The Uses of Variety: modern Americanism and the quest for national distinctivenessHarvard University Press, 30/06/2009 - 394 من الصفحات The turn of the last century, amid the excesses of the Gilded Age, variety became a key notion for Americans'a sign of national progress and development, reassurance that the modern nation would not fall into monotonous dullness or disorderly chaos. Carrie Tirado Bramen pursues this idea through the works of a wide range of regional and cosmopolitan writers, journalists, theologians, and politicians who rewrote the narrative of American exceptionalism through a celebration of variety. Exploring cultural and institutional spheres ranging from intra-urban walking tours in popular magazines to the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, she shows how the rhetoric of variety became naturalized and nationalized as quintessentially American and inherently democratic. By focusing on the uses of the term in the work of William James, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hamlin Garland, and Wong Chin Foo, among many others, Bramen reveals how the perceived innocence and goodness of variety were used to construct contradictory and mutually exclusive visions of modern Americanism. Bramen's innovation is to look at the debates of a century ago that established diversity as the distinctive feature of U.S. culture. In the late-nineteenth-century conception, which emphasized the openness of variety while at the same time acknowledging its limits, she finds a useful corrective to the contemporary tendency to celebrate the United States as a postmodern melange or a carnivalesque utopia of hybridity and difference. Table of Contents: Introduction: Americanizing Variety I. The Ideological Formation of Pluralism II. The Aesthetics of Diversity III. Heterogeneous Unions Afterword: In Defense of Partiality |
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... William James and the Modern Federal Republic 2 Identity Culture and Cosmopolitanism II THE AESTHETICS OF DIVERSITY 9 50 67 29 3 The Uneven Development of American Regionalism 115 4 The Urban Picturesque and Americanization 156 III ...
... William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking William James, A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy WPR John Henry Barrows, ed., The World's Parliament ...
... above all things its interest in unity. But how about the variety in things? Is that such an irrele- vant matter? William James, Pragmatism (1907) Introduction Americanizing Variety Introduction Americanizing Variety The United States, by.
... William James's praise of the “ undisciplin- ables , ” where the peculiar , the marginal , and the distinct became em- blematic of the nation . In The Uses of Variety I explore how the rhetoric of diversity operated within U.S. culture ...
... William James's duality of “connection” and “auton- omy” in making comparisons and contrasts between the two periods. The earlier period is neither identical nor “other” to our contemporary times. Instead, to quote James, it is in “some ...
المحتوى
1 | |
27 | |
II THE AESTHETICS OF DIVERSITY | 113 |
III HETEROGENEOUS UNIONS | 199 |
In Defense of Partiality | 293 |
Notes | 307 |
Works Cited | 337 |
Acknowledgments | 361 |
Index | 365 |