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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
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Belgrad, Daniel. "The Social Meanings of Spontaneity in American Arts and Literature, 1940-1960," American Studies Program, Yale University, September 1994.
This study traces the intellectual influences and social conditions that gave rise to an aesthetic of spontaneity in American art, music, and literature during the 1940s and 1950s. Responding to wartime and postwar cultural pressures, artists and poets including Gottlieb, Motherwell, and Olson turned to automatism in search of socially radical art forms. Pollock, Cunningham, Voulkos, Ginsberg, Jones, and others developed this aesthetic throughout the 1950s. Exploring the signature forms of spontaneity—the “glyph,” the “plastic palimpsest,” and “spontaneous bob prosody”—I trace connections between it and contemporary ideas, including Surrealism, Jungian psychology, Whitehead’s process philosophy, Gestalt therapy, and Zen Buddhism.
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