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"This fresh and engaging collection of essays is a significant marker in the momentous shift from academic theorizing to a more public, more accessible form of cultural and literary commentary. These younger critics, like their predecessors in earlier generations, have rediscovered the personal voice as a superb vehicle for new ideas about art, culture, and society."--Morris Dickstein, Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate School
List of contents
Introduction/ Marianna Torgovnick 1
The American Stranger/ Alice Yaeger Kaplan 5
Decades/ Nancy K. Miller 29
The Duplicity of the Southern Story: Reflections on Reynolds Price's The Surface of Earth and Eudora Welty's "The Wide Net"/ Linda Orr 50
Tatami Room/ Cathy N. Davidson 76
Saving Our Lives: Dances with Wolves, Iron John, and the Search for a New Masculinity/ Jane Tompkins 96
Pursuing Authenticity: The Vernacular Moment in Contemporary American Art/ Henry M. Sayre 107
Becoming America's Lens on the World: National Geographic in the Twentieth Century/ Jane Collins and Catherine Lutz 128
Power, History, and Authenticity: The Mowachaht Whalers' Washing Shrine/ Aldona Jonaitis and Richard Inglis 157
The Ecology of Images/ Andrew Ross 185
Academic Writing and the Uses of Bad Publicity/ Gerald Graff 208
Ideology, Energy, and Cultural Criticism/ Mark Edmundson 220
Invoking Culture: The Messy Sid of "Cultural Politics"/ Virgina R. Dominguez 237
The Politics of the "We"/ Marianna Torgovnick 260
Notes on Contributors 279
Index 281
About the author
Marianna Togovnick, Professor of English at Duke University, is author of Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives and Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian-American Daughter.
