criticism and those writing imaginative literature -- turned to Fascist Europe for images, analogies, and metaphors for representing and understanding the conflict between traditional and modern cultures that they were witnessing in Dixie. Brinkmeyer considers the works of a wide range of authors of varying political stripes: the Nashville Agrarians, W. J. Cash, Lillian Smith, William Alexander Percy, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and Lillian Hellman. He argues persuasively that by engaging in their works the vital contemporary debates about totalitarianism and democracy, these writers reconfigured their understanding not only of the South but also of themselves as southerners, and of the nature and significance of their art. The magnum opus of a distinguished scholar, The Fourth Ghost offers a stunning reassessment of the cultural and political orientation of southern literature by examining a major and heretofore unexplored influence on its development.
America Goes to College
Author: John E. SeeryPublisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791487520
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
A rallying cry on behalf of a distinctly American institution of higher learning—the small liberal arts college—America Goes to College combines broad-based scholarship with personal narrative and reflection. In a highly entertaining manner, John E. Seery showcases the precarious successes of a well-rounded liberal arts college education, while at the same time signaling some of the dangers that loom on the horizon. Seery contends that the liberal arts are best pursued within the face-to-face interactive setting, characteristic of the small college classroom, as opposed to the large university lecture hall. Moreover and more provocatively, he identifies political theorists as the proper custodians and practitioners of the liberal arts tradition as it unfolds today. It is the unfettered freedom of the small liberal arts college, where vision and practice can actually coincide, that makes it the embodiment of the advantages of the American higher education system—a national treasure deserving of support.
Thomas Hart Benton
Author: Justin WolffPublisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429950285
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 417
Book Description
Born in Missouri at the end of the nineteenth century, Thomas Hart Benton would become the most notorious and celebrated painter America had ever seen. The first artist to make the cover of Time, he was a true original: an heir to both the rollicking populism of his father's political family and the quiet life of his Appalachian grandfather. In his twenties, he would find his calling in New York, where he was drawn to memories of his small-town youth—and to visions of the American scene. By the mid-1930s, Benton's heroic murals were featured in galleries, statehouses, universities, and museums, and magazines commissioned him to report on the stories of the day. Yet even as the nation learned his name, he was often scorned by critics and political commentators, many of whom found him too nationalistic and his art too regressive. Even Jackson Pollock, his once devoted former student, would turn away from him in dramatic fashion. A boxer in his youth, Benton was quick to fight back, but the widespread backlash had an impact—and foreshadowed many of the artistic debates that would dominate the coming decades. In this definitive biography, Justin Wolff places Benton in the context of his tumultuous historical moment—as well as in the landscapes and cultural circles that inspired him. Thomas Hart Benton—with compelling insights into Benton's art, his philosophy, and his family history—rescues a great American artist from myth and hearsay, and provides an indelibly moving portrait of an influential, controversial, and often misunderstood man.
Resisting the Place of Belonging
Author: Daniel BoscaljonPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317065018
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Book Description
People often overlook the uncanny nature of homecomings, writing off the experience of finding oneself at home in a strange place or realizing that places from our past have grown strange. This book challenges our assumptions about the value of home, arguing for the ethical value of our feeling displaced and homeless in the 21st century. Home is explored in places ranging from digital keyboards to literary texts, and investigates how we mediate our homecomings aesthetically through cultural artifacts (art, movies, television shows) and conceptual structures (philosophy, theology, ethics, narratives). In questioning the place of home in human lives and the struggles involved with defining, defending, naming and returning to homes, the volume collects and extends ideas about home and homecomings that will inform traditional problems in novel ways.
Marsden Hartley
Author: Donna CassidyPublisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584654469
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 442
Book Description
A provocative new reading of the great American avant-garde arist Marsden Hartley's late work.
Barnstorming the Prairies
Author: Jason WeemsPublisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452944911
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 593
Book Description
To Midwesterners tucked into small towns or farms early in the twentieth century, the landscape of the American heartland reached the horizon—and then imagination had to provide what lay beyond. But when aviation took off and scenes of the Midwest were no longer earthbound, the Midwestern landscape was transformed and with it, Jason Weems suggests in this book, the very idea of the Midwest itself. Barnstorming the Prairies offers a panoramic vista of the transformative nature and power of the aerial vision that remade the Midwest in the wake of the airplane. This new perspective from above enabled Americans to conceptualize the region as something other than isolated and unchanging, and to see it instead as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America’s agrarian character with the more abstract forms of twentieth-century modernity. In the maps and aerial survey photography of the Midwest, as well as the painting, cinema, animation, and suburban landscapes that arose through flight, Weems also finds a different and provocative view of modernity in the making. In representations of the Midwest, from Grant Wood’s iconic images to the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright to the design of greenbelt suburbs, Weems reveals aerial vision’s fundamental contribution to regional identity—to Midwesternness as we understand it. Reading comparatively across these images, Weems explores how the cognitive and perceptual practices of aerial vision helped to resymbolize the Midwestern landscape amid the technological change and social uncertainty of the early twentieth century.
Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas
Author: Light Townsend CumminsPublisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623493293
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Book Description
Winner, 2016 Liz Carpenter Award for the Research in the History of Women, presented at the Texas State Historical Association Annual Meeting At Fair Park in Dallas, a sculpture of a Native American figure, bronze with gilded gold leaf, strains a bow before sending an arrow into flight. Tejas Warrior has welcomed thousands of visitors since the Texas Centennial Exposition opened in the 1930s. The iconic piece is instantly recognizable, yet few people know about its creator: Allie Victoria Tennant, one of a notable group of Texas artists who actively advanced regionalist art in the decades before World War II. Light Townsend Cummins follows Tennant’s public career from the 1920s to the 1960s, both as an artist and as a culture-bearer, as she advanced cultural endeavors, including the arts. A true pathfinder, she helped to create and nurture art institutions that still exist today, most especially the Dallas Museum of Art, on whose board of trustees she sat for almost thirty years. Tennant also worked on behalf of other civic institutions, including the public schools, art academies, and the State Fair of Texas, where she helped create the Women’s Building. Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas sheds new light on an often overlooked artist.
Pictorial Cultures and Political Iconographies
Author: Udo J. HebelPublisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110237865
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Book Description
The pictorial turn in the humanities and social sciences has foregrounded the political power of images and the extent to which historical, political, social, and cultural processes and practices are shaped visually. Political iconographies are taken to interpret norms of actions, support ideological formations, and enhance moral concepts. Visual rhetorics are understood as active players in the construction and contestation of the political realm and public space. The twenty-one articles by scholars from Europe and the United States explore the political function and cultural impact of images from the perspectives of Art History, American Studies, Visual Culture Studies, History, and Political Science. The contributions in particular address the complex interplay between agent and addressee in the public space as well as issues of national identity, discourses of inclusion and exclusion, and the designation of political spaces within transnational contexts. The publication is part of the interdisciplinary research initiative “Perceiving and Understanding: Functions, Perception Processes, Forms of Visualizations, Cultural Strategies of Pictures and Texts” at the University of Regensburg.