American Myth Research Articles

What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books

What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books

The Searchers: Aristoteles Revisited

In the first half of the 20th Century, the “western” was a major genre in Hollywood filmography. Starting as a simple and almost childish type of entertainment easily attained by the audience, it evolved into a more sophisticated form of film communication and art, and become the preferred genre for some film directors like Howard Hawks and John Ford, among others. This evolution allowed the genre to become an important tool of analyses and criticism of American Culture, History, Myths and Society, especially during the time of the McCarthyism and the Red Scare, a time when progressive and more critical views on these subjects could not be openly dealt with. Among the authors who saw the “western” as this privileged means of expression, Ford definitely stands tall, and in his filmography, “The Searchers” occupies a front row seat. For all of the above, we intend to bring some light to this movie, analysing some aspects of its narrative from the perspective of the Aristotelian principles of dramatic construction.

“The truth is memory has not forgotten us”: Memory, Identity, and Storytelling in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

This article examines the intersection of memory, identity, and storytelling in the highly acclaimed Vietnamese American novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. The novel challenges the American myths of inclusion and equal opportunity for all by critiquing United States’ historical amnesia and imperialistic historiography. To Vietnamese American members of the 1.5 generations, memory can never be a choice because only through historical remembrance and self-narrativity can they construct their diasporic identity and establish alliance with the previous generations.

Missing Colonies in American Myths of Slavery: Where Is the “Deep North” in Sociology Textbooks?

This exercise in reflexive sociology consists of a comparative analysis of the standard verbiage of Introduction to Sociology and Sociology of Race/Ethnicity textbooks on the subject of American slavery. We interrogate whether narratives about slavery in sociology textbooks present the system as a peculiar Southern institution, or as a cross-regional institution that includes the Northern colonies. The study found that a majority of the Introductory books present the system as Southern. The majority of the Race/Ethnicity books prominently feature Southern slavery, yet some are more likely to detail Northern slavery and the broader Atlantic World context. Given that the field of sociology is a key carrier of collective-memory institutionalization in its role as a remembrance environment, we argue that it has the potential to impact historical revisionist understandings of American history in public collective memory. Such revisions carry implications for transregional responsibility for racial injustices.

What Are These Biographies Not Saying?: Colorblindness in Biographies About Oprah Winfrey

What Are These Biographies Not Saying?: Colorblindness in Biographies About Oprah Winfrey KaaVonia Hinton (bio) In Chelsea Clinton’s 2017 collective biography She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World, the entry about Oprah Winfrey begins this way: “OPRAH WINFREY’s grandmother expected Oprah to follow in her footsteps and become a maid. Oprah knew, even as a little girl, that her dreams would take her somewhere else. She persisted in turning those dreams into her reality and became a media superstar. . . .” (emphasis in original). This anecdote suggesting Winfrey’s grandmother, Hattie Mae, attempted to prepare her for a future as a maid is often cited in children’s biographies. In Carole Boston Weatherford’s Oprah: The Little Speaker, she imagines the exchange occurring like this: “One wash day [Grandma] called Oprah, ‘Come watch, child; you’ll need to know how to do this someday.’ And Oprah said to herself, ‘No I won’t.’” Anecdotes such as this construct Winfrey as exceptional, intuitive even, and her life experiences are presented as instructive and inspirational while minimizing social realities and promoting American myths. Particularly, the audience is asked to marvel at her ability to transcend an impoverished girlhood and achieve the American Dream. Biographies about Winfrey also promote the Cinderella/rags-to-riches storyline. In Weatherford’s author’s note, for instance, she writes, “Once upon a time, a poor girl from a Mississippi pig farm talked her way to fame and fortune and came to be a queen.” While encouraging the reader to focus on Winfrey’s ability to dream and achieve success, these texts fail to confront the social injustices in the United States that deemed it imperative for Hattie Mae to try to teach Winfrey what Nancy Tolson calls the “destructive aspects of Southern culture,” particularly how some black mothers, even those outside the South, attempted to prepare their daughters for domestic work, because, [End Page 244] due to racism, there were few possibilities for other types of employment (183). On the surface, children’s biographies of Winfrey introduce children to a girl who grew up destitute on a farm in Mississippi and became a mogul (read as “unlikely [s]hero”) (Martin 87). But omissions like the one described above are prevalent across children’s biographies of Winfrey, and they help construct a colorblind narrative. Omissions also prompt an important question: what else are these biographies not saying? Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Michelle Alexander, and others argue the twenty-first century is entrenched in colorblind racism, an ideology that makes it possible to use Winfrey’s accomplishments to argue, for example, that confronting interlocking oppressions of race, class, and gender is unnecessary (Taylor; P. Collins). As Sarah J. Jackson points out in Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press: Framing Dissent, black celebrities are often used in the United States to attempt to illustrate that racism no longer exists, particularly after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when the increasing popularity of ideas about multiculturalism and colorblindness spawned “‘modern’ or ‘enlightened’ racism [which] tends to ignore the deep and lasting legacy of racial oppression while holding up the achievements of a few African Americans as evidence that racial problems have been solved” (4). Similarly, Dana L. Cloud argues Black Americans in popular culture—such as Winfrey—have been tokenized in biographies for adults and defines tokenist biography “as biographical narratives that authorize a person from a marginalized or oppressed group to speak as a culture hero on the condition that the person’s life story be framed in liberal-capitalist terms” (116, emphasis in original). Cloud found Winfrey had “self-fashioned” (Ards), with the help of the media, a life narrative that functions as a rags-to-riches tale steeped in depictions of colorblindness with little regard to structural injustices or historical context. In this paper, I maintain children’s biographies also use the rags-to-riches storyline to depict Winfrey as a culture hero while perpetuating American myths around colorblindness and deemphasizing how race, class, and gender impacted her life. Scholars argue colorblindness is the dominant racial ideology in the United States, and it is used to justify racial inequality.1 A colorblind...

Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford

Reviewed by: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford Walter L. Buenger Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. By Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford. (New York: Penguin Press, 2021. Pp. 386. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Forget the Alamo? How many times over the last forty years or so have serious historians, exasperated by the debilitating hyper-focus on the Texas Revolution and the clap-trap that went with it, uttered that plaintive cry? Yet the myths, legends, and added-after-the-fact stories outlive their best efforts. In fairness, Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford, the journalist authors of Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, really do not seem to hope anyone can or should forget the Alamo or that the myth has fallen. As they say in their aptly named closing, “We are What we Remember,” their goal is to change “the story we tell about the Alamo” (340). The book divides into two parts. In the first part the authors strip away almost two hundred years of propaganda, ideologically driven media mania, and self-glorifying myth-making to emphasize “the truth about Bowie, Travis, and Crockett” (340), the importance of slavery in all that happened between 1821 and 1836, and the reality that, although the Alamo was psychologically important to victory at San Jacinto in many ways, death at the Alamo could have and perhaps should have been avoided. In the second part the authors trace the accrual of Alamo propaganda, media mania, and myth, and they describe how since the 1970s historians and activists primarily from Latino, Tejano, and Native American communities have sought an honest past and to escape the heavy hand of the “Heroic Anglo Narrative” (xxv). Veteran historians of the Southwest will find the book’s messages familiar and a bit breathless. The flaws and foibles of James Bowie, William Barrett Travis, and David Crockett, judged by the standards of their time or ours, have long been known, as have such details as Crockett’s probable surrender and execution after the Battle of the Alamo. Stephen F. Austin’s many attempts to preserve the right of Anglos to bring slaves to Texas and to keep them in bondage have long been clear, and those familiar with [End Page 223] founding documents know that Section 9 of the 1836 Constitution of the Republic of Texas made slavery and White supremacy the law of the land. Many scholars have felt or observed the sting of vitriolic attacks by defenders of the Heroic Anglo Narrative. They have known at least since the publication of Richard R. Flores, Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and Master Symbol (University of Texas Press, 2002) of the ridicule and bias heaped on Tejanos, and how they have been lumped with the treacherous enemy because of the symbolism of the Alamo and Texas Creation Myth. Two things about this book, however, will be especially valuable for historians. It lays out the time line of the myth, and it connects that myth’s evolution to the needs and purposes of each era. The phrase “Remember the Alamo” emerged as what we would now call wartime propaganda in the lead up to the Battle of San Jacinto and helped inspire Texans to take revenge on Santa Anna and his army. It stiffened the spine and will of warriors, but then the myth receded in importance for half a century only to emerge again to reassure Anglos of their place atop the racial and ethnic hierarchy. By 1936, the story had passed into the national and international sphere as a symbol of the advancement across the continent of what was called the Anglo-Saxon race. Curiously, Davy Crockett was a minor character in all this, but in the 1950s Walt Disney and John Wayne turned Crockett into a potent symbol of struggle against an alien foe. Crockett became a key to Cold War propaganda and for many remains atop the pantheon of Alamo heroes. He had to die swinging “Old Betsy,” surrounded by foreign corpses, because that is what true American...

The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women's Lives, 1660–1900 by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux

Reviewed by: The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women's Lives, 1660–1900 by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux Ian McCormick Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women's Lives, 1660–1900 ( New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 264; 200 color illus. £19.99 paper. Material culture is an interdisciplinary enterprise that has been re-invigorated in recent years by archival studies of "things" previously deemed insignificant; [End Page 522] there is also a renewed confidence in the articulation of complex social, political and cultural narratives that allow objects to speak to modern observers. The cross-fertilization of archaeology, anthropology, museum studies, social and economic history and cultural studies has led to the composition of biographies of common objects and even commodities such as cod, salt, sugar, coffee, and pineapples. In this regard, a considerable body of influential research has emerged from Arjun Appadurai's The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986). Strangely, studies of things have shown that objects have voices and sometimes narrate their strange social circulations. Veering off into the surreal, objects start to have their own life as It-narratives (especially during the eighteenth century). In the domain of material culture, the object's voices are in a sense ventriloquized by the cultural critic and the historian. The renewed interest in things is evident in various influential studies: Sherry Turkle (2007), Mark Blackwell (2007), Julie Park (2010), Christopher Douglas (2016), Jonathan Lamb (2016), and Lynn Festa (2019). Sometimes entire collections have been devoted to one class of object, such as the Northampton Shoe Museum. Increasingly, however, the museum object is more than its measurable proportions, its provenance, and its defined space within the taxonomic regime. Pioneering studies such as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (Vintage, 2001) have eloquently revealed that objects can be theorized within larger frames of ideological construction and nation building discourses. In The Pocket, Burman and Fennetaux have created more than a museum of pockets. At the start, however, they note the limitations of their research on pockets, which did not include "fibre testing and dye analysis (costly and intrusive)" (15). It is also conceded that many of the pockets they investigated did not have a specific provenance. Nonetheless, Burman and Fennetaux have undertaken an impressive study of the topic, having meticulously documented 390 pockets, which involved field work across "more than thirty museums and private collections" (15). They have also examined 572 cases reported in The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1913, which variously amplify the criminal aspects of the topic, while also enabling more nuanced reflections on aspects of women's social history that have been poorly documented. In addition, this lavishly illustrated study includes 161 prints, paintings and photos of pockets. By drawing on stories and novels that mention pockets, as well as polemical and satirical works, the authors fulfil their promise to offer "social practices and materiality" (16). In summary, pockets are examined through chapters that analyze production, consumption, possession, mobility and sociability, work, privacy and memory. At various points throughout this book, a dense layer of data springs from what pockets contained (prior to the arrival of the fashionable reticule, or "ridicule," a type of handbag). Although lists of seemingly miscellaneous objects are often presented, the authors argue that they stand in for the character of their owners and that they are more than chaotic abundance, given that pockets were spaces wherein "women could practice an intimate order for their things" (113). The alternative view, represented by Adam Smith, is also mentioned: women's pockets merely overflowed with trinkets. Accordingly, in this study pockets are defended against the misogynistic representation of them as overstocked reservoirs of ephemera. In more general terms, Burman and Fennetaux contend that tie-on pockets were aligned with "benevolence, good housewifery and orderliness" (43) as so many of the objects listed are associated with their practical use. In support of these claims, the authors provide evidence for pockets within pockets, secret [End Page 523] pockets, and multiple compartments. Moreover, small boxes were frequently recorded, which indicates another example of a closed...

ʻ(Sports) Movies, Magic and Moreʼ: (Re)Telling the Story of College Basketball’s Integration in the Disney Sports Movie Glory Road

In 2006, Disney released the movie Glory Road to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 1966 Texas Western, the team who won the NCAA title while starting five black players – a first in college basketball history. While ʻbased on a true storyʼ, this movie actually paints a signifying picture of both the event and time it was produced at. By proceeding to Disneyfy elements of the story, celebrate the American founding myths and ethos, deconstruct myths while building up others, and crystallize issues related to the representation of black athletes in movies, Glory Road reflects the use of sports films by Hollywood and Disney to convey political messages and build narratives which celebrate a certain view of America and its history, especially in regards to race relations. The analysis of the movie, compared with autobiographies by ʻtrueʼ actors of the event, underlines the politics of representation and Disneyfication of politically-signifying historical events, and sports films as tools to build and validate myths with a strong political dimension, while opening up on the rise of self-representation as a new form of empowerment on the field of representation and symbols.

The Framing of Race: Trayvon Martin and the Black Lives Matter Movement

This study analyzed two national newspapers to investigate how each framed race in coverage of Trayvon Martin and the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing from Feagin’s white racial frame as the framework for analysis, results show that the news coverage reflected an encompassing pro-white/anti-black master-frame that presented Black Americans as inadequate, lawless, criminal, threatening and at times biologically different. Some news stories contributed to the media’s conceptualization of race within a liberty-and-justice American myth paradigm. Conversely, whites were presented favorably as “protectors” and “virtuous.” Episodic news frames were discovered with highly-focused coverage on events that shifted attention away from the broader trend of racial profiling. These findings contributed to the understanding of the role of corporate media in reinforcing the framing of race. Emerging sub-frames are discussed.

Powieść uniwersytecka Alicji Iwańskiej


 
 
 The paper discusses the novel Baśń amerykańska [An American Fairy Tale] by Alicja Iwańska, a Polish writer and sociologist who worked at American universities for many years. The paper discusses the picture of the academic community at a state university in the USA in the 1960s and the way in which it is presented, which makes it possible to classify the text as a campus novel, which is an extremely popular genre in English-language literature. The paper also points to the author’s demythologising view of the USA, challenging the American myth characteristic of the Polish awareness.
 
 

Gender Subversion, Acceptance, and American Myths in William Inge’s Picnic

Gender Subversion, Acceptance, and American Myths in William Inge’s Picnic

American myths of linguistic assimilation: A sociolinguistic rebuttal

AbstractThis study examines the behavior of 331 Spanish speakers, 269 immigrants to the United States and sixty-two native-born individuals, through questionnaires and sociolinguistic interviews. Results show that increased US life experience correlates with expanded use of English in both private and public domains of life. Additionally, greater use of English co-exists with maintenance of fine-grained patterns of structured linguistic variation in Spanish, such that US-born speakers demonstrate remarkable similarity to the immigrant generation in their usage of three variables: (i) subject pronoun presence vs. absence, (ii) grammatical subject position, and (iii) syllable-final /s/. The co-occurence of increased use of English, on one hand, and intergenerational structural continuity in variable linguistic behavior in Spanish, on the other, challenges two misconceptions about Spanish in the United States: that (a) Spanish-speaking immigrants and their US-born children are unwilling or unable to learn English, and (b) regular use of English entails attrition and/or failed acquisition of Spanish. Neither of these views finds empirical support in our data. (Spanish in the United States, comparative variationist linguistics, subject personal pronouns, grammatical subject position, syllable final /s/, bilingualism)

Ransom, Amy J. I Am Legend as American Myth: Race and Masculinity in the Novel and Its Film Adaptations

The cover of Amy J. Ransom’s I Am Legend as American Myth shows a lone man who trudges forth against a barren sky and a city whose former life is only evidenced by skeletons of concrete, whose death is manifest by the vampiric apparition that looms overhead to bare its fangs. Although taken from the I Am Legend film, the apocalypse is less thematic than peripheral in how Ransom incorporates race, masculinity, and positionality in her analyses of how the eponymous novel manages to be simultan...

”The war goes on behind bars”: The prisoner of war narrative as a building block of the American myth of origination

”The war goes on behind bars”: The prisoner of war narrative as a building block of the American myth of origination

WOMEN’S RE READING OF THE AMERICAN MYTH: TORI AMOS AND HER CONCEPTUAL ‘BODILY’ WORK

This study analyzes women’s recentering of the American myth done by Tori Amos, American singer-songwriter active since the 1990s. The article emphasizes the authorial subject position and reads the latter as providing Amos with an opportunity of conceptualizing various women’s experience, including corporeal. The ‘bodily’ becomes a conceptual tool – the singer-songwriter employs it to critically analyze master narratives and decolonize the feminine. Within the structure of the American myth Amos is primarily interested in the individual‑universal Christian motif and the historical fate of Native Americans, or, rather, in the distortion or effacement of these elements. Amos’ heroine appropriates the main sacrificial image of the Christian myth through ironic legitimation of misogynistically constructed female guilt, reads the figure of God in terms of toxic and vulnerable masculinity, and presents a version of communion as a passionate act of love. To embrace the history of America the singer-songwriter incorporates voices of American Indian women: dead, they are embodied in nature, as well as in women’s corporeal rituals of memory preservation that reveal themselves as women’s solidarity. Narrating the story of America as a woman’s story, Amos builds up a non‑hierarchical re‑reading of the American myth that insists on polyphony rather than on producing another ‘solid’ master narrative.

Japońskie filmy o Ajnach w perspektywie amerykańskiego westernu

Recently the topic of transnationalism in the arts has become a popular strand of academic research. Nevertheless, this phenomenon is not an entirely new concept. In cinema it has been a constant element since its inception. One of the most important inspirations for world cinema has been the traditional cinematography of the USA, especially from the period of the great film studios, with the western being one of the most popular and imitated genres. Although it seems to be inextricably connected with the American myth of the frontier, the Wild West, the theme of expansion, and the conflict of ‘civilization’ and ‘wildness/savagery’ has reverberated outside the USA. In Japan westerns resonated on both the consumer-commercial and artistic levels. Japanese filmmakers utilized elements of the genre while weaving in some native contexts. The history of colonization of the northern island of Hokkaidō and its native inhabitants – the Ainu people – have been a point of reference for Japan-based western films. In this article, the authors analyze the western-specific genre elements in Japanese films about the Ainu people, while concentrating on the portrayal of individuals, groups and human relations on the frontier.

Editor's Column: “the beacon thing”: Musings on John Steinbeck, America, and Light

Editor's Column: “the beacon thing”: Musings on John Steinbeck, America, and Light

I Am Legend as American Myth: Race and Masculinity in the Novel and Its Film AdaptationsAmy J.Ransom. McFarland & Company, 2018.

I Am Legend as American Myth: Race and Masculinity in the Novel and Its Film AdaptationsAmy J.Ransom. McFarland & Company, 2018.

Listening to the Elder Brothers: Animals, Agents, and Posthumanism in Native Versus Non-Native American Myths and Worldviews

Listening to the Elder Brothers: Animals, Agents, and Posthumanism in Native Versus Non-Native American Myths and Worldviews

Recreating an American Myth: An Analytical Reading of Paul Bunyan by W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten

One of the ability which music possesses is to evoke the audience’s sense of cultural and national identity. In the second half of the twentieth century, people can easily travel and relocate to a new country in order to search for a better living condition. However, with this newly found freedom, people’s sense of belonging and cultural identity has been put into serious doubts and tests. W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten’s Paul Bunyan encapsulates and foresees this phenomenon. Both have just arrived at the United States to escape from the war-torn Britain. Eager to find a voice to suit their new audience and symbolically swear allegiance to their newly adopted country, Auden and Britten employed an American founding myth in order to engage with their American patrons. Through a closed reading of Paul Bunyan, listeners will soon realize the inseparable notions between the musical presentation and its cultural identity. Furthermore, the story is told in the form of American musical theater, which is the artists’ ambitious attempt to capture the American optimism and spirit. This article intends to explore the notion of “myth narrative” in the genre of Music Theater; and how it reflects both the poet and the composers’ intention to obtain their sense of American identity.