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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
By University | By Year
Blake, Casey Nelson. "Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford," University of Rochester, January 1986.
This dissertation is a historical study of the writings of the “Young American” critics in the years 1900-1930. In contrast to the conventional view of these critics as cultural nationalists, this work focuses on their radical critique of the culture of industrialism by exploring the ways in which the Young Americans drew on the pragmatism of James and Dewey and the Ruskin-Morris tradition of romantic criticism to pose a communitarian alternative to the culture and social arrangements of industrial capitalism. The thesis also examines the questions of personal identity and meaning that preoccupied these critics in their private lives and criticism, contrasting their ideal of “personality” to that described by recent historians of twentieth-century consumer culture.
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