Modern American Culture Research Articles

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

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

Эссе “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” Д. Ф. Уоллеса как ключ к пониманию американской культуры и общества: анализ основных тем в контексте романов “Infinite Jest” (1996) и “The Pale King” (2011)

The article analyzes the main ideas of the essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (1993) written by the American writer David Foster Wallace (1962–2008). According to scholars and researchers studying the writer’s oeuvre, this essay reflects his worldview and serves as the basis of most of his literary works. In E Unibus Pluram, D. F. Wallace considered the following issues as characterizing modern American culture and society: addictions of American people caused by their loneliness and dissatisfaction with life; consumerism as an unproductive activity; individualism as the embodiment of selfishness and unwillingness to pursue communal well-being; the contradictory nature of freedom and the illusion of choice. In addition, D. F. Wallace examined cynicism and irony of postmodernism cultivated by commercial art that, in turn, distort American writers’ perception of reality: they are basing their works on the fiction presented by television, which they perceive as realistic material. The researchers believe that the analyzed essay largely marked the transition from American postmodernism to metamodernism (the concepts such as ‘New Sincerity’ ‘postirony’, etc. are also used as related or synonymous) in the 20th–21st centuries; Wallace’s statement about the exhaustion of postmodern irony and his call for sincerity are considered to lie at the heart of reflections on the place of the writer in the modern literary context. The issues stated above are discussed in the article in the context of the D. F. Wallace’s magnum opus Infinite Jest (1996) and his unfinished novel The Pale King (2011): it is concluded that they are central to understanding these novels and reveal meanings and ideas conveyed in the texts. This is the novelty of this article: there have been numerous research papers about the personality and works of the author published abroad; however, in Russian literary criticism, these aspects are insufficiently studied or have not been considered yet.

New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture

New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture

20세기 전반기 미국 차 소비 지형의 변화

This study examines the American tea culture and tea consumption patterns in the United States, analyzing development patterns of modern American tea culture, as well as trends and factors influencing tea imports and consumption. First, tea consumption in the United States in the first half of the 20th century increased at the same level or slightly higher than in the previous century despite population growth. Second, tea consumption increased dramatically due to the Prohibition Act in the 1920s and black tea particularly increased rather than green tea as more tea was imported from India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia than from China and Japan due to the influence of the Pacific War and the Korean War in the 1940s and the 1950s respectively. Third, iced tea, which existed before the 20th century, was initially made of green tea but later changed to black tea, and as refrigeration improved, it became a representative American drink. Fourth, tea bags were invented in the previous century for economic feasibility and refine taste at first. Their quickness and convenience stimulated consumer sentiment, and when combined with CTC black tea, they gained an overwhelming advantage in the market. As stated above, American tea culture was still intact even after the 20th century, and it built its own unique tea culture that advanced from the original English tea culture, such as American tea food, informal and entertaining character, iced tea and tea bags.

Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture

When I was a child, mahjong was a game played by some of my mother's friends—ladies who did not have full time jobs and met at each other's houses for afternoon tea. I had never thought about how it came to be a game known and played by suburban white women. Annelise Heinz's use of mahjong as a material cultural lens for American history is ingenious. The game enjoyed a fad in the 1920s and was then revived in the postwar period. How this import that could have fallen away entirely (like so many other 1920s crazes) developed a particular meaning and longevity for different Americans is a fascinating narrative that Heinz explores deftly. The early twentieth century saw the popularization of commercial board games—branded products and games for which one needs a special set. This reflected improvements in manufacturing, greater leisure time, and marketing (and, in some cases, examples of copyright infringement), all of which would come into play when mahjong began to be commercially imported to the United States. As Heinz demonstrates here, the fact that this was a distinctively Chinese game brings a particular layer of Orientalism, as attitudes toward the game changed with the evolving identity of Asian communities within the United States.

Review: Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture, by Annelise Heinz

According to Annelise Heinz, mahjong became a “quintessentially American game” in the twentieth century (p. 3). This is a bold claim and I would wager that many Chinese and Chinese Americans may disagree or, if not, be quite surprised. Nevertheless, Heinz’s study of mahjong in the United States is bold, ambitious, and stunningly detailed. The book is itself the archive of mahjong: a collection of information from newspapers, photographs, diaries, sociological writings, paintings, and many interviews with players, teachers, and marketers. Drawing together a picture of mahjong consumerism and production in China and the United States, most fascinating is Heinz’s study of the mahjong players: Chinese, Chinese American, and Japanese American communities, white Western expats in Shanghai, and Jewish mothers in the United States.Heinz asks a big question: How did mahjong as a game reflect what it meant to be and become “modern”? Heinz’s study contributes to and complicates studies of cultural appropriation and leisure histories. Heinz never uses the phrase cultural appropriation in her book; doing so would be reductive. Instead, Heinz methodically describes the entwined transpacific history of the game, its many different players (Chinese, white women, Jewish American mothers, Airforce wives, Japanese Americans, and Chinese Americans), and its production, marketing, and consumerism in China and the United States, the game’s cultural evolutions, its cross-over appeal, and importantly, the significance that the game had on the formations of race, gender, ethnicity, and national belonging. As Heinz argues, “The history of how mahjong ‘became American’ is also a story of particular communities ‘becoming American’ in the twentieth century” (p. 6).Mahjong helped to redefine and negotiate identities and communities of race, gender, and culture, and in doing so helped shape ideas around what it meant to be modern Americans during different eras. During the 1920s, elite white women donned Chinese costumes, served Asian treats, and played mahjong. Chinese Americans advertised their play of mahjong and used this opportunity to uplift their image in U.S. culture. For second generation Chinese Americans, playing mahjong gave them access to a culture and an identity that was specifically Chinese but also American. Japanese Americans also played mahjong while interned in the Japanese American concentration camps during World War II. There is even a brief mention of elite Black women during the Jazz Age who played mahjong—for these women, the pastime demonstrated their upward mobility as they were able to engage in a game also played by elite white women. During the postwar period, as Jewish Americans became socially and culturally mobile, mahjong play, particularly organized by Jewish American mothers and wives in the suburbs, negotiated gender and class identity as well as their Jewishness and Americanness within a history of U.S. anti-Semitism.You may or may not have a personal interest in mahjong the game; nonetheless, mahjong is both the star and the setting of a compelling study of American modernity during the twentieth century.

Görsellikten Eyleme: John Guare’in Altı Derecelik Ayrılık Oyununda Ekfrasis İzleri

John Guare’s renowned play Six Degrees of Separation (1990) exposes the protagonist Paul’s endeavour to assert his identity and find a place, by creating false identities, in the world of high-class individuals which is bounded by class, race, and sexual orientation. In delineating his journey into modern American culture, John Guare employs Kandinsky’s double-sided painting along with many other artistic devices such as flashbacks, flashforwards, cross-cutting, and different narrative techniques. Kandinsky’s painting, which dominates the stage with its slow movement, mirrors the varied aspects of social life where the characters hold no enduring and steady connection with reality. This painting also projects the emotional and psychological dilemma of the characters in the social life where they lose their sense of humanity and moral ideals. In this respect, this paper intends to explore how Kandinsky’s ideas of art and his double-sided painting constitute the quintessence of the play, reflecting the materialism of decadent contemporary society and its emotional and psychological impacts on the characters.

Sameness in Diversity: Food and Globalization in Modern America

Laresh Jayasanker uses the title Sameness in Diversity to capture what he sees as a central paradox in modern American food culture. U.S. residents today have more food options than at any other moment in the nation's history, but, despite the appearance of abundance, food choices are also constrained in ways invisible to the average consumer. Jayasanker's multifaceted exploration of this tension consists of a brief but persuasive 150 pages and is bolstered by more than one hundred pages of notes and bibliography. The first three chapters focus on the fruit and vegetable trade and on the rise of large supermarkets. Jayasanker carefully describes some of the inner workings of a global supply chain that allows consumers to defy seasonality. However, year-round access to produce has come at a cost to biodiversity as farmers produce highly marketable or government subsidized crops at the expense of others. These products are then...

SciFi Cinema as one of Spatial Localizations of Military Images in American Mass Culture

War is one of the most popular topics in modern mass culture. The author analyzes the features of the perception of war in modern science fiction cinema. The purpose of this article is to analyze the representation of war in American science fiction as a form of historical memory in mass culture. The author uses inventionism methods to analyze the images of war in the film production of mass culture as “invented traditions” of the consumer society. The range of perception of war and military experience in popular culture is analyzed. Modern global film industry and national film industries regularly address military themes in the world or national contexts, producing films that actualize military experience of nations and states. The film industry segments that specialize in the production of science fiction and fantasy films also do not ignore the military theme. It is supposed that popular culture offers a variety of images of war, including militarism, violence, military collective trauma, and military political psychosis. The author believes that military theme in popular culture arose as a result of reflection on real military conflicts, and the creators of the pop-cultural project could reject the war or idealize it. The author believes that military science fiction in modern American mass culture actualizes the values of pacifism or militarism as reflections of the left or right preferences of the creators of such cultural product for the consumer society. Science fiction films actualize various forms of war, including global military clashes, civil conflicts, aggression, intervention and genocide. Popular culture is becoming the main sphere of existence of the memory of war because military conflicts of science fiction series can be perceived in the consumer society as more real than the historical wars of the past. Military images of mass culture are supposed to actualize various forms of war memory, including memory as trauma, memory as marginalization, and memory as nostalgia which idealize war.

From other Exiles: Alienation or the Madness of Herzog?

This paper analyses how alienation in Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) results in madness and wisdom at the same time. Following this, the researcher will firstly examine the background of alienation and its silent assumptions by highlighting the following features: the search for truth, the marginalization, and the mental paralysis of the hero, Herzog. In line with the findings achieved at this stage, the researcher will secondly study how alienation scrupulously traces Herzog’s madness and wisdom, considering the relationships between alienation, on the one hand, and melancholy, oblivion and escapism, on the other hand. In the second part of this essay, the researcher will argue how madness is reflected in terms of wisdom and sanity. It is the wisdom of the marginalized intellectual in modern American society. Seen from this perspective, alienation and madness are argued to have satirical and allegorical dimensions as they entail reciprocal relationships with wisdom and sanity. The conclusion the researcher seeks to achieve is that when Herzog attempts to bypass and deconstruct the amoral ethics of modern American culture, he unexpectedly goes through various shifts from his being alienated, disregarded, rejected, mad and ultimately wise. Foucault’s (1967) and Deleuze’s (1968) concerns over the issues of madness and alienation prove to be an insightful theoretical platform in this paper.

The New Edith Wharton Studies

The New Edith Wharton Studies

The Comic in the Midst of Tragedy's Grief with Tig Notaro, Hannah Gadsby, and Others

ABSTRACT The function of the comic in the midst of tragedy is not clear. After all, is it simply comic relief that wounded nations, communities, or individuals seek? Tragedy has long been cast as memory and mourning while comedy offers for the masses a Nietzschean moment of joyful forgetting and for the Stoic mind a measure of transcendence from our grief. The latter view came into prominence for modern American culture with the nineteenth-century satirist Mark Twain, who wrote that “the secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow,” which has been interpreted through the often-quoted formula: comedy is tragedy plus time. The assumption is that we need some distance emotionally in order to mock or transcend the tragic. While we grant the humor of transcendence can produce some momentary relief through emotional distance, we wonder if there might be another way that humor can deal with suffering? Popular psychology often speaks of five stages of grief, and while that progression seems too linear and simplistic, we find that the now much more inclusive comic stage has something to offer their audiences struggling to make sense of a volatile world.

Associative Experiment in the Study of Sociocultural Stereotype

As complex phenomena of social and cultural experience, sociocultural stereotypes manifest in behav­ioural, material and verbal spheres. Notable advances in the study of various aspects of sociocultur­al stereotypes in humanities have not eliminated the necessity of their study in research paradigm of cognitive-linguistics that incorporates psycholinguistic methods within interpretative framework. An in-depth study of sociocultural stereotypes requires rigorous empirical investigation of language evidence received from competent speakers in experimental situations. The experimental work provides a high level of empirical accuracy to verify emotional evaluation and pragmatic presuppositions conveyed by sociocultural stereotypes. The aim of this study was to unveil the meaning of a sociocultural stereotype flapper in contemporary culture and to model its cognitive structure on results of associative exper­iment. This sociocultural stereotype was chosen for its importance in changing standards of women behaviour in modern American culture. Flappers were young and daring American women, whose look and behaviour were criticised rigorously by traditionalists. An associative experiment conducted in the Lock Heaven College of Pennsylvania University showed the stereotype of flappers, though emerged in 1920s, still exists in national consciousness as a stereotypical image and a symbol of the epoch. The work contributes to the methodology of systematising experimental data in cognitive-linguistic research.

Selling Lemonade to a Crowd of Drunks

Selling Lemonade to a Crowd of Drunks Lisa M. Steinman I TAKE MY TITLE from a letter Wallace Stevens wrote to Ronald Lane Latimer, one of a series of exchanges about an edition of Ideas of Order from Latimer’s Alcestis Press, an edition about which Stevens expressed excitement even as he tried to make certain its appearance would not violate his contract giving Knopf first refusal rights (see L 271). Stevens paid particular attention to how Latimer should be allowed time to market—Stevens’s letter says “to dispose of”—the Alcestis Press fine print limited edition. The letter ends by saying that “selling poetry now-a-days must be very much like selling lemonade to a crowd of drunks” (L 284). The letter has been mentioned by other critics, mostly in passing (see, especially, Beyers). At first reading, it is typical: a little formal, but also witty and even a bit self-deprecating, much like the tone in a letter to Latimer written three days later, which opens with Stevens writing “Sorry to be so communicative, but it will die down” (L 285). The more I read the sentence featured in my title, however, the more I realized how puzzling I found the tone of that remark to be. So, what I want to do here is to reread with some care that apparently light comment about selling lemonade to a crowd of drunks and to suggest that there are at least three contexts or sets of assumptions in light of which one might hear Stevens’s letter.1 The first (and perhaps least important) such context is Stevens’s attitude toward drunkenness or at least toward drunken crowds insofar as his views are related to how, by the mid-thirties when the letter on which I am concentrating was written, poetry’s appeal—or lack thereof—was a cause for anxiety. Second, the comment resonates with the contested treatment of certain aspects of modern American culture—especially its advertising (that is, its commercialism)—viewed variously in terms of either aesthetics or politics, especially in the 1920s and the 1930s. Finally, I want to consider how Stevens’s comment to Latimer casts light on the poet’s shifting views of consumerism and commercial culture—which are not the same thing, but do overlap—over two or three decades. I am not going to propose a tidy answer to my question about what Stevens implied when he spoke of selling lemonade to a crowd of drunks, although I do want to suggest that there are implications of Stevens’s comment that are “now-a-days” (to use his phrase) less audible than they were in the summer of 1935 when the letter was written, because I want to [End Page 213] underline that hearing tone of voice matters and that then-contemporary contexts help us to hear Stevens’s somewhat puzzling tone of voice. I also want to flesh out some implications of what Stevens wrote later the same year in another letter to Latimer, namely that “Everything is complicated” (L 303).2 In other words, as I hope will become clear, I think some of the puzzlement that arises when considering Stevens’s tone of voice in the letter about selling lemonade to a crowd of drunks has to do not simply with when the letter was written but with the fact that Stevens was not always of one mind—that he was in his letters, as in his essays and poems, often trying to work through what he thought and felt (and to highlight the importance of acknowledging mixed thoughts and feelings) about complicated issues. Finally, I want to try to model how one might trace what Richard Deming calls Stevens’s “active negotiation[s]” with complicated issues in different, that is, changing, contexts (107). Although much of the story I piece together here is not new, not even a new kind of story, it does seem to me useful “now-a-days” to insist on nuance, complexity, and a renewed sense of how historical or cultural context matters. Let me start by turning to the most autobiographically local and perhaps best-known context of the letter...

Darkness at Noon: Le Malheur of Capitalism in Bellow’s Later Novels

The crisis of capitalism, or what Saul Bellow dubs “the crisis of knowledge”, crystallizes the way he deconstructs and subverts the roots of modern American culture. The concepts of “darkness” and “Malheur” embody the tragic fate of capitalism and the end of history to recall Baudrillard and Fukuyama. Colin Davis relates this intellectual atmosphere to Lyotard’s theory of “after knowledge” and the postmodern condition, Lévinas’s “after ethics” and Althusser’s “after hope”. Fictionally, Bellow epitomizes this cultural backdrop in modern America by addressing the decline of civility, the agony of the artist, the end of humanism and morality in a society which is dominated by the crowd of low culture to cite Williams. Conceding that the novelist identifies “darkness”, “noon”, “Malheur” and “capitalism” with Derrida’s premises of deconstruction and Foucault’s insights about episteme theory and the archeology of knowledge, it becomes then fundamental to underpin how he gives theory and philosophy an overriding role in the purification of humanism from the burden of materialism and capitalistic democracy. Special focus is on Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and The Dean’s December (1982) as they illustrate Bellow’s gestures of deconstructing the negativity of capitalism.

A “Successful Person” as a Value Dominant of the American Liguo-Axiological Worldview

The article deals with the study of an essential for the American culture concept “successful person” through the lens of linguistic axiology. A linguo-axiological approach to language study makes it possible to detect important information about the American axiological world view and gives an opportunity of a more detailed familiarization with the American national character and mindset. The aim of the paper is to reveal and analyze the ways of verbalization of the value component of the concept “successful person” as well as to determine its place in the axiological world view of the representatives of modern American linguistic culture. The research is based on the analysis of various types of English dictionaries: defining, phraseological, etymological, etc. The analysis revealed that the concept under investigation is widely represented in the language on the lexical and phraseological levels, possesses vivid evaluative characteristics and has a branched semantic structure. This concept also acquires in the culture a metaphorical interpretation and is verbalized by a series of metaphors. The concept “successful person” holds one of the dominant positions in the American world view being a realization of the key idea of a national cultural phenomenon “American Dream”.

Strangers in a Strange Land: How Our Founding Principles and a Bitter Pill Undo the Assimilation of US Catholics.

Most Catholic physicians work with the comfortable assumption that we can practice our profession and our faith, fully assimilated into modern American culture and society. Increasingly, we have come to realize that to be a Catholic Christian is by nature to be countercultural. American culture, ordered by the founding fathers in concepts of liberty and freedom, has been profoundly affected by the introduction and reliance on a contraceptive pill. This has changed the mores and sexual behaviors of society in ways that are antithetical to Catholic values. The consequences of contraception have directly led to an acceptance of a broad number of behaviors and attitudes that society insists must be tolerated. This challenges the commitments of Catholic physicians both personally and professionally.

ПОДКАСТЫ ИНТЕРНЕТ-РЕСУРСА ALL EARS ENGLISH В ОБУЧЕНИИ ИНТЕРАКТИВНОЙ СТОРОНЕ УСТНОГО ОБЩЕНИЯ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ СТУДЕНТОВ УРОВНЯ B2-C1

In the article, requirements for interaction skills for advanced (B2-C1) students learning English are presented. It is shown that podcasts have significant linguo-didactic potential for teaching the interactive aspect of oral foreign-language communication to B2-C1 students by the example of the podcasts of the Internet resource All Ears English that can serve as a source of information on linguistic and extralinguistic features of interaction in the modern American culture and is an authentic standard of the American English speakers’ speech behaviour. The structure and thematic groups of All Ears English podcasts are defined on the basis of speech strategies and means of communication.

A Troubled Relationship: Sex Equality and the Limits of Law

A Troubled Relationship:Sex Equality and the Limits of Law Deborah Dinner (bio) Katherine Turk. Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 284 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-08-12248-20-3 (cl). Nancy Woloch. A Class by Herself: Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s-1990s. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. 337 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-691-00259-0 (cl); 978-06-91176-16-1 (pb); 978-14-00866-36-6 (epub). The legal regulation of women's work underwent a sea change from the early twentieth to the twenty-first century. It is indeed difficult to name a shift in modern American legal culture more dramatic or one bearing more profound social and economic consequences. In the 1908 case Muller v. Oregon, the US Supreme Court upheld a state law capping the number of work hours an employer could demand of a female employee. The decision entrenched ideas about women's difference—the supposed biological frailty associated with female reproductive capacity as well as women's social role as mothers and disadvantage in the labor market—in constitutional jurisprudence. At the same time, Muller affirmed state legislation redressing the imbalance of power between workers and employers. Nearly a century later, in the 1991 case United Auto Workers v. Johnson Controls, the court struck down a private employer's "fetal protection policy." The exclusion of nonsterile women from hazardous jobs, the court reasoned, violated women's rights under the federal statute that guarantees nondiscrimination in employment. The decisions were mirror opposites along several different axes: gender, federalism, and conceptions of individual rights and collective responsibility. Muller reified sex difference, affirmed states' importance to welfare policy, and valued protection over autonomy. By contrast, Johnson Controls denied the legal relevance of pregnancy to workers' rights, affirmed the authority of a federal statutory regime, and valued individual women's choices over corporate paternalism. These twin decisions also serve as bookends for the two histories under review. Both Nancy Woloch and Katherine Turk examine the troubled relationship between gender, workplace organization, and the law. Deftly analyzing a century of complicated legal doctrines, Woloch traces the creation and dissolution of a legal regime that set the female worker apart as A Class by Herself. The strength of Woloch's book is its comprehensiveness, [End Page 134] especially in its analysis of debates among feminists, their allies, and opponents, from the late nineteenth century through the mid-1960s. Woloch offers the definitive treatment of the contest between women's protection and equality in this period, synthesizing primary source research with exhaustive review of historical, political science, and legal scholarship. Turk zeroes in on the late twentieth century, which no longer serves only as the denouement to histories of earlier periods but rather has emerged as a focus in its own right of women's legal history. Equality on Trial analyzes interpretive contests about sex equality, specifically Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in employment "on account of sex" (as well as race, color, national origin, and religion). While existing histories focus on the arguments of attorneys and social movement advocates, Turk investigates how workingwomen at the grassroots level responded to and endeavored to shape enforcement of the law. Turk's empathic and nuanced analysis of the archival record yields a revisionist argument—that sex discrimination law undermined the economic security of working-class people even as it created new opportunities for professional women. Together, these two books depart from triumphalist accounts of civil rights and offer sobering insights into the limits of law—conceptualized as court-adjudicated rights—to empower women. Woloch shows how in the early twentieth century, constitutional doctrine came to link sex equality with free contract and to code labor protection as feminine. Social feminists, who sought to augment the state's role in protecting working-class women, embraced sex-specific labor standards for dual purposes: to help women who faced exploitation in the labor market and also worked a double shift in the home and to serve as an "entering wedge" for protective laws for all workers (19). In the late nineteenth century, state courts began...

TARA STUBBS and DOUG HAYNES (eds). Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture

TARA STUBBS and DOUG HAYNES (eds). <i>Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture</i>