Journal of American StudiesVol. 40 Iss. 3 (2006)
Titans/Planners, Bohemians/Revolutionaries: Male Empowerment in the 1930s
Phillip Abbott
While the New Deal's socioeconomic reforms have lost footing in contemporary American society, Abbott distills the importance of the liberal legislative framework established in Depression-Era America.
Buster Keaton and the South: The First Things and the Last
Alan Bilton
Framing the increasing mechanization and resulting narrative discontinuity of film as "a kind of technological synonym for modernity," Bilton credits Buster Keaton's playful, participatory approach to the creative process with the development of a national comedic style.
Adventuring through the Pieces of a still Unorganized Mosaic: Reading Jean Toomer's Collage Aesthetic in Cane
Rachel Farebrother
With a level-headed clarity and coherence often missing from Cane's narrative, Farebrother nimbly dissects the mystical stylistic grafting of Jean Toomer's revolutionary piece and adeptly identifies the corridor of artistic freedom opened for past and present American novelists by the legacy of this structurally innovative work.
William S. Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night Trilogy: Writing Outer Space
Alex Houen
Within a squabbling crowd of academic proponents and nay-sayers, Houen champions Burroughs's writing-as-modernity-intervention manifesto in a Herculean attempt to legitimize literary commentary on the larger cultural implications of the American space-program.
"Well Intended Liberal Slop": Allegories of Race in Spiegelman's Maus
Andrew Loman
Loman discusses how Jewish-American cartoonist Art Spiegelman depicts the structural similarities between systemized American and European racism in his distended allegory of the Nazi Project.
Embodying and Transgressing Race in the Novels of John Gregory Brown
Artemis Michailidou
Michailidou massages two of John Gregory Brown's novels in the service of noting this author's contribution to the interaction between a character's self-perception, "corporeal representation and racial identity."
Visions of Diversity: Cultural Pluralism and the Nation in the Folk Music Revival Movement of the United States and Canada, 1958-65
Gillian A. M. Mitchell
Grounded in the social history of 20th-century American and Canadian folk music, Mitchell contends that the popular, yet faulty definition of "diversity" ultimately derailed the movement's political goals.
Susan Howe's Renaissance Period: Metamorphosis and Representation in Pythagorean Silence and Defenestration of Prague
Montgomery Will
Through a textual and cultural analysis of Pythagorean Silence and Defenestration of Prague, Will forcefully etches the dissimilarities between Howe's ambivalent authorial voice and those of other writers traditionally lumped under the label "language poets."
REVIEWED BY
Emilie DuBois
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