American Tradition Research Articles

Philosophy of Religion in the Classical American Tradition. By J.Caleb Clanton. Pp. 295, Knoxville,University of Tennessee Press, 2017, $50.00.

Philosophy of Religion in the Classical American Tradition. By J.Caleb Clanton. Pp. 295, Knoxville,University of Tennessee Press, 2017, $50.00.

Boundless

This essay explores the visual articulation of protection, family care, nurturing, and freedom through the lens of two cloth ancestral figures from early 1920s Edgefield, South Carolina. The doll-like reliquaries, made by healer Ellen Weaver, embody materials from the graves of relatives and engage practices rooted in African American rootworking and conjure traditions. The figures are distinct in that they are small doll forms made to travel with their owners. Created after the accidental death of Ellen’s 2-year-old granddaughter, Rose, the dolls have moved with her sister Lillie Mae from Edgefield to Greens Cut, Georgia, to Queens, New York, and Cleveland, Ohio, where they reside with Lillie Mae’s granddaughter Nancy Stroman. Nearly eighty-five years old, the figures reveal Ellen’s deep commitment in her ability to artistically manipulate supernatural powers and harness the power of the family’s ancestral spirits to protect, heal, and inspire her descendants.

Anti-Intellectualism and Natural Food: The Shared Language of Industry and Activists in America since 1830

This article uses the concept of “anti-intellectualism” to explain surprising overlaps in rhetoric between American food activists and the manufacturers they criticize. It shows anti-intellectual elements in the language of, in turn: Sylvester Graham, an influential lecturer during the 1830s; the Natural Food Company, maker of Shredded Wheat and an advocate for “natural food” in the early 1900s; and Michael Pollan, a leading figure in contemporary American food politics. These activists and manufacturers have spoken in an anti-intellectual style about nature and food, arguing that certain forms of knowledge and evidence are more natural than others. Each has favored similar ways of understanding nature, rejecting professionalized expertise for tradition, intuition, and the wisdom of more “natural” peoples. While disagreeing on the proper structure of food production and distribution, activists and manufacturers have both sought authority to tell people how to live by evoking similar visions of the American past. This shared ideal romanticizes a time in which women did more work at home, immigrants and indigenous people were even more marginalized, and custom and tradition more fully guided people’s food choices. With different politics and intentions, manufacturers and activists belong to the same lineage of food discourse and have both furthered an American tradition of anti-intellectualism.

Private Property in the Context of Community

AbstractThe dominant philosophy of private land ownership—that private property exists for the benefit of its owner and that use and ownership should be determined by market forces—is not the only philosophy in the American tradition. Classical republicanism's proprietarian perspective was equally in favor of private property, but held that private property exists for the benefit of society. This article begins by presenting the proprietarian view of private property rights, drawing on the legal scholarship where this perspective has been revived. Next, I use the case of contemporary land reform in Scotland to exemplify the rationale for this perspective. Lastly, I attempt to import the lessons of Scottish land reformers without importing their model, instead considering ways in which private land ownership might be embedded in non‐market institutions in the United States.

Jhumpa lahiri's “unaccustomed earth”: A study of the second generation indian American diaspora experience.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s story titled “Unaccustomed Earth”, dwells on the life of a second generation diaspora character Ruma. Ruma along with her husband Adam and son Akash, live in Seattle, Washington, USA. This paper is an attempt to study and to analyse as to how this Indian American diaspora character Ruma, lives the life of a second generation diaspora in America. This paper seeks to argue that though she is born in America and follows American traditions and culture, yet she does not completely cease to follow Indian customs, Indian values, Indian culture or consume Indian food. She, in fact, charts a new course in her life and emerges with a new identity as she tries to negotiate her life in America.

Albert Murray’s The Spyglass Tree and the 1923 Armed Defense of Tuskegee Institute

In Albert Murray’s novel The Spyglass Tree (1991), which is set in a town similar to Tuskegee, Alabama and at a college similar to Tuskegee Institute in the 1930s, the protagonist hears a tale in a barbershop of how the campus community defended itself from the Ku Klux Klan in the previous decade. The protagonist uses this story, which is an approximately accurate re-telling of the historical defense of Tuskegee Institute from the Klan in 1923, as a model for heroic action. Murray thus revisits a theme from his first novel, Train Whistle Guitar (1974), in which the same protagonist learns to appreciate and be guided by African American vernacular traditions and published forms of discourse in equal measure.

The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition by Jamin Creed Rowan

The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition by Jamin Creed Rowan

The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture: Muslim Sources from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Jeffery Einboden

BOOK REVIEWS 149 never viewed thought and knowledge as settled or static, and instead leapt at the opportunity presented by apparent logical contradictions to produce new knowledge, as James Engell notes in his chapter, which shares the book’s title (238). The authors’ frequent dialoguing with one another helps clarify the narrow scope of some of the essays in the book and encourages a comprehensive rather than a selective reading. As interest in the growing interdisciplinary fields of attention studies and boredom studies continues to grow, Coleridge and Contemplation positions itself as a rousing and timely resource, enhancing ongoing debates among Romanticists and Coleridgeans regarding Coleridge’s vitally vermicular, but often bewildering theory of mind and its diverse applications. Sean Nolan The Graduate Center of the City University of New York The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture: Muslim Sources from the Revolution to Reconstruction Jeffery Einboden Oxford University Press, 2016. xv + 216 pp. $78 cloth. Through a series of excellent monographs, Jeffrey Einboden has emerged as an expert philologist of global literary studies who reveals new comparative apertures for interpreting early American writing. Based on his remarkable multilingual acumen, Einboden has honed an original methodology which locates specific acts of textual transmission as productive matrices for exposing the dynamics of intercultural exchange. His 2013 book, NineteenthCentury U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages ingeniously wrestled with the lexical complexities involved in translating canonical American literature into Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic. The scholarship in this book reverses the optics by witnessing expressions in Arabic and engagement with Muslim sources buried in the private writings of five important early American intellectuals: Ezra Stiles, William Bentley, Washington Irving, Lydia Maria Child, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture uncovers “a domestic American tradition of Islamic engagement” (126) extending from the Revolutionary period through the American Renaissance as Protestantism is transformed across a sequence of New England generations from Calvinism to Unitarianism to Transcendentalism. Religion & Literature 150 The book’s strengths derive from the depths of Einboden’s archival discoveries from a dozen repositories and the precision of his close readings of his excavated evidence. Einboden’s sleuthing reveals dynamic ways that Islamic sources, Qur’anic translations, and Arabic inscriptions were domesticated and incorporated into these writers’ intimate modes of self-fashioning. Digging beneath published writings, Einboden examines material markings in manuscripts that are more concealed, including diaries, notebooks, primers, epistolary exchanges, marginalia, and scribblings on envelopes. He argues convincingly that the discoveries he has made have been neglected because later editors, lacking linguistic competency, omitted many Arabic inscriptions in their collections. Einboden’s love of language is palpable in his revelatory analysis of how words and works transmit between languages and move through time and space, and become manifest in intimate instances of semantic production never disclosed until these critical interventions bring them to light. Einboden’s first two chapters address two important but underexamined early American religious thinkers: the Calvinist Ezra Stiles and the Unitarian William Bentley. Einboden examines the personal writings of these ministers to reveal how their study of Arabic and their reading of Islamic sources served as exegetical resources from which they constituted more cosmopolitan religious selves. The book begins when Ezra Stiles pens an illustrative inscription to his son that includes verses from the Qur’an in Arabic, performing a “hybrid paternity” (32) between varied Semitic languages. Another remarkable moment of Stiles’ “ecumenical exchanges” (24) is when, at the end of a letter to Rabbi Isaac Cardigal, he signs his own name in Arabic script. Stiles also prophesies that the emergent American nation will preserve the “great purity and elegance” of the English language exemplified by how the sacredness of Arabic has been preserved despite the proliferation of provincial dialects. The second chapter features William Bentley, known in his time as “America’s ‘most learned’ man” (51), whose situation as a prominent minister in Salem placed him within a circuit of transoceanic exchange that enabled him to acquire twenty-eight Islamic texts, which have “never received critical notice, despite representing the richest collection of Muslim manuscripts assembled in Jeffersonian America” (57). Like Stiles, Bentley believed the capacity to read Arabic was “exceedingly useful...

Side by Side: Alice and Staughton Lynd, the Ohio Years by Mark W. Weber and Stephen H. Paschen

Reviewed by: Side by Side: Alice and Staughton Lynd, the Ohio Years by Mark W. Weber and Stephen H. Paschen David Brown Mark W. Weber and Stephen H. Paschen, Side by Side: Alice and Staughton Lynd, the Ohio Years. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2014. 144 pp. $29.95+. This is a multifaceted work of history, biography and politics written by two scholars—Mark Weber, a retired dean of libraries at Kent State University and Stephen Paschen, a retired archivist at Kent State University Libraries—who have long admired the activism of Alice and Staughton Lynd. Their [End Page 53] book is an engaging complement to Carl Mirra's 2010 study, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970, and picks up chronologically where Mirra's book ended, with the conclusion of the 1960s and the realization that Staughton, denied tenure at Yale and black-listed from a number of Chicago universities for his criticism of American foreign policy in Vietnam, would never find another teaching position in the academy. Looking at the fullness of the Lynds's life together, one might say that they were better off outside the Ivory Tower. As post 1960s colleges and universities became more conservative, the Lynds never backed away from their activism—for the rights of workers, prisoners, and the elderly. They remain today symbols of social justice and worthy of biographical treatment. In many respects, this is a book that traces the human impact of deindustrialization in Ohio's Mahoning Valley. After leaving Chicago in 1976, Alice and Staughton moved to Youngstown, Ohio to practice labor law. By this time the sixties had definitively ended. SDS and SNCC were gone, the Vietnam War was over and the Lynds found themselves at a crossroads. Staughton had taken a law degree at the University of Chicago in 1973 and Alice enrolled in a paralegal program at Roosevelt University in 1974. Together they sought to continue their engagement in participatory democracy and nonviolence through the legal profession. But this meant more than defending trade unions. In Chicago they had both grown skeptical of large union bureaucracies, questioning their interest in affecting meaningful and positive change for the rights of their members. This kind "business unionism," they insisted, promoted hierarchical top-down relationships that distanced powerful organizations from those they ostensibly served. In Youngstown, a strong union tradition was being overturned by the neoliberalism of the 1980s. Faced, as he thought, with a decision to either represent the unions or represent the workers, Staughton left his job at a Youngstown law firm in 1978 and he and Alice (having taken a law degree at the University of Pittsburg) began working at the Northeast Ohio Legal Services until they retired in the 1990s. Weber and Paschen offer within this narrative a useful history of Youngstown's economic struggles, legal fights over the same, and the impact of plant closings on workers that demonstrate their fluency with the recent history of the region—a history that, as residents and academics at neighboring Kent State University, they are in an ideal position to relate. [End Page 54] One of the Lynds' major campaigns was over the question of community rights to shuttered industrial property. They lobbied, petitioned, organized, and occupied buildings in an effort to produce a legal decision that would recognize worker owned mills. Unsurprisingly the American property rights tradition proved too strong, and the Lynds lost this legal fight. It demonstrated, however, the eagerness of workers in the region to challenge corporate power and their willingness to remain committed to another hallowed American tradition—grassroots social democracy. For the Lynds the fight for community rights continued and in more recent years they became involved in prison reform and the Occupy Movement. More broadly, their opposition to the Gulf Wars, US foreign policy in Central America, and Israeli occupation of the West Bank and ongoing settlement building has often taken their reform efforts out of the Ohio context. Among the real virtues of this book are the many interviews that flesh out the Lynds' lives and work in Ohio. Alice and Staughton participated in these discussions but so also did, to name but...

Unmediated Impasse of Modernity

Unmediated Impasse of Modernity Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) How to Live, What to Do: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens Joan Richardson University of Iowa Press www.uipress.uiowa.edu 132 pages; Paper, $19.95 I begin with the Stevens poem published originally in Parts of a World (1942), which lends this book its title, with one evident revision, "How to Live. What to Do." Last evening the moon rose above this rockImpure upon a world unpurged.The man and his companion stoppedTo rest before the heroic height. Coldly the wind fell upon themIn many majesties of sound:They that had left the flame-freaked sunTo seek a sun of fuller fire. Instead there was this tufted rockMassively rising high and bareBeyond all trees, the ridges thrownLike giant arms among the clouds. There was neither voice nor crested image,No chorister, nor priest. There wasOnly the great height of the rockAnd the two of them standing still to rest. There was the cold wind and the soundIt made, away from the muck of the landThat they had left, heroic soundJoyous and jubilant and sure. Strangely, Joan Richardson, Stevens biographer and scholar extraordinaire, does not discuss this titular poem, aside from a throwaway line ("How to live, what to do—it matters what you pay attention to"), though the lines of the poem giving this book its subtitle weave their ways throughout it. Such a significant piece being missing feels like neither dereliction, nor chance, but intentional. Richardson must want her reader to discover in this absent poem something key. Likely, she wants the reader to identify with the two figures in the poem, the speaker (or "the man") and the other (or "the companion.") In this lyric's plot, these deliberately vague figures can play the roles of lover and beloved, poet and muse, archetypal first man and first woman, or Adam and Eve from Milton's conclusion to Paradise Lost (1667), perhaps even Dante and Beatrice as they observe the cosmic Love that rolls through all things. But of course, these two figures may be no more than wind-blown vagabonds in a depression-haunted derelict America. Finally, they can be parsed as animus and anima of one self, interior paramours of the post-romantic psyche, from Shelley to Jung. Clearly, the poem testifies to the modern waste land in which there are no more gods, heroes, priests, or singers ("choristers"). In such a world, one must start pragmatically, mindfully, and open-mindedly, from scratch: all those facts of modernity acknowledging, with the cutting sound of wind (Shelley's West Wind come around again?), its "heroic sound / Joyous and jubilant and sure." The thirteen chapters of this short provocative book are not so much radically different perspectives, or ways of looking at Stevens, since they follow upon each other as if composed as a single long argument or common imaginative stance, divided up after original composition. Richardson brings to bear, here all in one place, the discourses she has been using in her earlier work. These discourses are biographical (a la her ground-breaking two volume biography), pragmatist (William James and Peirce, as well as Emerson's "transcendental" anticipations), mystical (Eastern mysticism especially), and philosophy of science (the Whitehead of Science in the Modern World on up through Stevens' lifetime) and even current science—quantum physics and neuro-biological. The often-anachronistic resulting portrait of Stevens is of a modern poet, in the best American tradition of Whitman, Dickinson, and Emerson, who accepts the idea of the modern world being post-apocalyptic with respect to religious and most traditions. Stevens as thus starts mostly from scratch, thereby making the poetry's subject the exploration of this new empty space and the haunting reverberations that resound from the pre-linguistic babblings of the infant's acquisition of language to the philosophical poet-critic's highest abstractions, from ironic fumblings with syntax and grammar and excursions into philological history, on to the most rarefied of etymological deviations and blind alleys, the most refined of epistemological and phenomenology of...

Escape toCanada: Richard Ford's Fugitive Novel

In “Risking Nationalism: NAFTA and the Limits of the New American Studies” (1997), Bryce Traister draws on Amy Kaplan to caution against favouring models of pluralism in American studies that leave “national borders intact without interrogating their formation” (Kaplan 15). Conversely, many Canadianists remain deeply sceptical about both borderlands studies and hemispheric studies. Rather than dismissing American depictions of Canada outright as clichéd and stereotyped, it would behove scholars to consider why there is a long-standing American tradition of writers employing Canada, literally and figuratively (frequently by moving characters across the forty-ninth parallel), to deeply explore American concerns and why this fictional migration matters—both for Canadians and Americans. This article inverts the fearful presumptions cultivated by Canadians about America by using Richard Ford's Canada as a test case for such an analysis.

Bioethicists Are More Like Bricoleurs than Engineers: Reflections on Fredrik Svenaeus' Phenomenological Bioethics

Bioethicists Are More Like Bricoleurs than Engineers:Reflections on Fredrik Svenaeus' Phenomenological Bioethics Erik Parens (bio) A Review of Fredrik Svenaeus, Phenomenological Bioethics: Medical Technologies, Human Suffering, and the Meaning of Being Alive, Routledge, 2017. In America in the 1960s, ethics was out of fashion. Scientists tended to think it was as wooly and "ideological" as religion, and many philosophers agreed. But advances in the biosciences and biotechnologies made the need for ethical reflection hard to ignore. Ethics needed what today we would call rebranding. The new field devoted to questions arising with advances in the biosciences and biotechnologies would be called "bioethics." As theologian Warren Reich put it when reflecting back on the birth of bioethics in the late 1960s, The field of bioethics started with the word bioethics because the word is so suggestive and so powerful; it suggests a new focus, a new bringing together of disciplines in a new way with a new forum that tended to neutralize the ideologic slant that people associated with the word ethics. (Reich 1993) Different from its fuddy-duddy precursor, bioethics would be methodical and useful, resembling the technoscientific enterprise to which it would offer advice. New bioethical experts would methodically apply their principles to problems and they would produce advice as solid as any engineer's. [End Page 479] In his valuable new book, the Swedish philosopher Fredrik Svenaeus seeks to offer a "richer" and "thicker" alternative to that Anglo–American tradition of bioethics—an alternative that has its roots in the European, specifically phenomenological tradition of philosophy. I hasten to add: Svenaeus is well aware that, in fact, Anglo–Americans can take a fair amount of credit for approaches to bioethics that have what he calls "phenomenological heritages" (6)—namely, feminist bioethics, narrative bioethics, and the ethics of care—but it is the contrast between the Anglo–American and phenomenological traditions that he uses to frame his book, and it is the one I will accept to make my comments. Basically, whereas I find his elucidation of the conceptual tools in the phenomenological tradition to be quite helpful, I cannot say the same about his absorption with that old picture of the bioethicist as engineer. As someone who has worked at a bioethics research institute for more than two decades, it seems to me that whether we are more comfortable in the Anglo–American or phenomenological tradition, bioethicists are more like bricoleurs than engineers. With the term bricoleur, I mean to conjure the figure described by Claude Levi-Strauss—someone like what in English we call a handyman or "Jack of all trades." Imagine someone roaming the streets of a 19th-century village, pulling a cart filled with the tools and materials they have scavenged on their meanderings across the countryside. When someone has a problem (perhaps a wall has caved in), they hail the bricoleur, who uses the tools in their cart, to respond as best they can. Their response is not as grand or long-lasting as a building engineer's, but it provides temporary shelter from the cold. MARVELOUS TOOLS IN THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL TRADITION As Svenaeus observes, one of the striking differences between the Anglo–American and phenomenological traditions is their different relationships to modern natural science and to the technologies it undergirds. At the risk of oversimplification: whereas scholars from the Anglo–American tradition have tended toward enthusiasm about modern natural science and technology, scholars from the phenomenological tradition have tended toward criticism. The phenomenological tradition does, after all, attempt to bracket the attitude of the natural sciences. It seeks to understand what it is like to have experience rather than to explain the mechanisms that give rise to experience. As Svenaeus also observes, the phenomenological tradition can counterbalance the Anglo–American tradition's tendency to view science [End Page 480] as "value free." That is, it can be especially helpful in noticing that modern science grows out of a particular worldview, which rejects an earlier worldview. Here I of course refer to Francis Bacon's and Rene Descartes' explicit rejection of the view of the study of nature found in Aristotle. One of the primary aims of those founders of modern natural...

Portage: A Family, A Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life by Sue Leaf

Reviewed by: Portage: A Family, A Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life by Sue Leaf Kevin Koch Sue Leaf, Portage: A Family, A Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 249 pp. $16.95. Every once in a while, you encounter a book seemingly written for yourself. And maybe even about yourself. I frequently felt as if I were looking in a mirror while reading Sue Leaf’s delightful nature memoir, Portage: A Family, A Canoe, and the Search for the Good Life. [End Page 85] Perhaps it was her three-decades-plus marriage to her husband Tom, with many of their best times spent outdoors in a canoe. My wife and I have tallied just a few less than the author, and we too head to water, woods, or cycling roads as often as possible. Maybe it was the four kids they brought along on outings (including Mother’s and Father’s Days . . . parents choose!). For us it was three. Definitely it was the seventeen-foot, green, Old Town Penobscot canoe. They must have bought the one next to ours. And shuttling from the canoe back to the car by bicycle—done that, too. True, Leaf and her spouse’s portage-laden canoe journeys—through the Upper Midwest (another similarity), the Boundary Waters and Great Lakes, and occasional outlier trips to places like Montana, Ontario, and Louisiana—have been far more ambitious than the local floats my wife and I have undertaken. Yet the book is no less relatable, even to those who have never dipped a paddle. For Sue Leaf and her husband are, like most of us, working people with busy lives. They head off once each year, more or less, for a week-long canoe trip involving camping, portaging, and minimalist living. Portage chronicles the almost-annual ventures in semi-independent essays ranging from their dating days, to their first and successive forays with children, to their first voyages into empty-nester waters. In the hands of a less-skilled author, it could become a clichéd trope that canoeing offers lessons about life. But while the essays of Portage often do open up to universal reflections, they are organically connected to their preceding narratives and uniquely insightful. Canoeing with children, for example, “reinforced in our children less tangible ideas: that it’s good to roll with the punches and learn how to execute plan B, for there is always a need for a plan B.” If the kids complained, they were plied with three questions: Are you warm? Are you dry? Are you fed? “If the answer is ‘yes’ to all of them, a camper is in a good place.” There are mishaps to learn from. After an ill-fated route through rapids, “the gash on the hull of the Old Town remains, reminding me to choose wisely.” (Another glance in the mirror: our Old Town likewise sports an accusing gash from an ill-executed maneuver.) Leaf and her spouse all too soon paddle into middle age. On a more somber note, Leaf explores Native American traditions that present the canoe as a liminal boat that “would carry us to our new life.” More cheerfully, sans children to instruct in the ways of the wild, they occasionally opt for an easier float, even allowing for the luxury of a cooler, which previously [End Page 86] would have been too heavy and bothersome to carry: “Hey, we’re empty nesters! Approaching decrepitude! We’re entitled to cold beer in camp!” But more than what we learn is what we see, hear, and encounter. I’ve paddled only once in the Boundary Waters, and through Leaf’s accounts I can feel once again the weight of a canoe on my shoulders during a long portage, can see the copper-colored, tannin-tinted clarity of frigid lake waters, and must whisk away pesky mosquitoes. I’ve never paddled in the south or in Canada, but I can visualize their daughter’s eagerness to paddle “toward one floating ‘log’ after another” in search of an elusive Louisiana alligator, and can ponder Ontario’s Nellie Lake with its eerie deep clarity...

Mania for Freedom: American Literatures of Enthusiasm from the Revolution to the Civil War by John Mac Kilgore

Reviewed by: Mania for Freedom: American Literatures of Enthusiasm from the Revolution to the Civil War by John Mac Kilgore Jon Mee (bio) Mania for Freedom: American Literatures of Enthusiasm from the Revolution to the Civil War john mac kilgore Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016 300 pp. They who have made but superficial studies in the Natural History of the human mind, have been taught to look on religious opinions as the only cause of enthusiastick zeal, and sectarian propagation. But there is no doctrine whatever, on which men can warm, which is not capable of the very same effect. The social nature of man impels him to propagate his kind. The passions give zeal and vehemence. The whole man moves under the discipline of his opinions. Although he doesn't quote it directly, John Mac Kilgore's account of American literatures of enthusiasm from the Revolution to the Civil War accords with Edmund Burke's statement from the First Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796). Mac Kilgore is very well aware of the contribution made by Burke to the refreighting of the idea of enthusiasm in the age of democratic revolutions: the period, as he sees it, when the term was regularly used—whether positively or, like Burke, negatively—to describe the "mania for freedom" of his title. Methodologically, the difficulty of enthusiasm is that it is more often a [End Page 606] term of attribution than self-description. The discourse on enthusiasm is everywhere in this period and earlier, at least from the English Civil War, and Mac Kilgore is very well read in its archive on both sides of the Atlantic. The problem is identifying what is the discourse of enthusiasm, especially when those accused of it were often not always keen on the identification. Mac Kilgore makes a genuine contribution to recent studies on enthusiasm, a subject that has become conspicuous in several fields over the last two decades, by looking at its distinctive contribution to American literature and politics. He proceeds with a particular definition of enthusiasm, effectively derived from hostile accounts of an insurrectionary tradition at odds with the conservative narrative of the prudence of the American Revolution. His method is to use the term to find a positive continuity between groups often accused of enthusiasm: "commoners, slaves, Native Americans, women, abolitionists—who activated dissent against institutional tyranny and forged transnational, counternational, or antinationalistic political affiliations in the process" (1). Primarily concerned with the literary dimension of this American tradition, he more specifically identifies "literatures of enthusiasm" as "those texts that transform writing into a species or inciter of democratic revival and revolt" (1). The term is given a particularly American purchase through its complex relationship with the foundation of the United States. Exploiting recent theoretical writing on "constituent power," mostly indebted to Antonio Negri, Mac Kilgore sees the tradition as one that refuses to cede that constituent power to the state and continually insists on the originary power of "the people" to assert its authority. Of course, one might say that tradition persists in some of the populism, especially in its anticonstitutional formations, of the Right that has played a part in recent American politics, most obviously in last November's election result, an event horizon perhaps unforeseen when this book was written. On the other hand, Mac Kilgore's identification of constituent power with enthusiasm raises questions of organization, practical politics, and forms of progressivism whose dreams of revolutionary intervention have made no claim to inspiration or any kind of prophetic tradition. Have forms of American insurgency existed beyond Mac Kilgore's enthusiastic tradition? Do they still? Mac Kilgore's primary concern is with the way normative constructions of the sphere of politics have tended to distance it from enthusiasm because of the assumption that emotion is primarily a subjective form of experience. [End Page 607] Mania for Freedom invokes instead the work of Brian Massumi and others for whom "affect" (as opposed to "emotion") summons "exteriorized, intercorporeal, and pre-personal intensity or contact that has to do with relations exceeding but including the self" (19). Within the larger history of the term, Mac Kilgore writes intelligently of the...

The Rise of Trump and the Death of Civility

According to supporters and opponents alike, Donald Trump has been an unconventional candidate and president. In this paper, I evaluate the relationship between Trump’s unconventional behavior and the requirements of civility. I provide a definition of civility, and I explain why it makes sense to relate Trump’s actions to civil norms. I then discuss how civility is enacted, I examine criticisms of civility’s triviality, and I explore the ways in which civility may repress dissent and maintain hierarchy. Although I consider the degree to which Trump’s actions are strategic, I ultimately argue that Trump’s incivilities are an effort to initiate a revolution in manners. In undertaking this effort, Trump is participating in a longstanding American tradition of determining standards of appropriate conduct through political conflict.

Kathy Knapp, American Unexceptionalism. The Everyman and the Suburban Novel after 9/11

In American Unexceptionalism. The Everyman and the Suburban Novel After 9/11, Kathy Knapp analyzes the way many American writers have been revisiting (and reviving, she contends) a most American tradition, suburban literature, in the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers. In her long, contextualizing introduction, Knapp notes that 50% of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks were from the suburbs (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut), and that 75% of them were white middle-class men,...

A NEW FUNCTION OF PRISON INDUSTRY AND PRIVATE PRISONS IN DEVELOPED COUNTRIES, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF THEIR IMPLEMENTATION IN THE REPUBLIC OF SERBIA

In the 1990s, various countries had a different approach to the problems related to prisoners’ labor. In the United States, the concept of prison labor could survive only in such developed states as New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts which could cope with the burden of keeping unproductive prisons. Under the impact of the penal reform and upon the adoption of new penal legislation in these states, the old American tradition of labor prisons gave way to a new standard which implied that convicted offenders had to learn different crafts while in prison but they were excluded from the public labor market when at large. The new industrial program, which was thus engendered, has significantly contributed to spreading the reformist functions of prison labor. Organized prison labor had always been strongly supported by penal reformers in the north of the United States but, in the mid-1980s, as the penal reformers moved away from that part of the United States, the concept of organized prison labor no longer had a significant political and legislative impact. The influence of penal reformers and the idea of instituting convict labor (but without competition in the labor market) had a strong influence on government politicians both at the federal and state government levels. The reformers endeavored to ensure the prisoners’ welfare and enable all prisoners to work and participate in the labor market as competitive workforce, both by leasing their labor and through the sale of final products on the free market.

The Art of Life, the Dance of Poetry: Gender, Experiment and Experience in Mina Loy and Diane di Prima

Mina Loy and Diane di Prima’s experimental poetic contributions to their early “situational avant-gardes” (the 1910s Modernists and late 1950s Beats in New York) vindicated the relation of gender and experiment within their countercultural movements, redefining these groups’ poetic and ideological tenets. Firstly, I will connect and contextualize these two poets as part of American feminist avant-garde tradition. Then, I will study their early poetry’s specificities and their common particularity: a gendered approach to the interconnectivity between experiment and experience. The article develops the idea that Loy and di Prima’s “motional” poetics of alternate forces of expression and linguistic experimentation is a dynamic materialization of the ambivalence involved in their bodily and spatial experiences of inclusion and exclusion as bohemian women poets in their urban environment and their artistic communities. The last section theorizes the way these embodied positionalities, and the continuum formed by environment, space, body and language, interrelate with Loy and di Prima’s feminist motional avant-garde poetics based on material feminist philosophies and postmodern and experimental literary critics’ views.

Republic or empire: the genealogy of the anti-imperial tradition in US politics

This article analyzes an alternative perspective on the relationship between the USA and the concept of empire. We should note that another rich vein of policy dissent, the anti-imperial tradition, has long existed in American history. A republican tension between ‘empire’ and ‘republic’ has formed the core problematique of American political thought from the beginning. Furthermore, this enigma has haunted US politics along its trajectory, even though James Madison tried to invent a federalist solution to the ancient dilemma of liberty and power. Therefore, I will explore the lineage of the American tradition of anti-imperialism and its foreign policy manifestations, stretching back from the founding era to the contemporary world by re-reading American political development through the lens of republican security theory. I hope that such exercise will shed light on the future direction of US grand strategy in our age of the American hegemonic decline.

The Historical Consciousness and the Guilty Conscience in Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife

In The Antelope Wife, Louise Erdrich presents us with her notions of historical consciousness ― focused on a certain massacre and some other conflicting factors in connection with Native Americans and whites. The massacre reminds us of the Wounded Knee Massacre, one of the most decisive and fatal incidents in American history. However, Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian, like other intellectuals, intentionally ignores the massacre to build American history progress without Native Americans. In The Antelope Wife, Erdrich calls for the recognition of whites’ conscience through the fictional character, Scranton Roy. Even though he commits suicide after his spiritual journey in order to obtain forgiveness and reconciliation, his guilt ridden conscience gets rest at last. And his son, Augustus Roy, as a white man, lives with Native Americans, which enables him to witness the oppressed Native Americans and various, absurd government policies. Augustus’s marriage to a Native American woman, a relative of an old woman who was killed by Scranton Roy, and the relationships with their descendants, including Sweetheart Calico, Klaus’s Antelope Wife, prove the interconnectedness of history. Erdrich asks the reader to gain a new historical consciousness through Rozin’s acknowledgment of Native American tradition and culture.