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Events
Jan. 9 | Call for papers: Identities and Technocultures
A 2-day conference about American culture and technologies that examines how new technologies dominate and define Americaness in the US and abroad. Co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts (CESA) and the Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA).
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Cleghorn, Cassandra. "Bartleby's Benefactors: Toward a Literary History of Charity in Antebellum America," American Studies Program, Yale University, March 1995..
Building on recent studies of the consolidation of the antebellum middle class through social work and other cultural forms, this dissertation examines antebellum writers’ preoccupation with charity. To write about doing good as a problem was to plug into a complex national narrative in which mutual benevolence and fellow-feeling were seen as at once the very foundation of Christian democracy and a threat to the promises of radical individualism. Insofar as these ideologies were aligned with literary modes like sentimentalism and social reportage, stories of charity became a way to negotiate questions of social responsibility and literary affiliation. A range of texts are treated: canonical works, anonymous magazine writing, and the highly publicized treatment of Laura Dewey Bridgman, the blind and deaf woman, by philanthropist Samuel Gridley Howe.
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