Register
Register here for the annual meeting and to begin or renew an ASA membership
Register here to submit a proposal through the ASA's 2012 submission site.
Register here for JHU Press and ASA membership services, including online access to American Quarterly and the Encyclopedia of American Studies Online.Register here to join an ASA community. Only current ASA members may contribute to the community blogs. Registration is not required to submit display or text ads or news and events or to view many pages. We will refuse posts that are not of professional interest to ASA members.
Click here for membership FAQ's
Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
By University | By Year
Coiner, Constance. "'Pessimism of the Mind, Optimism of the Will': Literature of Resistance," University of California, Los Angeles, December 1986.
Drawing on the cultural and literary theories of Pierre Macheray, Antonio Gramsci, and Mikhail Bakhtin, among others, this work places two American working-class writers, Meridel le Sueur and Tillie Olsen, in a contemporary critical context. It addresses the complex intersection of American feminism and the political Left, as refracted in these two writers’ literary texts. This study is based on two main premises: that a text or oeuvre of working-class literature, as any form of discourse, displays contradictory meanings; and that these ruptures or discontinuities may be more resonant historically than those instances in which the text or oeuvre ‘works’ or appears fully formed. The critic’s task is not to repair or complete the literature but to identify the principle of its conflicted meanings. In LeSueur’s and Olsen’s Thirties literary texts, this principle lies partly in these writers’ complex relationship to the American Communist Party, an organization to which they were deeply committed. Because they were at once loyal members of a male-dominated Party and emerging feminists, their texts variously strain toward and away from Party prescriptions, at points subverting not only bourgeois but also orthodox Marxist categories.
Quick Links
American Quarterly [official journal site]
American Quarterly [editorial site]
Encyclopedia of American Studies
Encyclopedia of American Studies [editorial site]