Subtitle: A New Critical Realism for a Post-Seattle World
Author: Amy Schrager Lang, Cecelia Tichi
Subject: American Studies
Paper ISBN 0-8135-3717-7
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-3716-9
Pages: 320 pp. 23 b&w photos
Praise for What Democracy Looks Like
"An impressive and eclectic collection that does a compelling job of addressing contemporary concerns over resistance to globalism, capitalism, and continuing attempts to silence dissenters."-Emory Elliott, editor, The Columbia Literary History of the United States
Description:
The convergence of activists in Seattle during the World Trade Organization meetings captured the headlines in 1999. These demonstrations marked the first major expression on U.S. soil of worldwide opposition to inequality, privatization, and political and intellectual repression. This turning point in world politics coincided with an ongoing quandary in academia-particularly in the humanities where the so-called "death of theory" has left the field on tenuous footing.
In What Democracy Looks Like, the editors and twenty-seven contributors argue that these crises-in the world and the academy-are not unrelated. The essays insist that, in the wake of "Seattle," teachers and scholars of American literature and culture are faced with the challenge of addressing new points of intersection between American studies and literary studies. The narrative, the poem, the essay, and the drama need to be reexamined in ways that are relevant to the urgent social and political issues of our time.
Collectively urging scholars and educators to pay fresh attention to the material conditions out of which literature arises, this path-breaking book inaugurates a new critical realism in American literary studies. It provides a crucial link in the growing need to merge theory and practice with the goal of reconnecting the ivory tower elite to the activists on the street.
About the Author:
Amy Schrager Lang is a professor of English and humanities at Syracuse University in New York. Cecelia Tichi is the William R. Kenan, Jr. professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and a past president of the American Studies Association.
Table of Contents:
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A New Critical Realism
Amy Schrager Lang and Cecelia Tichi
A Short World History of "Seattle": 1994-2005
Body Count/Bodies Count
1. Working-Class Actuality: "The Great Unexamined"
Janet Zandy
2. Crane and the Body Count
Cindy Weinstein
3. Why Set a Free Man Free? Mark Twain, Empire and Gender
Amy Kaplan
4. Welcoming the Unbidden: The Case for Human Biodiversity
Rosemarie Garland Thomson
5. Consumer Compassion: The "Face" of Global AIDS
Roger Hallas
Experiments in Reality
7. "There is evil in the world an I'm going to do something about it": William Faulkner as Political Resource
Joseph R. Urgo
8. Rhetoric, Politics, and Ethics in Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo
James Phelan
9. Fear and Loathing in Globalization
Fredric Jameson
10. Hawthorne and Class
Teresa Goddu
11. Experiments in Reality: Wycoff's Workers
Jonathan Prude
The Commons
12. Cooper and the Tragedy of the Commons
Dana D. Nelson
13. Looks the Same to Me: Post Seattle, Post Sealth
Paula Gunn-Allen
14. Agriculture, Empire, and Ecology: Re-Farming the New World Order
Scott Hicks
15. History's Place Markers in Memory: 1954 and 1999
Thadious M. Davis
16. Along the Border
Bill V. Mullen
17. Tomato Pickers and the Challenges of Today's Classrooms
Judith Scott Girgus
18. Langston Hughes on the Historically White Campus
Joanne M. Braxton
Art and Activism
19. Where the Language Discovers Itself
Carolyn Forch
20. Deep Water, No Life Rafts
George Saunders
21. Not Yet Global Citizens
Laurie Garret
22. The Anti-Tribalist Identity-Based Movement for Pluralist Democracy
Tony Kushner
Another World is Possible
23. Neither Capitalist Nor American: The Democracy as Social Movement
Michael Denning
24. Ivory Towers, Velvet Gloves
Daniel Lang-Levitsky
25. The Status of Intellectual Authority and the Promise of Democracy
Silvio Torres-Saillant
26. Teaching After the Battle in Seattle: This is What Plutocracy Looks Like
George Lipsitz
Notes on Contributors
