Cultural Historicism Research Articles

IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, FOUCAULDIAN ASCENDANCY ON THE HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL MATERIALISM MOVEMENTS

Purpose of the study: This paper analyses the prominent movements that have been significantly influenced by Foucauldian conceptions particularly power relations and knowledge. This paper focuses on two critical movements namely Historical movement and Cultural materialism movement.
 Methodology: This is a review paper and largely based on secondary data analysis. Foucault's ideas influenced some movements such as New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. I will discuss how Foucault was inspired and influenced by some thinkers like Nietzsche. So, the present appears to be the issue to be studied historically. This point of view led to the rise of some movements, which are focusing on present issues and problems.
 Main Findings: The current study shows firstly that the German philosopher Michel Foucault has a great influence on many literary movements particular the new one such as Cultural materialism and new Historicism and so on. Secondly, it appears Foucault's inspiration by some thinkers and philosophers like Louis Althusser, Nietzsche, and Machiavelli.
 Applications of this study: Foucault has an impact on the other movements and thinkers in which many types of research in contemporary age deal with issues that Foucault involves in his works, such as social, political and economic issues. One of the materials that Foucault focusing it, the significance of past and relate to the present.
 Novelty/Originality of this study: The reader can feel the obvious influence of Michel's writings through a variety of features of Althusser and Nietzsche particularly Foucault regarded Nietzsche's idea as the departure point for his power theory.

CULTURAL NATIONALISM OR ESCAPIST IDEALISM: OKOT P’BITEK’S SONG OF LAWINO AND SONG OF OCOL

This article seeks to demonstrate that cultural nationalism has been a significant ideological force in African literary writings in general and poetry in particular. It endorses a distinctive communitarian vision of the nation and has repeatedly been espoused by many a literary academic as a remarkable effort towards the re-establishment of coherence and integrity in African traditional life and institutions. While recognizing the beauty of traditional life, this approach turns a blind eye to the endemic challenges that these nations are grappling with. Taking Okot’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol as the literary points of reference, I have delineated the character of cultural nationalism, the leadership role of the colonized intellectual, and its recurring emergence in alternation with escapist idealism. Using Fanonian theory, I have argued that rather than idolize the past in what may be largely interpreted as idealist escapism, Okot’s intent in the two poems selected for this study is to offer a truthful, accurate and objective representation of the real African world. He divorces his poems, Sengorian and Negritudist as they may seem, from rigid cultural historicism and espouses the marginalized perspective that Africa’s culture is a product of shared heritage and the desire for liberation should not blind us to the dynamism of our culture and the reality that neocolonialism has ushered in a new political culture that should worry us more than the coloniser’s. It is not enough for us to look only backwards in our quest for cultural revolution.

History’s Impasse: Radical Historiography, Leftist Elites, and the Anthropology of Historicism in Southern France

The “historic turn” marked a new era of convergence between anthropology and history. However, recent research proposes that this anthrohistorical field is informed by a latent cultural historicism...

National-Regional Component in the Training of Artists of Decorative-Applied Art

The article considers the regionalization of education as an important condition for preservation and development of ethnocultural artistic traditions. Regional culture is understood to mean a world of material and spiritual elements that make up being of particular region inhabitants with their constituent parts such as history, religion, folklore, and traditional applied art. The authors emphasize special role of culture and art universities in the process of humanizing art education. The article draws attention to the problem of identity in the modern global world and the importance of introducing the values of the past through the knowledge of the region’s cultural heritage to the modern person. In this context, the authors emphasize the importance of traditional folk art as an area of self-determination and human identity.The article proposes a set of special tasks for inoculation of a regional component in the educational process. The main methodological task is the formation of national historical self-awareness, group and individual self-identification, patriotism through the acquisition of cultural samples by their mastering in the process of creative activity and the further development of traditional arts and crafts in the new conditions of cultural existence.The article concludes the renewal of the content of teaching arts and crafts on the basis of its enrichment by studying various national cultures taking into account regional peculiarities becomes the most important thing at the present stage. The training of future artists of decorative and applied art should be based on the principles of cultural appropriateness, historicism, creative development and socialization, which presuppose students’ development in the process of nonmaterial culture learning

Perception Operation in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

Perception Operation in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar Abstract Contemporary Shakespeare studies have gained a new perspective and created an unprecedented synergy in dramatic criticism with the introduction of Cultural Materialism and New Historicism as critical theories. Within the contexts set by New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, Shakespeare's plays, through polyphonic discourses and dialogues, create environments constructed in the relationships of his characters with one another and with the society on the basis of political and ideological considerations. In Shakespeare's theatrical environments, his characters play their political and ideological roles in a way similar to what happens in the real world politics. In such political and ideological environments, analysing polyphonic discourses and dialogues, critical readers can come up with some political and ideological concepts to analyse and explain the ways things happen and the reasons for why they happen. This study argues that one of these concepts is perception operation/management which Shakespeare uses in Julius Caesar as a means of political and ideological propaganda in the same way as is used in the contemporary real world, which creates a close association between the play's original context and contemporary political context through contemporary interpretations. Hence, this study deals with the role of perception operation/management in Brutus' manipulating attempts at political resistance to Julius Caesar's ruling, which paved the way for Caesar's assassination.

Imperial historicism and American military rule in the Philippines' Muslim south

AbstractWhen American imperialists seized the Philippines at the dawning of the twentieth century, their guiding philosophy was predicated upon broadly conceived notions of cultural and political historicism. The unwavering self-assurance required to rule over millions of unfamiliar imperial subjects derived its potency from an unquestioned panoptic view of history. This epistemological tool of imperialism found an especially unique and fascinating expression in the United States' politico-military rule over Filipino Muslims. This article explores the creation and processes of imperial taxonomy among Moro populations while accounting for a number of disturbing disruptions and anomalies in the Americans' historical narrative (such as slavery and Islamic civilisation) that threatened to unravel the tightly circumscribed concept of a uniform and interpretable progressive transitional past. It also examines the ways in which American imperialists accounted for these anomalies, and manipulated their own interpretations of the past and the present to maintain the integrity of their philosophical imperial foundations.

Labors of imagination: aesthetics and political economy from Kant to Althusser

This book is a major new study of the doctrines of productivity and interest in Romanticism and classical political economy. The author argues that the widespread contemporary embrace of cultural historicism and the rejection of nineteenth-century conceptions of agency have hindered our study of aesthetics and politics. Focusing on the difficulty of coordinating paradigms of intellectual and material labor, Mieszkowski shows that the relationship between the imagination and practical reason is crucial to debates about language and ideology.From the Romantics to Poe and Kafka, writers who explore Kant's claim that poetry sets the imagination freediscover that the representational and performative powers of language cannot be explained as the products of a self-governing dynamic, whether formal or material. A discourse that neither reflects nor prescribes the values of its society, literature proves to be a uniquely autonomous praxis because it undermines our reliance on the concept of interest as the foundation of self-expression or self-determination. Far from compromising its political significance, this turns literature into the condition of possibility of freedom. For Smith, Bentham, and Marx, the limits of self-rule as a model of agency prompt a similar rethinking of the relationship between language and politics. Their conception of a linguistic labor that informs material praxis is incompatible with the liberal ideal of individualism. In the final analysis, their work invites us to think about social conflicts not as clashes between competing interests, but as a struggle to distinguish human from linguistic imperatives.

‘Three pounds and fifteen shillings; the inconsiderable salary of Judas’: seventeenth‐century exegesis, cultural historiography and Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica

This essay explores how early modern ideas of law and custom, focusing intensely on the Bible, became increasingly aware of the shifting meaning of biblical law codes over Old and New Testament time and the meanings encoded in biblical actions. It traces the emergence of the idea over the course of the early modern era that right interpretation of the Bible demanded a significant historical sensibility. This exegetical imperative took on particular significance in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, in response to a proliferation of non‐learned interpretation. Distinguishing this from later forms of historical criticism, the essay traces how the scriptures became in turn, a site for a cultural historicism that endowed the early modern Bible with a generative ability to produce copious commentary on the most insignificant curiosa, from the legal basis of biblical conduct to the cultural meanings of plants and natural history in the Bible. Looking primarily at Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) and its extensive engagement with biblical curiosa, the essay contextualizes Browne's scriptural exegesis within the work of contemporary legal‐scriptural theorists including John Selden, Thomas Fuller and Henry Hammond.

The Methodology of the Modernists: Process in American Protestantism

Scholarship on early-twentieth-century American Protestant modernism appears to have arrived at an impasse. Although scholars continue to explore the biographical contours of modernist individuals, and theologians still review the capacity of modernist theologies, the body of analytical scholarship on the “modernist impulse” has failed to keep apace with the glut of materials addressing its fraternal twin, fundamentalism. Published in 1976, William Hutchison'sThe Modernist Impulse in American Protestantismremains the last significant historical commentary on the cultural and intellectual dynamics of Protestant modernism. In that masterful exegesis, Hutchison supplied the classic definition of this impulse, arguing that despite the diversity of its participants and complexity of their thought, the modernist movement in America could be accurately summarized as a shared commitment to cultural adaptation, God's immanent role in human development, and a postmillennial progressivism. While this tripartite formulation still provides the authoritative elucidation of early-twentieth-century Protestant thought, a reappraisal of the modernist canon reveals that Christian liberals not only were invested in theological overhaul and intellectual malleability, but also persistently specified an elaborate methodological structure for belief. In works such as Minot Savage'sJesus and Modern Life(1898), Margaret Benson'sThe Venture of Rational Faith(1908), Douglas Clyde Macintosh'sTheology as an Empirical Science(1919), J. Macbride Sterrett'sModernism in Religion(1922), and Henry Nelson Wieman'sThe Wrestle of Religion with Truth(1927), seminarians and ministers offered detailed descriptions of how Protestants should think in the modern era. These were not expansive tracts bent on exploring the fluid boundaries of faith in a plural culture; rather, these were precise, pointed exhortations on the virtue of scrupulous historical research, scriptural comparison, and relentless self-examination. Rather than continue to translate Protestant modernism as cultural acquiescence and enthusiastic historicism, this essay suggests that a recalibrated portrait of this movement is needed.

Subjectivity and Women's Poetry in Early Modern England: 'Why on the ridge should she desire to go?' (review)

214 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) describes Siena as characterised by social cohesion, a sharing of values between painters and patrons, and remarkable cultural homogeneity. He has not found division because he has not looked for it by employing the neo-Marxist analytical terms of hegemony, counter-hegemony, and ideology. The entire purpose of the close control over art exercised by the Sienese state was to project an image of good government and social cohesion. That does not mean it was the actual state, and you would need to look to evidence outside of visual art to test whether it was. This argumentation will possibly form part of the third and final volume. Max Staples School of Humanities Charles Sturt University McGrath, Lynette, Subjectivity and Women’s Poetry in Early Modern England: ‘Why on the ridge should she desire to go?’, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002; cloth; pp. x, 295; RRP £45.00; ISBN 075460585X. This analysis of the construction of subjectivity through the construction of texts focuses on three women writing between the mid sixteenth and the mid seventeenth century: Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Cary and Aemilia Lanyer. McGrath confesses to an ‘eclectic’ approach in reconstructing the Foucauldian ‘practices of the self’, placing herself, like her subjects, on a theoretical margin between cultural and post-structuralist feminism. Nevertheless, the book presents us with a unified exploration of some diverse texts, using cultural historicism to embed these writers in their socio-literary context and through a close analysis of selected writings using the frame of contemporary psychoanalytic theory. The book itself is divided into two equal sections. The first three chapters explore the background of women as producers and consumers of texts and their strategies for avoiding and subverting the gendered linguistic and cultural constraints attached to these activities. The following three chapters provide detailed explication of some of the poetry and drama written and published by three women who are recently becoming less marginalised in Early Modern studies. In a period crowded with writers who have been neglected due to the canonicity of Milton and Marvell, women have been gradually reinstated, if somewhat overshadowed by the promotion of Katherine Philips. In the last decade, however, the three writers chosen by McGrath have increasingly Reviews 215 Parergon 20.2 (2003) received critical attention in anthologies, at conferences, and can even be found on the useful website run by the University of Pennsylvania, ‘Voice of the Shuttle’. McGrath’s scholarly and thorough examination of the texts and the conditions of their production is therefore timely. The book is lavishly annotated and draws on a variety of philosophical and historical writings from a wide spectrum of writers. Renaissance conduct manuals (always a good source of indignation) augment some well-chosen black and white illustrations. The chapters are broken up into sections of five or six pages which makes this a very easy study to browse in. The content of the chapters dealing with individual writers, however, presumes some knowledge of their work and its reception. For a reader unfamiliar with Whitney, for instance, some early directions about her work and where it can currently be found would have been helpful especially as lengthy quotations from the poetry have not been included. McGrath also glosses over the paucity of information about Whitney’s circumstances such as her possible imprisonment. Whitney’s literary relationships are, however, used to deepen the analysis of her poetry, and to show how she responded to the dominance of male literary discourse. As she was an aristocrat, Elizabeth Cary’s life is better documented and there is more material on which to develop a feminist reading. The discourse of marriage revealed in her play, Mariam, is presented from multiple points of view, but one senses a determination to fashion Cary as writer who can subvert conventions and restrictions, in order to fashion her own subjectivity. The fate of women’s published material in the marketplace and on the stage receives less attention here, where I expected it, than in the introductory chapters. McGrath focuses not only on the heroine of Cary’s drama, Mariam, but also treats Cary’s own appearance in the biography written by one of her daughters, The Lady...

New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism

Part 1 Rethinking literary history: Michel Foucault - archaeology, genealogy and power culture and interpretation - anthropology, ethnography and understanding Pierre Bourdieu - habitus, representation and symbolic exchange Michel de Certeau - oppositional practices and heterologies. Part 2 Cultural materialism and new historicism: Raymond Williams and cultural materialism ideology and hegemony - Althusser, Macherey and Gramsci contemporary cultural materialism - subjectivity, desire and transgression Stephen Greenblatt and new historicism conclusion - new historicism and contemporary criticism.

Aplicación de las técnicas geoarqueológicas en el estudio del proceso histórico entre el V y III milenios a.n.e. en la comarca de la Janda (Cádiz)

Studies of the prehistory of the area of La Janda (province of Cadiz) were carried out at the beginning of this century from the perspective of Cultural Historicism. Our group has done systematic archaeological surveys and rescue excavations during this decade, with the aim of studying the historical process of the hunter-gatherer, tribal and early class societies that lived in the Atlantic Band of Cadiz. The application of geoarchaeological and archaeometric techniques to the study of the archaeological products and the mineralogical and petrological analyses of the raw materials, as well as the geological ones, allow us to glimpse interesting aspects about the historical and economic process of these social formations.

Faulkner, Hemingway, et al.: The Emersonian Test of American Authorship

It is impossible to be a great Southern writer and a great American one, too; for very essence of America is a natural, victorious hypervisuality which has superseded hyperverbal pathology and failure of South. Here, Faulkner may be a greater writer or word-smith than Hemingway; but Hemingway will forever remind us of Faulkner's failure to transcend Southern lyricism and an aristocratic, Old-World diction for democratic prose-imagism of New-World aesthetics and perception. Indeed, Civil War, like Revolutionary War, was fought for a good deal more than political, economic and social self-determination. Emerson said it best in his early essay, American Scholar, when he declared we would listen no more to courtly muses of Europe (79, italics mine) because our unique manifest destiny was eye, not ear. In his journals, he simply noted: That which others hear, I (7:152, italics mine). And some half-century before, Thomas Paine had already put matter of our common sense thus: Independence is only bond that can tie and keep us together. We shall then see our object, and our ears shall be legally shut against schemes of an intriguing, as well as a cruel enemy. (Common 91, italics mine) Indeed, as a host of critics from Paine to Emerson to Tocqueville and D. H. Lawrence had quickly grasped, America thinks and acts upon a different systemwhat Tocqueville called a new science for a world: Americans like to discern object which engages their attention with extreme clearness...to view it more closely in broad light of day.... Hence, Americans have no need to draw philosophical method out of books, having found it within themselves. (2: 4, 5) The freedom to democratically see for oneself, without blinders of imported aesthetics or dependence upon a failed cultural historicism, is sine qua non of American authorship. Hemingway reaches for it; Faulkner doesn't. For Faulkner, galling realization that he could never embrace Yankee or wider American aesthetics no doubt made him epitome of Southern elegiac authorship. Faulkner thus notes same inconceivable difference in being that D. H. Lawrence recognized between Old World and New in his Studies in Classic American Literature. From North, outland, there looked down upon him countless row on row of faces whch resembled his face and spoke same language he spoke yet between whom and him there was no longer any real kinship and soon there would not even be any contact since very mutual words they used would no longer have same significance and soon after this would be gone because they would be too far assunder even to hear one another. (Intruder in Dust 243-44) As we shall now see, on a variety of comparative topics such as American nature, history, religion and human gender, Faulkner solves his personal and authorial crises by reliance upon ear or Wordsworthian Power of Sound, whereas Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Vonnegut, Updike and even Flannery O'Connor have come to terms with what Emerson, above, called our genius, with tyrannous eye. Brooks, Lewis and Warren, in their anthology, American Literature: The Makers and Making, have denominated Emerson as somehow, indispensable figure in American literary history (1: 670); and we now know this to be true in Emerson's ocular Americanhood: The eye is final; what it tells us is last stroke of nature. Beyond color we cannot go. (Journals 14: 166, italics mine) Carl Sandburg simply called this hypervisuality victorious Yankee colors: The fence zigzags and morning glory staggers on a path of sea-blue, sky-blue, Gettysburg Union blue. (66) Indeed, as we begin our discussion of Faulkner's innate and obsessive Southern lyricism-what he calls the thunder and music of prose (Interview 76)we should use as touchstones two great climaxes of Light in August and The Sound and Fury, moments so excruciatingly relevant for Faulkner that he even chose identical words to express themboth Joe Christmas's aural monument to Southern racial pathos and tragedy-the siren toward its unbelievable crescendo (Light 440)-and Benjy's Southern utter hiatus of familial and cultural failure, Ben's voice mounting toward its unbelievable crescendo. …

:Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts Through Cultural Historicism

This text presents the theme of cultural historicism. It examines Tudor-Stuart representations of surveillance and the cultural oversight of the sexual body as revealed in Elizabethan-Jacobean drama to bring together two discourses that have not been joined before.

Reading Tudor-Stuart texts through cultural historicism

Reading Tudor-Stuart texts through cultural historicism

Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts Through Cultural Historicism.

Journal Article Albert H. Tricomi. Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts Through Cultural Historicism. Get access Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts Through Cultural Historicism. By Albert H. Tricomi. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. Pp. xii + 201. $39.95 cloth. William W. E. Slights William W. E. Slights Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 48, Issue 3, Fall 1997, Pages 369–371, https://doi.org/10.2307/2871036 Published: 01 October 1997

REDISCOVERING HEGEL: THE ‘NEW HISTORICISM’ IN ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT STUDIES

This paper advances the argument that a particular form of culturally, rather than materialistically, based historicism dominated organization and management studies in the 1980s. the 1970s were dominated by a materialistically based form of historicism in which economic, technological and organizational imperatives were deemed to drive the evolutionary dynamics, trajectories and outcomes of institutional and organizational transformation. In sharp contrast, the 1980s witnessed the rise of culturally or ideationally based forms of historicist thought and analysis in which the explanatory and political significance of factors located in a society's or organization's ‘material base’ were substantially downgraded in favour of variables embedded in their ‘ideological superstructures’. the paper traces the emergence, progress and implications of this cultural historicism in relation to four distinct, but interrelated discourses ‐ enterprise, flexibility, quality and human resource management. It also suggests that this analysis raises a number of fundamental theoretical and methodological issues concerned with three different approaches to the study of the interconnections between intellectual and institutional change in ‘late’ or ‘post’‐modern societies ‐ that is, the history of ideas, the sociology of knowledge, and technologies of government. the paper concludes with the argument that each of these broad approaches needs to be brought into clearer theoretical and methodological alignment in order to develop a more subtle and sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of, and elective affinity between, intellectual and institutional change. It also suggests that this need for a clearer theoretical alignment between these three approaches will become particularly pressing in the 1990s as an alternative discourse of citizenship emerges to challenge the ideological hegemony of the discourse of enterprise with its roots in cultural historicism.

A Traveller's Guide to Putnam's “Narrow Path”

It is now over 15 years since Hilary Putnam first urged that we take the “narrow path” of internal realism as a way of navigating between “the swamps of metaphysics and the quicksands of cultural relativism and historicism” (1983, p. 226). In the opening lines of the Preface toRealism with a Human Face, a collection of Putnam's recent papers edited by James Conant, Putnam reaffirms his allegiance to this narrow path, unmoved by Realist murmurings from the swamps and laconic Rortian suggestions that only the quicksands are a proper metaphilosophical abode for those willing to confront our lack of epistemological and metaphysical foundations. If there are changes to be discerned in these writings, Putnam avers, they pertain only to the burden allotted to different considerations in the overall economy of his argument: “It might be said that the difference between the present volume and my work prior toThe Many Faces of Realismis a shift in emphasis: a shift from emphasizing model-theoretic arguments against metaphysical realism to emphasizing conceptual relativity” (p. xi).

Introduction

IntroductionSpecial Cluster: New American Studies in Science and Technology: Essays in Cultural Historicism Richard Grusin (bio) As it completes its third year of publication, Configurations is still in some senses defining what it means to be “a journal of literature, science, and technology.” In the very first essay of the journal’s very first issue, Joseph Rouse provides a cogent definition of the practice of “cultural studies of scientific knowledge,” which he situates in opposition both to “postpositivist history and philosophy of science” and to the “social constructivism” of “the Edinburgh ‘strong programme,’ the Bath constructivist-relativist approach, applications of discourse analysis to science, and ethnographic laboratory studies.” 1 Despite the inaugural or originary force of this paper’s placement, however, it is not at all clear that Configurations has restricted itself to work in that (inter)discipline. Nor is it clear that the three essays in this cluster would fall under Rouse’s rubric of “cultural studies of scientific knowledge.” In assembling this cluster, then, my hope has been in part that these papers would contribute to and help expand the ongoing definition of what it means for Configurations to call itself “a journal of literature, science, and technology.” Perhaps the most obvious way in which these essays can contribute to the definition of the journal’s identity is in their shared focus on the role of science and technology in the cultural construction of the idea of America in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. Although Configurations has published special [End Page 349] issues on the cultural construction of Russia or of cyberspace, this cluster represents its first coordinated effort to focus on America. For most of the journal’s first three years, the idea of America has remained unspoken, despite the fact that Configurations is basically an American journal: edited by American academics, and published by an American academic press, for an audience made up mostly of Americans. Americanness has been, in some sense, an unmarked term in much of the journal’s discussion of science and technology—even functioning as a kind of absent or unseen other in the special issue on “Communities of Science and Culture in Russian Science Studies.” These papers will, I hope, initiate the discussion of the idea of America in Configurations—that is, of how the idea of America both defines and is defined by the network of relations among literature, science, and technology. Less obvious than their shared focus on American science, technology, and culture are the methodological or theoretical affinities among the three essays. All three authors were trained at Berkeley in the late seventies and early eighties, during the emergence of the new historicism in Renaissance and American literary studies. “New historicism” has been defined in opposition to an older historicism in which history was seen as a neutral or unproblematic context against which to interpret literary texts. Unlike this older historicism, new historicism extended to history the poststructuralist axiom that everything is a text; consequently, it turned to history, not as a source of facts or events or statistics, but as a source of textual analogues to the literary texts that were their primary focus. In so doing, new historicism also recognized that literature itself was historically constructed—that is, that it was the product of economic, political, and social (i.e., of ideological) practices. Consequently, literature was seen as a contested site, an arena where the ideological conflicts of history were played out. As second-generation new historicists, each of the authors can be said to practice what I would like to call “cultural historicism.” Unlike much first-generation new historicism, in which the literary was singled out as a privileged (if still ideologically and culturally constructed) site of analysis, each of these three papers treats the literary as one cultural discourse among others. The aim of these essays in cultural historicism, then, is not to focus primarily on the ways in which literature plays out the cultural and ideological conflicts of history. Rather, each focuses on the way in which certain myths of American cultural origin are played out across a number of diverse and heterogeneous discourses and technologies of representation...

National Parks: The American Experience by Alfred Runte

340 Western American Literature Nelson’s tough-minded examination of life as it is in the West as it is will not suit the palates of those who prefer life as they wish it had been in the West that never was. Those with more adventurous tastes will find it heady stuff indeed. JAMES K. FOLSOM The University of Colorado, Boulder National Parks: The American Experience. By Alfred Runte. (Lincoln: Uni­ versity of Nebraska Press, 1979. xiv 4- 240 pages, $16.50.) There are ample ironies and intelligent insights even in Runte’s title, for the many conflicts over land use he discusses, coupled with several styles of popular historical consciousness, can certainly be defined as “the American experience.” The parks embody the myth that we are a “wondrous” people in a “wondrous” land (“scenic nationalism”), yet they also embody the cultural conflict between belief in “the sanctity of private property” and the conviction “that no individual had the right to own a national monument.” The tensions between these oppositions are further complicated by the shifts in the argument of what a “park” is or ought to be, and one of Runte’s central stories is to trace the national park idea at several cultural levels as it moves from a nineteenth-century preoccupation with “panorama” to the 1960s’ conception of “ecosystem.” The chronological narration of how our national parks emerged as cul­ tural entities allows Runte to discuss the criss-crossed (or maybe cross-eyed) function of visualization as a mass mediation in national life. Runte’s contri­ bution to the literature of land, eye, and expansionism is to detail concretely what happened to land and how metaphorical and ideological representations acted as historical forces in the creation of both real estate and a geo-centered cultural identity self-consciously and (later) pridefully different from Eur­ ope’s. Runte’s first three chapters link the rise of mass media to the operations of an iconography of landscape ideologically inseparable from the rise of “scenic nationalism.” By mid-century, we recall, the United States acquired the Rockies, Texas, the Southwest, California, and the Pacific slope, an awe­ somely compressed expansion and one making the East “the audience to frontier events.” In the pages of the New York Tribune Greeley intoned typologically that the redwoods were big “when David danced before the ark,” and in 1865 Bierstadt sold his canvas “The Rocky Mountains” (1863: 6/ x 10') for $25,000 (a record for an American painter) and of course saw his works and those of other artists mass-duplicated as prints, newspaper and Reviews 341 magazine illustrations, and engravings. With the additional publicity of the Washburn Yellowstone articles in Scribner’s, the Hayden Survey of the Yel­ lowstone in the early 1870s, and with the Northern Pacific Railroad’srecogni­ tion that it “would be the sole beneficiary of the tourist traffic” to the northern Rockies, the time for the national park idea was fully coincidental with the materialism and economic structure of the Gilded Age, with the full swelling of “scenic” or “cultural nationalism,” the notion of the rustic “resort,” and with the “concept of useless scenery.” Runte’s remaining chapters frequently use the case study method. The need to preserve Mt. Rainier below timberline, for example, was argued by an elderly John Muir, who saw early on that an icy summit could take care of itself but that the flora and fauna of the lower slopes were in clear and present danger of becoming a wipeout of black stumps. Differences, confron­ tations, and ruptures of all sorts Runte locates finally in two competing economies of meaning — on the one hand, one investing the land with moral values, a surrogate cultural historicism (the Grand Canyon is equal to a European cathedral), and a nationalist sublime (a “suspended” or “primitive America” existing as a “classroom”) ; and on the other, an opposed economy realizing the land’s commodity exchange and use values, its potential as deferred or future payoff, and a nationalist resource much like a bank. Yet another topic this book approaches is the American (but by now global) conversion of directly lived life into a spectacle, which is the domi­ nant...