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This book is the result of an experiment in advanced teaching and learning which took place as a joint effort of the Departments of History at the European University Institute, Florence, and at New York University in the years 1996-1999. The experiment brought together fifteen graduate students and six professors from the two institutions, and included two workshops and a conference, in which also other scholars participated. Junior and senior scholars explored how and to what extent reciprocal exchanges between Europe and the USA in the period from the end of the XVIIIth century to the present were connected with and meaningful for their researches. The papers that have emerged from this approach also discuss the methodology of history: issues such as the relations between representations, identities, material production and consumption are challenged. The reciprocity of European representations of America and of American visions of Europe comes out clearly as does the impossibility of studying the symbolic considering the material and vice versa.
List of contents
Contents: Preface: Ioanna Laliotou/Luisa Passerini: An Experiment in Teaching and Learning - Part I: Jerrold Seigel: Introduction - Pierangelo Castagneto: From Walden to Wilderness: The Making of Anglo-Saxon Identity in Nineteenth-Century America - Silvia Sebastiani: The Changing Features of the Americans in the Eighteenth-Century Britannica - Maurizio Ascari: Prince Camaralzaman and Princess Badoura Come to Tea: Cosmopolitanism and the European Identity in The Europeans - Flaminia Gennari Santori: The Taste of Business Defining the American Art Collector 1900-1914 - Part II: Luisa Passerini: Introduction - Ioanna Laliotou: Visions of the World, Visions of America: Science Fiction and Other Transatlantic Utopias at the Turn of the Century - Elizabeth Fordham: From Whitman to Wilson: French Attitudes toward America around the Time of the Great War - Isabelle Engelhardt: The Creation of an «Artificial Authentic Place» - The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC - Part III: John Brewer: Introduction - Enrica Capussotti: «James Dean is like One of Us...» The Reception of American Movies in Italy during the 1950s - Robert Lumley: Between Pop Art and Arte Povera: American Influences in the Visual Arts in Italy in the 1960s - Saverio Giovacchini: The Gap: How André Bazin Became Captain America - Part IV: Mary Nolan: Introduction - Gerben Bakker: America's Master: The Decline and Fall of the European Film Industry in the United States (1907-1920) - Bent Boel: The United States and the Postwar European Productivity Drive - David Randolph: Pausing to Refresh: Creating a Market for Coca-Cola in Sweden - Gwendolyn Wright: Good Design and «The Good Life»: Cultural Exchange in Post-World War II American Domestic Architecture - Adam Arvidsson: The Discovery of Subjectivity: Motivation Research in Italy 1958-1968 - Paulina Bren: Looking West: Popular Culture and the Generation Gap in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1969-1989.
About the author
The Editor: Luisa Passerini is Professor of History of the Twentieth Century at the European University Institute, Florence. Among her recent books are:
Identità culturale europea: idee, sentimenti, relazioni (as editor), Firenze 1998;
Europe in Love, Love in Europe. Imagination and Politics Between the Wars (as author), London 1999. Her ongoing research is about the historical relationships between the discourse on Europe and the discourse on love, while deconstructing Eurocentrism from within.
