American Culture Research Articles

Influence and Untimeliness in Modern Architecture: A Conversation between Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Amanda Reeser Lawrence

A conversation between Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Amanda Reeser Lawrence recorded on November 13, 2023 at the Yale School of Architecture. The conversation focuses on their shared interest in twentieth-century American architecture culture, including architectural pedagogy marked by the use of architectural precedents as a generative design tool and the rise of art historical formalism as a dominant method of teaching architectural history. During the discussions the authors unpacked the key concepts and intellectual roots of their respective projects, “untimeliness” and the “usable past” (Pelkonen) and “influence” and “anachronism” (Lawrence) and shared notes on how they approach history teaching in a design school setting so as to make it an integral part of architectural thought.

A calculated attack on clergy abuse: challenging patriarchal power at Willow Creek Community church

ABSTRACT In 2018, The Chicago Tribune reported one of the most significant abuse scandals in evangelical megachurch history: Bill Hybels, Willow Creek Community Church’s founder, was accused of sexual assault and misconduct. Willow Creek staff and elders denied the allegations, refused to take action against Hybels, and accused the women of collusion. In response, survivors and sympathizers formed online networks of support through social media and blogposts, adding their voices to the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements. While Willow Creek professed gender egalitarian theology, it failed to curb the power of its charismatic male leader. This paper argues that Willow Creek, which grew in the context of twentieth century American culture and conservative evangelicalism, harbored naturalized patriarchy, complementarian ideology, and gender individualism that resisted the examination of gender inequality. This demonstrates the limitations of egalitarian theology and the necessity of broader social movements and networks to unravel patriarchal religious systems.

Atlantic Patriotism: The Seven Years' War and the Transformation of American, British, and French Political Culture

Abstract: The Seven Years' War worked as a catalyst of mutations already present before the hostilities. The case is particularly palpable when we consider the transformation of American, British, and French political culture between 1756 and 1763. In America, William Pitt's colonial policy based on partnership led after the peace to a huge disappointment in America and a growing tension with London. Eventually, it paved the way for the revolt of the Sons of Liberty. In Great Britain, the ideological and political consequences of the war were no less dramatic. Pitt's patriot policy, which was in many respects a mirror of the colonists' political culture based on the same republican principles, brought a decisive contribution to the birth of radicalism after the peace. Last but not least, French political culture was deeply affected by the conflict. A new conception of the political role of the French people emerged during the war, leading to the transformation of the subjects of Louis XV into self-proclaimed citizens willing to offer spontaneously their services for the common weal.

ON DEFINING BRITISH AND AMERICAN NATIONAL IDENTITY THROUGH HUMOR

This article dwells on diverse expressions of humor in British and American cultures. It highlights humor as an important means of interaction between different social groups and reveals their national peculiarities, which are vividly reflected in various expressions of humor. Over time, both nations have developed their own unique form of humor based on their national identity and historical experience. Humor is a vital means that serves to express positive or negative feelings through language. A humorous view of life is very important. Britain and the USA are two separate cultures with their own characteristics, histories, and mentalities. Both nations use diverse methods of expressing humor. The purpose of the study is to show the variety of English and American humor. The material for research comprises different examples of American and English jokes on various topics. The relevance of this study is determined by the growing impact of humor as a means of communication and socialization that promotes mutual understanding, tolerance, and hence respect among members of society and different nations. The novelty of the article is the material studied in the paper. In the research, we have employed the methods of data comparison and analysis.

Feasibility Analysis of Cross-cultural Competence Development in College English Textbooks— A Case Study of New Horizon College English Textbook for Viewing, Listening and Speaking

Against the backdrop of increasingly frequent globalization and international communication, English serves not only as a tool for international exchange but also carries the function of disseminating and communicating diverse cultures. University English textbooks are not just tools for language learning but also crucial mediums for fostering students’ cross-cultural communication skills. This paper examines the cultural content reflected in the textbook and its impact on students’ cross-cultural communication abilities in the third edition of New Horizon College English Textbook for Viewing, Listening and Speaking (Third edition, Book 2) textbooks from a cross-cultural perspective. A framework of cross-cultural competence teaching for textbook analysis was constructed based on the previous research. The study analyzes the cultural content and its presentation in the textbooks according to the different dimensions of the framework, revealing significant differences in the selection and presentation of cultural content. Research findings show that the textbooks primarily focus on introducing English and American cultures while neglecting the diversity of other English-speaking countries and students’ local cultures, resulting in a narrow cultural perspective. Furthermore, the depth and breadth of cultural content are insufficient to comprehensively develop students’ cross-cultural communication skills. It is suggested that when using these textbooks for cultivating cross-cultural skills, attention should be given to diverse cultures, balancing the introduction of different cultures, incorporating students’ local cultures, and helping them develop a global perspective. By enriching cultural content and implementing diverse teaching activities, students’ cross-cultural understanding and communication skills can be enhanced, fostering international exchange and cooperation.

The proximal distant: How does remote acculturation affect wellbeing in the multicultural context of Lebanon?

As a multicultural context, Lebanon has been subjected to complex cultural influences across history and has no clear cultural delineations. Lebanese currently choose to maintain or abandon a combination of four local cultural identities (sectarian, religious, national, and supranational). They may also choose to adopt postcolonial French culture and/or remotely acculturate to American culture. In this unique Middle Eastern context, we specifically examined Americanization in relation to well-being. Using a cross-sectional design, we analyzed data from 741 participants aged 18–40. We identified several cultural clusters from measures of identity and behavioral orientations towards one's self-ascribed sectarian, Arab, religious, national, postcolonial French, and American cultural indicators. Cluster analysis indicated the existence of three clusters within the sample: a national multicultural Americanized cluster (23%), a religious multicultural Americanized cluster (40%), and a religious multicultural traditional cluster (37%). The clusters’ composition and characteristics potentially reflect historical and current events related to the political and social fabric of the country and the region (e.g., the Arab Nationalist Movement, the recent national uprising). In addition, we compared psychological well-being across clusters; the analyses demonstrated significant differences. Universally, our results highlight the importance of maintaining a positive attitude towards one's local culture(s) to protect one's well-being and indicate that Americanization extends beyond adolescence and the emerging adulthood periods into adulthood. At the societal level, the emergence of a cluster prioritizing national identity encourages efforts to promote a superordinate national identity and could be indicative of a significant shift within the Lebanese social and political fabric.

Identity Politics, Natural Law, and Human Dignity

Rooted in Marxism and Critical Theory, identity politics upended traditional philosophical anthropology about personhood, and argues that identity is wholly manifested through economic group, social class, gender, or racial categories. Humans are ontologically viewed through their status as victims, not as fully integrated moral persons. Touted as a political issue, identity politics is at heart a philosophical and anthropological problem, and to address it one must return to a better understanding of the soul and human dignity. The resurrection of the classical Natural Law tradition is the remedy for finding common ground and rebuilding civil society, for at the heart of Natural Law is the belief in human dignity which imbues every human being with worth to be honored and respected regardless of race, sex, age, or different culture or religion. Classical Natural Law provides the theological, philosophical, and definitional background for human dignity and only if it is resurrected can “the discontent” in American culture be fully human again.

George M. Marsden. Fundamentalism and American Culture, 3rd edition.

George M. Marsden. Fundamentalism and American Culture, 3rd edition.

The Evolution of Donald Trump’s Image in Rap Lyrics

The paper researches the peculiarities of the development of the reference to Donald Trump in rap lyrics. The paper focuses on the analysis of stylistic devices and metaphors used by the authors of rap lyrics when referring to the image of Donald Trump as a businessman and politician; as well as the analysis of the sociocultural context of these references, their significance within the genre and American culture in general, and their stylistic effect.

Revealing Footprints of Ancient Sources in Recent Eurasian and American Folk Music Cultures Using PCA of the Culture-Dependent Moment Vectors of Shared Melody Types

One of the possible objective and universal descriptions of most folk songs can be based on structural musical characteristics such as contour, tone set, tonality, rhythm, meter, and form. Experimental studies in the recent decade supported the universal importance of contour and tonality as the two most important characteristics determining human music cognition and memory. It follows from this statement that a mathematically adequate description of folk songs should be based on both contour and tonality information. We describe a method searching for characteristic groups of universal melody types (MTs) propagating jointly and regularly in several subsets of 59 folk music cultures in Eurasia and America, represented by a database of 59,000 folk songs. The MTs are represented by pairs of contour and degree distribution vectors. We describe the propagation of the MTs by 59-dimensional vectors containing their “moments” in the 59 cultures studied. We show that principal component analysis (PCA) of these moment vectors reveals assumable ancestor cultures, and we show a method modeling the 59 musical cultures as linear combinations of the musical contents of seven assumable ancestral cultures. The results provide a method and a hypothesis for tracking the footprints of assumable ancient musical “primary languages” in folk music traditions in Eurasia and America. The assumable musical ancestral cultures presented here show good correspondence with the distribution of certain human genetic characteristics and archaeogenetic results.

«Америка» и литература: к истории журнала в послевоенном СССР (1944–1952 гг.)

A vivid illustration of the successes of U.S.–Soviet diplomacy during the period of allied relations was the magazine Amerika, published in the United States in Russian and distributed in the USSR. The magazine was intended to inform Soviet citizens about real American life, familiarize them with the achievements of the United States in science and culture. It was important to present American literature on the pages of the magazine: authors new to Soviet readers and stories by well-known writers translated into Russian for the first time. The article concludes that, along with the rest of the magazine's content, its literary section sought to demonstrate American prosperity and emphasize the closeness of American and Russian cultures. After the war, however, relations between the two countries went into decline again. The USSR continued to translate, censor, and distribute Amerika, but at the same time launched a campaign against the magazine in the Soviet press. In 1952, the symbol of US — Soviet alliance of 1941–1945 ceased to exist. The canceled project was restarted however four years later. The history of the magazine is reconstructed on the basis of Soviet press and archival materials, including transcripts of conversations, Agitprop reports, correspondence between the U.S. Ambassador to the USSR W.A. Harriman and V.M. Molotov, the First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR A.A. Gromyko and the U.S. Charge d'Affaires in the USSR W. Barbour.

Дискутирование как основа реализации универсальных учебных действий (на основании зарубежного взгляда на дебатирование в образовательной деятельности)

The Federal Educational Program of General Secondary Education mentions the use of discussion in the educational process occasionally. Communication is considered as a means of ensuring the formation of universal educational actions (UES). Communicative activity differs from communicative actions on the basis of a motive, which is based on the need for communication, which is more developed in modern youth than the cognitive need. The article substantiates the necessity of transferring the communicative activity of students to the classroom (classroom) and filling its content with educational information. This approach dictates the need for work based on discussion, in which the communicative activity of the participants reaches a maximum. Based on the concept of discourses of J. Lacan (Master’s discourse, university discourse, hysteric discourse, analyst’s discourse) and the practice of debating in modern American university culture, the possibilities of using different forms of discourse in various kinds of discussions and options for their use in the educational process are analyzed. The materials are accompanied by a brief retrospective of the use of discussion in state and military policy and the conclusion is made about the need for a wider introduction of discussion (debating) to form the ability to communicate within the framework of the UES.

Janteloven in Denmark and Norway — To be or not to be?

The paper focuses on the concept of the Jante law (janteloven), formulated by A. Sandemose in 1933 in his novel En flyktning krysser sitt spor. Fortelling om en morders barndom (A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. A story about a murderer’s childhood), which later became an element of the cultural code of Denmark and Norway. In this study we follow C. Levisen in his distinguishing between the “literary Jante law”, described by A. Sandemose in his novel, and the “linguistic” Jante law, which is a collocation in the Danish and Norwegian languages. This lexicalization of the concept has been brought about by the specific Scandinavian mentality, conditioned by a number of reasons (the agrarian Scandinavian culture, the Lutheran ethos). In the modern Danish and Norwegian languages the concept of janteloven is negative and is used in specific types of discourse (sports, popular culture, business, politics, psychology, schooling, immigration problems, feminism). Besides, there are numerous reformulated Jante laws (den positive jantelov, den omvendte jantelov, antijantelov, jenteloven, Danskerloven), which proves the precedence of the notion in the Danish and Norwegian cultures. The dominating American individualistic culture influences the development of a new system of values (ambition, self-concern, pushiness are no longer viewed as negative qualities), which results in a conflict between the traditional and the new in the Danish and Norwegian cultures: the Jante law comes into conflict with the so-called achievement culture (præstationskulturen). As a social construct and a secret regulator of public relations the janteloven has found its place between the number of other concepts (hygge, trivsel and so on), yet the janteloven has been specifically reflected in political practices, both in its formal expression (development of various “canons”) and in the methods of countering the imposition of certain phenomena on the part of government authorities.

Manifest Technique: Hip Hop, Empire and Visionary Filipino American Culture, Mark R. Villegas (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2021)

Manifest Technique: Hip Hop, Empire and Visionary Filipino American Culture, Mark R. Villegas (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2021)

Liberal Psychology and the Decline of Christianity

This paper attempts to trace the theoretical roots, as well as the practical consequences, of mid-century psychology—exemplified by Carl Rogers—into Protestant and Catholic churches in America. Drawing largely on Rogers himself, it argues that liberal psychology takes on a different view of man than that which is part and parcel of Christianity. Next, citing Alan Petigny’s book The Permissive Society, it traces the history of Rogers’s thought and its popularity both in Christianity and in the larger American culture. Lastly, it investigates the ways in which Rogers’s psychology—in the form of “client-centered therapy”—made its way into the churches.

Литература Латинской Америки на филологическом факультете МГУ: научная жизнь

The review is devoted to the main topics and events of the international conference organized by the Department of Ibero-Roman Linguistics at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University — “The Second Latin American Readings” (November 23–24, 2023). The work of the conference took place in two plenary sessions and four panels, one of which was devoted exclusively to the literature of Latin America. A total of 52 papers were presented, covering a wide scope of problems of Latin American studies, including linguistic, literary, cultural, art, and historical aspects. The plenary sessions included reports on significant phenomena and general trends in the development of Latin American culture, such as the characteristics of the Latin American world view formation in literature, the emergence of a national school of artistic translation in Mexico, and the genesis and formation of abolitionist prose in Cuba. The panels shed light on specific aspects of the continent's literature: issues of individual poetics, the history of individual works, artistic types and genres, as well as illuminating examples of cultural ties between our country and Latin America. The papers were chiefly accompanied by vivid presentations, and the meeting ended with a concert of Latin American music.

Knowledge Distillation and Transfer Learning Combined for Innovative Visualization Teaching of Non-Heritage Designs

Abstract This study introduces a novel approach by combining knowledge distillation and transfer learning to create a model that, despite its smaller size, approaches the accuracy of its much larger counterparts. It leverages a trained model from a source domain (teacher) to enhance an untrained model in a target domain (student) with significantly fewer parameters. Through transfer learning, we utilize pre-trained deep learning model parameters as initial values. This paper also explores integrating intangible cultural heritage (ICH) information with school curricula, transforming traditional knowledge presentation into intuitive, personalized displays. Our findings highlight that ICH visualization spans nine categories, with traditional arts and crafts leading with 25 items. Interestingly, only 22.58% of students understand Native American culture, pointing towards the potential for educational enhancement. The research suggests designing curriculum with varied teaching activities to improve students’ comprehensive skills.

아서 밀러 극의 인물, 주제, 문체에 나타난 유대인 특성

This study aims to identify Jewish characteristics in Arthur Miller's eight major plays, focusing on their characters, themes, and writing styles. As a Jewish American immigrant, Miller has been praised for portraying the American ego or culture. Until now, criticism of Miller's plays has taken his imperfect American self for granted as the standard of universality. Critics analyzed only the form and content revealed on the surface of the plays, which have become ambiguous due to the author's double identities. Miller presents a typical American middle-class character on the surface of his works but, in deep structure, projects the collective Jewish ideology and prophetic discourses oriented toward the Old Testament. This study redefines the propositions of 'Modern Tragedy,' 'Common Man,' and 'Whole Social Drama' that Miller claimed to emphasize the universality of his works. The analysis of Miller's plays' characters, themes, and writing styles reveals that he reflects his Jewish identity more strongly than his American ego.

Cultural Confrontations and its Impacts in Henry James' Daisy Miller

Everyone stands on his / her own ground absorbing own shadow. This shadow always stands amid us and it has more or less influences on our being. This shadow, in fact, is culture; the set of thoughts, rules, norms, and values that the people assimilate in the particular place and time; and this most ambiguous term is culture. As a matter of fact, literary study is understood as 'cultural study'. The most inevitable issue of culture is its differences. The differences appear in the disguise of shock, clash, collision, confrontation, differences and cultural dimensions
 This article proposes the bicultural study of America and Europe through the American visitors in Europe and cultural clash in Henry James’s narrative novella Daisy Miller. The characters of this novella young Daisy Miller, her brother Randolph Miller and her mother Mrs. Miller culturally confront while visiting Europe. They embody both tradition and translation; and fail to assimilate themselves in the 'host land'. Within tradition, they represent American culture, visible in the kind of cultural proximity they establish, as Daisy establishes with Winterbourne. Within translation, they try to reflect European culture, symbolized by the sort of affective relationship they keep, as Daisy keeps with young Italian Giovanelli. As migrant selves, they are able to conciliate Schenectady and Vevey, they transform tradition and translation into cultural identities that mutually nurture one another in spite the fact that they are judged vaguely through the European eyes.

Shamanic Healing and Altered States of Subconscious in Murakami’s Fictions

Shamanism, a universal phenomenon, originated in Inner Asia and has evolved over time. Haruki Murakami, a renowned Japanese author, has crossed cultural divides and gained attention with his works of fiction. His belief in protecting the individual for society's benefit is what appeals to and offends people about him. Murakami's works often convey a sense of loneliness and dislocation through characters that are often lonesome and alone. He uses magical realism to explore the subconscious, a metaphysical part of the mind that is unavailable to the conscious self. Murakami's daily writing routine reaches the surface, focusing on human solitude, loneliness, yearning, nostalgia, and the slender borders between existence and reality. Murakami's short fiction The Elephant Vanishes explores the complexity of human pleasure and voting rights, with the narrator's obsession with an elderly elephant and its keeper as a metaphor for the town's negative changes. His works, like Kafka on the Shore and First Person Singular, explore themes of perception, memory, and existence, often connecting readers' subconscious and influencing our lives. His works, often resembling American culture, have gained critical recognition in Japan. Murakami's fiction explores themes of autonomy and individuality, particularly for a generation of Japanese people who lack an identity and are subsumed by commercialism. His characters face existential crises, alienation from society, and the need to find their true identity to rebel against an oppressive system.