The ​Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture 1 csillagozás

Christopher Bigsby (szerk.): The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture

The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture offers a comprehensive, authoritative and accessible overview of the cultural themes and intellectual issues that drive the dominant culture of the twentieth century. This companion explores the social, political and economic forces that have made America what it is today. It shows how these contexts impact upon twentieth-century American literature, cinema and art. An international team of contributors examines the special contribution of African Americans and of immigrant communities to the variety and vibrancy of modern America. The essays range from art to politics, popular culture to sport, immigration and race to religion and war. Varied, extensive and challenging, this Companion is essential reading for students and teachers of American studies around the world. It is the most accessible and useful introduction available to an exciting range of topics in modern American culture.

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Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006
516 oldal · ISBN: 9780521601092

Enciklopédia 32


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Kiemelt értékelések

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Christopher Bigsby (szerk.): The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture

Nagyon hosszú időn keresztül olvastam ezt a kötetet, ámde bőven meg is érte befejezni. 23 olyan tanulmányt tartalmaz a 20. századi Amerikai Egyesült Államokról, amely tökéletesen körbejárja, elemzi és tisztába teszi az USA-val kapcsolatosan problémákat vagy éppen számunkra visszás, furcsa jelenségeket. Az biztos, hogy nekem most rengeteget segített, ezáltal könnyebben megértem, hogy bizonyos kulturális vonások miért is vannak, és talán azt is értem, hogy ez a rendkívül változatos nemzet hogyan is vált egységessé, amerikaivá.
Ha tisztában szeretnénk lenni olyan témákkal, mint pl. vallás, feketék/spanyol ajkúak/ázsiaiak jelenléte, filmipar, az amerikai társadalom a vietnami háború árnyékában (és még folytathatnám a sort…), vagy éppen a 20. századi prózairodalom, akkor garantáltan jó választás.


Népszerű idézetek

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In 1900, domesticity framed most women’s lives; few obtained education after the age of fourteen. Yet while almost all white women left the formal labor force after marriage, many African American women remained economically active throughout their adult lives. The vast majority of women married by the age of twenty-two or twenty-three, and stayed with their partner until he died. Divorce was a rarity. The average woman had four children. She typically survived the departure from home of her youngest child by only a handful of years, so living alone was a rarity. Many women participated in social and political events outside the home, even though only a small number could vote, mostly in local elections and some western states. Few women held public office, yet they worked effectively outside the political mainstream in various reform movements and voluntary activities.
By 2000, economic activity throughout adulthood has become the norm, with a shift in predominant occupations from domestic service and factory labor to paper-based employments in the professions and offices of the country. […] Education levels have skyrocketed for women as well as men from every race and ethnic group. Almost all young women graduated from high school in 2000 and about half entered higher education. Over the course of the century, women went from being about one-fifth of all college graduates to over half, while the proportion of advanced degrees obtained by women increased from a handful to nearly two-fifths. Consequent upon these changes, the age of marriage rose, as did the proportion of women not marrying at all. Fertility levels fell (with the notable exception of the midtwentieth century baby boom), as women obtained reliable birth control, notably the contraceptive pill in the 1960s. Abortions became legal across the nation in 1973, but remain highly controversial. A major shift occurred in the number of children brought up by a single parent, usually the mother, as divorce rates and levels of non-marital fertility rose sharply in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

194 - 195. oldal - S. J. Kleinberg: Women in the twentieth century

Kapcsolódó szócikkek: 1900
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The British pop group the Beatles arrived on American shores in early 1964, only two months after the JFK assassination and funeral, playing their own version of 1950s American rock and roll. They were met by huge audiences of teenage women who would scream, faint, and defy police lines. The four “mop-tops” proved to be both astonishingly creative and uniquely open to influences from the disparate sources of the global village to which Marshall McLuhan was drawing attention in his popular theories about the epochal effects of the mass media. As the decade unfolded, the Beatles held onto their mass audience while bringing into their music elements of classical European music, Indian ragas from the East, and avant-garde collage. Lyrically, they moved from energetic professions of teenage crushes to the introspective poetry and subversive attitude they found in the folk and protest music of their American peer Bob Dylan, whose folk music combined elements of Woody Guthrie’s 1930s left populism with the disaffected hipster poetry of Allen Ginsberg and other Beats of the 1950s. Dylan was in turn influenced by the Beatles to back himself with an electric band and create a new folkrock. The Rolling Stones, a London band that came hard on the heels of the Beatles’ and other Liverpool bands’ success, based their music on the decidedly adult themes of black American blues stretching back to the Mississippi delta region of the 1930s. Their aggressively sexual and outlaw image was an early influence on the move toward challenging inhibitions and conventions that characterized the decade. They were soon influenced by Dylan, as well as by the Beatles, and they rapidly moved toward an aggressive pop sound that along with the lyrics conveyed their feelings and social convictions.
Dylan and the British invasion, as well as the centering of the drug culture in California, next spawned bands in San Francisco such as Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, joined in Los Angeles by the Doors. The hallucinogenic experience of “trips” on the drug LSD inspired their psychedelic music with its lyrical themes of journeys into new modes of consciousness. They too entered the stew of mutual influence among the Beatles, Dylan, and the Stones. Psychedelia, pop, poetry, and blues combined in the introduction to the new culture of the black guitarist, singer, and songwriter Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 during the period the media had dubbed the Summer of Love. In August 1969 his thundering, apocalyptic instrumental performance of the American national anthem the “Star Spangled Banner” at the huge outdoor festival at Woodstock would virtually define the various elements of the youth culture.

309 - 310. oldal: John Hellmann - Vietnam and the 1960s

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In 2000, over 16 million foreign-born in the United States were from Latin America, representing 52 percent of the total foreign-born population. With over 12 percent of the US population, Latinos are now the second largest separate constituency, more numerous than African Americans.

117. oldal - Religion and the United States: 1960 to the present

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Back to the Future (1985) is an important film for establishing the clear Reaganite values of 1980s cinema as expressed in Hollywood’s return to mass-market blockbusters. The film concerns Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), a teenager living in a lower-middle-class household in suburbia. His father is a wimp, bullied around by his boss. Marty enters a time machine, which takes him back to 1955, to witness his parents’ courtship. At the film’s first turning point, he accidentally prevents his parents meeting and thus endangers his future existence. He spends the rest of the film fixing this, finally succeeding at the “Enchantment Under the Sea” dance which forms the climax of Act III. There, he plays rock and roll music on his guitar while, out on the dance floor, his future mother and father kiss and fall in love. With Marty’s help, his father learns to stand up to his future boss. When Marty returns to 1985, his family now lives in Reaganite, yuppie opulence, far from the drudgery he left at the beginning of the film. The “there’s no place like home” ideology of classical Hollywood, particularly The Wizard of Oz, is hereby given a remarkable, bootstraps Reaganite twist.
To add insult to injury, the music Marty plays is the classic rock from the 1950s. While out on stage, Chuck Berry’s cousin hears Marty playing, and calls his cousin on the phone, telling him that he has found the new sound they need. In an absurd redefinition of the racial history of American popular music, Marty the white kid teaches Chuck Berry how to make blues-influenced black rock and roll music! The story of Elvis making radical black music palatable for white America is thus turned on its ear in a white supremacist fantasy of creativity. In this way, contemporary Hollywood blockbusters provide ideological fantasy resolutions of real-world complex problems.

387. oldal - Walter Metz: Hollywood cinema

Kapcsolódó szócikkek: 1985
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The pay gap has narrowed as the glass ceiling opened slightly to admit a few more women into higher paid posts. In 1979, working women earned 63 percent as much as men; by 2000 they averaged 76 percent of men’s wages. In 2000, black and Hispanic women earned about 86 percent as much of men from their racial/ethnic groups compared with 76 percent for white women, a testimony to the generally higher remuneration of white men. Ten percent of Latinas, 12 percent of black, but only 5 percent of white women worked for poverty-level wages.

208. oldal - S. J. Kleinberg: Women in the twentieth century

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Moreover, whereas oral-tradition mentors had generally used inherited sets of exercises and pieces, recordings made it possible for pupils to skip about at will, intermingling styles and sources with little regard for traditions or conventional techniques.
This phenomenon furthered innovation in jazz and popular styles, but its most radical effects were on folk musics. These often became entirely displaced from their sources; indeed, some styles persisted only because persons outside the tradition had learned them from recordings. In the 1930s and 1940s the collector, the performer, and the scholar were conflated into single individuals, or families of individuals – the Lomaxes, the Seegers – who championed and preserved music that was in no sense theirs, making field recordings and promoting these as models from which listeners could learn. And they did. By the 1960s a white guitarist from Brooklyn (Dave Van Ronk) could become a leading exponent of the Mississippi delta blues style. More famously, a Jewish Minnesotan (Robert Zimmerman) could recreate himself as “Bob Dylan,” carrying forward an agrarian, populist, largely Protestant tradition. And Joan Baez, native New Yorker, part Hispanic- American, sang traditional Appalachian ballads wholly removed from her place and time. These and others together became catalysts for a “folk revival” that was altogether unprecedented: a genre that preserved and reproduced the sounds of various traditions entirely outside of their cultural frameworks. Thereafter it grew increasingly difficult to predict the actual ethnic or geographic origins of “folk” musicians: that Klezmer clarinetist may have been born a Catholic cowboy.

344. oldal - William Brooks: Music: sound: technology

Kapcsolódó szócikkek: Bob Dylan · jazz · Joan Baez · katalizátor · Mississippi-delta
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In his Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (2004), novelist Peter Turchi suggests that there are important links between maps, stories, and the mind, including the fact that the study of all three seem to have begun at about the same point in history: Turchi states: “Alphabetic texts, the earliest extant geographical maps, and the earliest extant map of the human brain” date back to around 3000 bc, thereby suggesting a close association among them. He says, “To ask for a map is to say, ‘Tell me a story.’” Noting the similarities between maps and stories, Turchi quotes Emerson: “The Writer is an explorer: Every step is an advance into new land.” Turchi himself asserts that “artistic creation is a voyage into the unknown. In our own eyes, we are off the map.”1 He compares finding one’s way in an unknown land or in the mind itself to the experience of writing: discovering the subject, through trial and error, failed attempts, and wrong paths taken, finally to find new knowledge of the world and the self which then enables the writer to guide others to make their own discoveries.

430. oldal - Emory Elliott: Society and the novel in twentieth-century America

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In the years after World War II, the realistic and the experimental lines of development in the American theatre came together in what was to be the most distinctive and influential American theatrical development of the twentieth century. Playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, in collaboration with director Elia Kazan and designer Jo Mielziner, created a form of total theatre that remained within the boundaries of dramatic realism while it dramatized the subjective reality of one of the characters. These productions synthesized dialogue, acting, scenery, lighting, and music into an integrated theatrical idiom that quickly became known worldwide as “the American style.”

418. oldal - Brenda Murphy: Theatre

Kapcsolódó szócikkek: Arthur Miller · Elia Kazan · Tennessee Williams
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No filmmaker’s story better expresses the ideological shortcomings of the Hollywood Renaissance than that of Melvin Van Peebles. Trained in the theatre, Van Peebles fled America in the 1960s, training as a filmmaker in France, releasing a highly regarded, French New Wave-influenced, character drama, Story of a Three Day Pass (1968). He was lured back to Hollywood by Columbia Pictures, to make a race comedy, Watermelon Man (1970). The film turned out to be too radical, and Van Peebles was restrained from doing what he wanted with his film, about a white man played in whiteface by a black actor, Godfrey Cambridge, who, at the film’s first turning point, is turned black by the comic malfunctioning of his tanning bed. In the first act of the film, Jeff is indifferent to the Civil Rights Movement. However, after he turns black, he is confronted with the tangible effects of racism, finally losing his job as an insurance salesman because he discovers the company is bilking black people, and ending the film as a comic black militant, training as a revolutionary who uses a mop as a spear.

385. oldal - Walter Metz: Hollywood cinema

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However, it was not until the summer 1975 release of Jaws that it became clear that the Hollywood Renaissance was dead. A film that came in frighteningly over-budget for minor studio Universal, Jaws made over $100 million during its first release. This huge profit placed Universal among the most profitable of the Hollywood film studios, and as a result of a long-term deal with blockbuster filmmaker Steven Spielberg, is now among the biggest and most financially stable studios in the New Hollywood.
Jaws, while wonderfully constructed, both narratively and aesthetically, represented a sea change in the films of the Hollywood Renaissance period. While a clearWatergate allegory – Chief Brody keeps the beaches open after the mayor claims that the island’s economy will collapse, resulting in the needless death of a little boy – the film’s pessimism is contained in its first act. The resulting two acts of the film are about Chief Brody recovering from his mistake and getting the job done. As Saigon was falling to the Viet Cong in the summer of 1975, Chief Brody caused millions of young people to return to the movie theatre and watch him eliminate the threat to the American ship of state.

386. oldal - Walter Metz: Hollywood cinema


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