bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Variants in estrogen‐related genes and risk of Parkinson's disease
Authors: Chung Sun Ju , Armasu Sebastian M. , Biernacka Joanna M. , Lesnick Timothy G. , Rider David N. , Cunningham Julie M. , Maraganore Demetrius M.
Published: April 2011

Incidence rates of Parkinson's disease are higher in men than in women at all ages, and these differences may be a result of the neuroprotective effects of estrogen on the nigrostriatal pathway. We investigated the association of common variants in 4 estrogen‐related genes with Parkinson's disease. Tagging single‐nucleotide polymorphisms in the CYP19A1, ESR1, ESR2, and PRDM2 genes were selected from the International Haplotype Map and genotyped in 1103 Parkinson's disease cases from the upper Midwest of the United States and in 1103 individually matched controls (654 unaffected siblings, and 449 unrelated controls from the same region). Of 137 informative single‐nucleotide polymorphisms, 2 PRDM2 single‐nucleotide polymorphisms were significantly associated with an increased risk of Parkinson's disease at the Bonferroni‐corrected significance level of 0.0004 (rs2744690: OR, 1.54; SE(logOR), .109; 99.96% CI, 1.05–2.26; uncorrected P = .0001; rs2744687: OR, 1.53; SE(logOR), .113; 99.96% CI, 1.03–2.29, uncorrected P = .0002); the association was significant in the women‐only stratum but not in the men‐only stratum. An additional 6 single‐nucleotide polymorphisms in PRDM2, 2 in ESR1, 1 in ESR2, and 1 in CYP19A1 had significant P values in the overall sample before Bonferroni correction. None of the single‐nucleotide polymorphisms were significantly associated with age at onset of Parkinson's disease after Bonferroni correction. Our results confirm the association of PRDM2 variants with Parkinson's disease susceptibility, especially in women. © 2011 Movement Disorder Society
Atlas‐based automated positioning of outer volume suppression slices in short‐echo time 3D MR spectroscopic imaging of the human brain
Authors: Yung Kaung‐Ti , Zheng Weili , Zhao Chenguang , Martínez‐Ramón Manel , van der Kouwe André , Posse Stefan
Published: April 2011

Spatial suppression of peripheral lipid‐containing regions in volumetric MR spectroscopic imaging of the human brain requires placing large numbers of outer volume suppression (OVS) slices, which is time‐consuming, prone to operator error and may introduce subject‐dependent variability in volume coverage. We developed a novel, computationally efficient atlas‐based approach for automated positioning of up to 16 OVS slices and the MR spectroscopic imaging slab. Standardized positions in Montreal Neurological Institute atlas space were established offline using a recently developed iterative optimization procedure. During the scanning session, positions in subject space were computed using affine transformation of standardized positions in Montreal Neurological Institute space. Offline analysis using magnetization prepared rapid gradient echo scans from 11 subjects demonstrated reliable OVS placement, comparable with but faster than iterative placement in subject space. This atlas‐based method was further validated in 14 subjects using 3D short‐echo time proton‐echo‐planar‐spectroscopic‐imaging at 3 T. Comparison of manual and automatic placement using 8 OVS slices demonstrated consistent MR spectroscopic imaging volume selection and comparable spectral quality with similar degree of lipid suppression and number of usable voxels. Automated positioning of 16 OVS slices enabled larger volume coverage, while maintaining similar spectral quality and lipid suppression. Atlas‐based automatic prescription of short echo time MR spectroscopic imaging is expected to be advantageous for longitudinal and cross‐sectional studies. Magn Reson Med, 2011. © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Influence of the ortho effect in the solvolyses of dichlorobenzoyl chlorides
Authors: Park Kyoung‐Ho , Kevill Dennis N.
Published: April 2011

The ortho‐effect of substituents upon the kinetics of reactions taking place at a reaction center attached to an aromatic ring has long been a topic of interest. For benzoyl chloride solvolyses, it was shown by Bentley and coworkers that the 2,6‐dimethyl‐derivative followed an ionization pathway with characteristics very similar to those for the solvolyses of p‐methoxybenzoyl chloride. We have carried out a Grunwald–Winstein equation treatment of the solvolyses of 2,6‐dichlorobenzoyl chloride, with similar sized chlorines replacing the methyl groups but now with an overall electron‐withdrawing influence of the ortho‐substituents. In this way the reactivity is moderated and the study can be extended to the important fluoroalcohol‐containing solvents. For the 30 solvents studied, an ionization pathway with a moderate nucleophilic solvation component is indicated. For comparison purposes, the treatment has also been applied to the 2,4‐, 3,4‐, and 3,5‐dichloro‐ derivatives. For the 2,4‐dichloro‐derivative, the two reaction channels are clearly visible and the solvents included for each channel are consistent with their solvent properties. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The role of tyrosine 71 in modulating the flap conformations of BACE1
Authors: Spronk Steven A. , Carlson Heather A.
Published: April 2011

β‐site amyloid precursor protein cleaving enzyme 1 (BACE1) is a potential target for treating Alzheimer's disease. BACE1's binding site is partially covered by a flexible loop on its N‐terminal domain, known as the “flap,” which has been found in several conformations in crystal structures of BACE1 and other aspartyl proteases. The side chain of the invariant residue Tyr71 on the flap adopts several rotameric orientations, leading to our hypothesis that the orientation of this residue dictates the movement and conformations available to the flap. We investigated this hypothesis by performing 220 ns of molecular dynamics simulations of bound and unbound wild‐type BACE1 as well as the unbound Y71A mutant. Our findings indicate that the flap exhibits various degrees of mobility and adopts different conformations depending on the Tyr71 orientation. Surprisingly, the “self‐inhibited” form is stable in our simulations, making it a reasonable target for drug design. The alanine mutant, lacking a large side chain at position 71, displays significant differences in flap dynamics from wild type, freely sampling very open and closed conformations. Our simulations show that Tyr71, in addition to its previously determined functions in catalysis and substrate binding, has the important role of modulating flap conformations in BACE1. Proteins 2011; © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Modelling of multijunction solar cells with dilute nitride n–i–p–i junctions
Authors: Royall B. , Balkan N.
Published: April 2011

We are proposing a novel structure containing GaInNAs n–i–p–i layers with a band gap of 1 eV connected in series to a GaInP/GaAs tandem structure. The device performance is modelled using the drift diffusion conductivity model where the number and thickness of the layers are taken as adjustable parameters to achieve the optimum design. We obtain the value of short‐circuit current to keep the n–i–p–i cell current matched to the other junctions in the tandem structure.
Changes in the responsiveness of serum leptin and hypothalamic neuropeptide Y mRNA levels to food deprivation in developing rats
Authors: Iwasa Takeshi , Matsuzaki Toshiya , Kinouchi Riyo , Gereltsetseg Ganbat , Murakami Masahiro , Nakazawa Hiroshi , Yasui Toshiyuki , Irahara Minoru
Published: April 2011

Neuropeptide Y (NPY) is an important orexigenic peptide that acts in the brain. The increase in hypothalamic NPY mRNA expression induced by fasting is mainly caused by a decrease in the effects of leptin. We investigated the developmental changes in the sensitivities of leptin and hypothalamic neuropeptide Y to fasting. Hypothalamic NPY mRNA levels were increased by fasting in postnatal days 15 and 25 rats, but not in postnatal day 5 rats. Serum leptin levels were decreased by fasting in rats at all ages (days 5, 15, and 25). In addition, hypothalamic OB‐Rb mRNA levels were decreased by fasting in postnatal day 25 rats, but not in postnatal day 5 or 15 rats. Although the percentage of fating‐induced decrease in the serum leptin level was larger in the postnatal day 15 rats than in the postnatal day 25 rats, the percentage of increase in the hypothalamic NPY mRNA level in the postnatal day 15 rats was smaller than that in the postnatal day 25 rats. There was a strong inverse correlation between serum leptin levels and hypothalamic NPY mRNA levels in the postnatal day 25 rats, whereas no significant correlation was found between these parameters in the postnatal day 5 or 15 rats. These findings indicate that the sensitivity of hypothalamic NPY mRNA expression to food deprivation and hypoleptinemia has developed by postnatal day 25.
THE QUASILINEARITY OF SOME FUNCTIONALS ASSOCIATED WITH THE RIEMANN–STIELTJES INTEGRAL
Authors: DRAGOMIR S. S. , FEDOTOV I.
Published: April 2011

The superadditivity and subadditivity of some functionals associated with the Riemann–Stieltjes integral are established. Applications in connection to Ostrowski’s and the generalized trapezoidal inequalities and for special means are provided.
Boundary quotients of the Toeplitz algebra of the affine semigroup over the natural numbers
Authors: BROWNLOWE NATHAN , AN HUEF ASTRID , LACA MARCELO , RAEBURN IAIN
Published: April 2011

We study the Toeplitz algebra 𝒯(ℕ⋊ℕ×) and three quotients of this algebra: the C*-algebra 𝒬ℕ recently introduced by Cuntz, and two new ones, which we call the additive and multiplicative boundary quotients. These quotients are universal for Nica-covariant representations of ℕ⋊ℕ× satisfying extra relations, and can be realised as partial crossed products. We use the structure theory for partial crossed products to prove a uniqueness theorem for the additive boundary quotient, and use the recent analysis of KMS states on 𝒯(ℕ⋊ℕ×) to describe the KMS states on the two quotients. We then show that 𝒯(ℕ⋊ℕ×), 𝒬ℕ and our new quotients are all interesting new examples for Larsen’s theory of Exel crossed products by semigroups.
Ushering in the Millennium, Or How an American City Reversed the Past and Single-Handedly Inaugurated the End-Time
Authors: Chevedden Paul E.
Published: April 2011

The story of millennialism extends down the ages from the ancient Near East to the present. In his seminal study on the origins of millennialism,Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, Norman Cohn exclaims, “What a story it has become!”

Much theological speculation; innumerable millenarian movements, including those now flourishing so vigorously in the United States; even the appeal once exercised by Marxist-Leninist ideology – all this belongs to it. Nor is there any reason to think that the story is nearing its end. The tradition whose origins are studied in this book is still alive and potent. Who can tell what fantasies, religious or secular, it may generate in the unforseeable future?

What fantasies, indeed!

All scholars who have studied millennialism have investigated unsuccessful movements, or movements that have yet to succeed, that is, achieve the millennium. This essay explores a successful millennial movement, one that has already ushered in the messianic age. Although this achievement is restricted geographically — to a city — it is nonetheless of major significance. Not only did this millennial movement receive support from the U.S. federal government, but it also accomplished its goal prior to the turn of the millennium.
The Body Politic and the Politics of Two Bodies: Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in Death
Authors: Laderman Gary
Published: April 2011

Abraham Lincoln has been mythologized and deified in the American imagination, occupying a preeminent place in the collective memory of the nation. He occupies this place because he is believed to embody the ideals and values of the country and because he seemed to preside with grace, equanimity, and wisdom over one of the most destructive conflicts in America's history. In life, but even more consequently in death, his presence – as “rail splitter,” “Great Emancipator,” and “Father Abraham” – conjures up an array of events, symbols, and myths that give definition and meaning to the American nation. When he died, an unprecedented funeral celebration occurred in the Northern region of the United States that solidified his privileged place in the country's pantheon of great heroes. The series of events that took place after his assassination, as well as his emplotment in public memory since then, suggest that his death, as tragic and painful as it was, added to the cohesion, unity, and the very life of the nation when it was most seriously threatened by chaos and degeneration.
Class, Consumption, and Ethnic Performance in Vaudeville
Authors: Hodin Mark
Published: April 2011

During the last decade of the 19th century, vaudeville became the nation's most popular entertainment form, drawing unprecedented numbers of spectators and appealing to members of diverse socioeconomic groups by staging a rapid succession of acrobats, comedians, legitimate theater stars, pet-tricks, and dramatic sketches. In a cultural scene that Lawrence Levine and others tell us was marked by the historical separation between legitimate and mass cultural practices, critical observers (then and since) have greeted the diversity of vaudeville's audience and the range of its performance with a mixture of surprise and liberal enthusiasm.
The “finish” of Consciousness: Emily Dickinson and Georgia O'Keeffe
Authors: Manning Susan L.
Published: April 2011

As early as 1946, Clement Greenburg was inclined to disregard Georgia O'Keeffe's significance on the grounds that her work “skipped essential stages” in the development of an abstract vocabulary. In his view, she simply got there too fast and too easily. She's famous, of course, for pictures that at first sight seem quite the opposite of abstract: challengingly labialike petals and priapic stamen, a whole painterly idiom of sexuality inscribed in representations of natural objects (Figure 1:Jack in-the-Pulpit, no. 4). As Ian McKay recently put it inContemporary Art, O'Keeffe's early exhibitions were regarded by many contemporary critics “as the work of a pathologically sex-crazed woman who, lacking the wherewithal to control her urges, poured them out onto the canvas for public display.” The sexual interpretations that so intrigued New York Freudians of the 1920s, and now serve to validate the oeuvre in its entirety for her feminist critics, have since tended to be absorbed into formal critique with a certain charge of displaced sexual innuendo: her painterly surface is “thin,” her perspectives “flat and frontal,” her scale distorted or unfathomable.
Making a Production Out of It:Victory at Seaand American Remembering
Authors: Beidler Philip D.
Published: April 2011

“Of course. It's my father's absolute favorite. He was there, you know.” Thus a friend replied when I told her I was writing aboutVictory at Sea, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) classic television documentary of U.S. and Allied Naval Operations in World War II. The father in question, moreover, was no ordinary judge of the material, but an old Navy Chief whohadactually been there for much of it, before, during, and after. Nor was the friend – a career journalist of long acquaintance with sea stories – an uncritical interpreter of the information. Still, as regards the forms and processes of cultural mythmaking, the exchange could be said to contain a familiar parable of World War II and American remembering, about some of the particular and identifiable ways in which Americans from the generation of 1941–1945 and their successors have come to conflate the experience of the war with certain popular-culture texts achieving classic status among its postwar representations. To put it more directly, one could not help thinking that for both father and daughter, as for myself and other Americans who “remember” World War II, “there” – or at least a significant portion of it – hasbecome Victory at Sea.
Pauline Hopkins and Psychologies of Race
Authors: Levander Caroline
Published: April 2011

Over the last decade, scholars of American cultural studies have taken as one of its central tasks identification of the ways in which Anglo-American writing is bound up in the African American tradition against which it had historically tended to distinguish itself. This project has involved, on the one hand, deconstructing distinctions between Afro-American and Anglo-American literary traditions and, on the other, affirming the distinctiveness of an Afro-American literary tradition by reclaiming lesser-known African American literary texts, such as Pauline Hopkins'sOf One Blood; Or, The Hidden Self. Indeed, the wealth of recent critical analyses of Pauline Hopkins's now almost canonical 1902 serial novel has engaged these two distinct lines of inquiry. By using the second half of her title as a way of understanding the first — that is, by assessing how William James's popular 1892 essay forScribner's Monthly, entitled “The Hidden Self,” operates as an organizing principle for Hopkins's fictional account of bloodlines — scholars have charted a series of interconnections between Afro-American and Anglo-American traditions even as they have made a case for the value of Hopkins's sensation novel. Familiar with James's contention that there is a “hidden self” within the individual, Hopkins, in these accounts, appropriates James's term to express the social condition of the African American after Reconstruction. Just as James's student, W. E. B. DuBois, declares in an 1897 essay for theAtlantic Monthlythat the African American experiences an inevitable “double-consciousness” proceeding from “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,” so too does Pauline Hopkins, in these accounts, use James's description of a “consciousness split into parts which coexist” as a way of expressing the psychosocial condition of late-19th-century African Americans.
Escape from Marseille: An American Story? Writing Victor Serge's, Laurette Séjourné's, Dwight and Nancy Macdonald's Balzacian Book
Authors: Bush Clive
Published: April 2011

Occupying part of a single paragraph in the published autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, the Polish-Belgian novelist, journalist, and revolutionary, Victor Serge, almost casually speaks of his escape in 1941 to Mexico from Marseille in Vichy France:

Some of us whose lives were in danger eventually made our exit. The Battle of the Visas which their friends have had to wage for their sake would stand some description: a single escape would provide material for a book of Balzacian proportions, packed with unexpected incidents and dark happenings behind the scenes.
On the Brink of Evacuation: The Diary of an Issei Woman, by Fuki Endow Kawaguchi
Authors: Moorehead Sanae Kawaguchi , Robinson Greg
Published: April 2011

One of the most significant gaps in our historical understanding of the expulsion and incarceration of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II is a knowledge of how Japanese Americans themselves perceived events as they occurred. Former camp inmates have produced an enormous corpus of literature, particularly in the last thirty years, dealing with their wartime experience, including oral histories, memoirs, essays, plays, poetry, and fiction. These have provided valuable insight as to how the government's policy played out in the lives of its victims, and have included a store of information useful in reconstructing the overall camp experience. Still, memoirs are by their nature products of hindsight and recollection, formed of material drawn from the untidy storehouse of human memory. They inevitably give an incomplete and less than trustworthy accounting of past sensations, especially the traumatic emotions and painful human relations that characterized the wartime Japanese American experience. In contrast, the contemporary written record of the wartime Japanese American experience is both relatively sparse and uneven. Surviving letters, essays, and journals stress the experience of the Nisei, American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry, who comprised the majority of camp inmates. Members of the immigrant Issei generation, less long-lived and fluent in English than their children, have produced little material despite various efforts to create Issei archival and oral history collections. Such documents by the Issei as do exist are generally in Japanese and are thereby impenetrable to the vast majority of scholars in the United States.
The Home Front's Cartoony Face: World War Two Through Orphan Annie's Eyes
Authors: Mazzenga Maria
Published: April 2011

September 1945 saw comic-strip star “Orphan Annie” engaged in a debate over popular media with “Professor Pollyanna.” The Professor and his spouse, known to Annie as “Uncle George” and “Aunt Sonja,” were one of many adult couples that took the eleven-year-old orphan into their home throughout the history of the comic stripLittle Orphan Annie. Temporary guardians like Uncle George and Aunt Sonja moved in and out of the strip on a regular basis, functioning as a foil for young Annie, the spokeschild of her creator Harold Gray, to express her opinions about the world. In this episode, Annie was puzzled by Uncle George's distaste for the tabloid-style newspaper fare she herself devotedly consumed daily. He “never reads th' funnies — or anything 'bout crime or sin or war horrors!” Annie observes incredulously. Professor Pollyanna, it seemed, only read editorials and, in Annie's mocking terms, “sweetness and light stories.” Annie later mulls over the matter with a sympathetic Aunt Sonja in an attempt to understand his views further. But Aunt Sonja could muster only the lamest of analyses: “Oh, probably George lives in a sort of dream world … but he's happy” (see Figure 1).
Dying to Be Black: White-to-Black Racial Passing in Chesnutt's “Mars Jeems's Nightmare,” Griffin'sBlack Like Me,and Van Peebles'sWatermelon Man
Authors: Dreisinger Baz
Published: April 2011

Is racial passing passé? Not according to contemporary book sales. The theme remains central to at least three recent best sellers: Danzy Senna'sCaucasia, Colson Whitehead'sThe Intuitionist, and Philip Roth'sThe Human Stain. Roth's novel made it to the big screen this fall, just asDevil in a Blues Dress, the adaptation of Walter Mosley's novel starring Denzel Washington, did in 1995. Renewed academic attention is being paid, of late, to “classic” passing narratives; once-ignored ones, including Charles Chesnutt'sThe House Behind the Cedars, are being revived; and still others being reread in the context of passing.
MacSong: Karaoke and the Academy
Authors: Gray Jeffrey
Published: April 2011

When Walter Benjamin wrote this sentence in the 1930s, he had in mind both the new directions of the press, which was opening more and more spaces in which its readers could write, and the new films and newsreels, where “any man today can lay claim to being filmed” (“Work of Art,” 233) and where, rather than actors, “people … portray themselves” (234; emphasis Benjamin's). Benjamin's attitude toward this collapse of the distinction between author and public was ambivalent. Phrases such as “the phony spell of a commodity” (233), to describe the cult of the movie star, suggest his nostalgia for a time when the aura of the “original” work of art had not yet begun to decay. On the other hand, his idea that “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual” (226) pointed enthusiastically to the new technologies as part of a liberationist meta-narrative.
“Poor Butterfly”: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Popular Music
Authors: Prigozy Ruth
Published: April 2011

The seventy-one song titles (see chart below) and innumerable lyrics that sprinkle his works indicate the extent of F. Scott Fitzgerald's reliance upon popular music as a source of his art. Contemporaneous descriptions of him as “laureate of the Jazz Age” need not be considered derisive; Fitzgerald was thoroughly in touch with his culture, was aware of the meaning of his sources, and was a keen analyst of the effects of popular culture on American lives. Cecilia Brady, in The Last Tycoon, admits “some of my more romantic ideas actually stemmed from pictures—42nd Street, for example, had a great influence on me. It's more than possible that some of the pictures which Stahr himself conceived had shaped me into what I was.” Fitzgerald was shaped by movies, by musical comedies, and not least by popular music. Other writers of our century were influenced in the same way, but it was Fitzgerald who acknowledged his debt to popular culture, who used it with meticulous care, and who evaluated seriously its impact, for better or worse, on the American scene.
Mr. Mailer's American Dreams
Authors: Spencer Benjamin T.
Published: April 2011

Since the death of Gertrude Stein probably no major author has so consistently and explicitly reflected concern with “the making of Americans” as Norman Mailer. From his early novellaA Calculus at Heaven, written while he was an undergraduate at Harvard, through his recentMarilyn, the tensions of his works have generally derived from attitudes that national myths or regional diversity have nurtured in his characters. Thus inThe Naked and the Deadhe subtitles the Time Machine chapter on General Cummings “A Peculiarly American Statement,” and therein he traces the general's views and conduct to the conflicts during his youth between his philistine Midwestern father and his genteel Bostonian mother, whose aesthetic ideals for her son yield to the image of tough “manhood” imposed by her authoritarian husband. Indeed, a notion of what it might mean to be an American in any inclusive national sense rarely emerges in this early novel; America instead seems to be a contentious aggregate of regional and ethnic cultures. Moreover, Mailer's authorial stance here is neither that of Dos Passos' detached naturalism nor that of Whitman's joyous acceptance of continental diversity within a national character but, rather, that of a sectionally oriented condescension toward those soldiers who lack the sophistication of his own brand of Northeastern urban culture. In fact, by 1952, Mailer had apparently adopted such slanting as a staple of his literary practice by arguing that a literary work should be shaped by the author's “prejudices, instincts, and sensitivity.” Nevertheless, Mailer's interest in American behavior has persisted over three decades as he has probed the quality of life in Hollywood or Texas or Florida or Chicago, seeking as he said of his participation in the Washington march, “to elucidate the mysterious character” of the “quintessential American event.”
The Americanizing of Zionism
Authors: Urofsky Melvin I.
Published: April 2011

If any single motif runs through the historiography of this country, it must be: “America is different.” Even before we became a nation, observers such as Hector de St. Jean Crevocoeur commented on how this new land, with its openness, its freedom, and its innovation, contrasted with the Europe from which its settlers had come. If this motto has been so persistent for America as a whole, then, to use the Talmudic idiom, how much more so has it been for America's Jews.
A Disciple's Odyssey: Jean Toomer's Gurdjieffian Career
Authors: Twombly Robert C.
Published: April 2011

Nineteen twenty-three was a momentous year in Jean Toomer's life. The publication ofCane, a cluster of thematically related sketches, stories, and poems about black people in Georgia and Washington, D.C., signaled his emergence as a talented young writer whom many associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Later in the year Toomer discovered the teachings of Georgi Gurdjieff, whose Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man was becoming internationally famous. WhileCanewas emerging as a minor classic during the 1920s, Toomer devoted himself to Gurdjieff, creating confusions about his loyalties that never ceased to plague him. Although his Gurdjieffian connection is well known, it is rarely taken seriously, and even today Toomer is usually discussed only as a “black” writer. Perhaps for a while he was, but his youthful fascination with race for its own sake slowly evolved into a racially conscious, then a radically unconscious, universalism. In that process, Gurdjieffian teachings were the catalyst, and it was clear to Toomer that his involvement with the “movement”—not race—was the defining quality of his life.
The Poetry in American Fiction
Authors: Wagner Linda W.
Published: April 2011

The excitement generated by modern American fiction is only partially suggested by Jean-Paul Sartre's 1946 statement that “The greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939 was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, and Hemingway. … To writers of my generation, the publication ofThe 42nd Parallel, Light in August, andA Farewell to Armsevoked a reaction similar to the one produced fifteen years earlier by theUlyssesof James Joyce.” Sharing withUlyssesthe technical virtuosity that was to mark “modern” fiction wherever it occurred, the novels of these American novelists set precedents that few writers today have forgotten. Faulkner, Hemingway, and Dos Passos became the prototypes for that new animal, the new American artist, the modernist who was fascinated, sometimes to the point of obsession, with method. As Gorham Munson recalled about a party in the early 1920s, the writers had split into two factions, the younger “as usual discussing the everlasting topic of form”; the older airing “their views on anti-religion.”
Eden's Constitution: The Paradisiacal Dream and Enlightenment Values in Late Eighteenth-Century Literature of the American Frontier
Authors: Cohen Lester H.
Published: April 2011

In a letter to Peter Collinson in 1753, Benjamin Franklin recounted his meeting with a “Transylvanian Tartar,” actually a Greek Orthodox priest, who had arrived in America in 1748 during a tour around the world. The “Tartar” asked Franklin why he thought the people of so many cultures—Tartars in Asia and Europe, Negroes in Africa, and Indians in the Americas—“continued a wandring [sic] careless Life, and refused to live in Cities, and to cultivate the arts they saw practiced by the civilized part of Mankind.” Before Franklin could respond, the “Tartar” offered his own explanation, beginning at the beginning, with Genesis and God's expulsion of Adam and his progeny from Eden. “God make man for Paradise,” Franklin quoted the “Tartar,” “he make him for to live lazy; man make God angry, God turn him out of Paradise, and bid him work; man no love work; he want to go to Paradise again, he want to live lazy; so all mankind love lazy.”
Herbert Solow: Portrait of a New York Intellectual
Authors: Wald Alan
Published: April 2011

Today's younger generation of intellectuals consists of the late arrivals to the generation that made its appearance as American “Marxists” and which has lived its entire life with Marxism (including, of course, anti-Marxism) as its central theme and interest. Without Marxism this generation is not only dull—it is nothing. It does not exist.—Harold Rosenberg, “Death in the Wilderness”
America's “Mythique” as Redeemer Nation
Authors: Clebsch William A.
Published: April 2011

The Good Gallic adjective “mystique” has been transmogrified into a not uncommon American noun. Why? Because we needed a name for those sets of transcendental or mystical beliefs and attitudes that attach to certain elusive ideas, persons, institutions, objects, events, and so on that fascinate us. We need just as badly a name for those complexes of legendary or mythical stories and meanings that express certain, equally elusive and fascinating things, ideas, experiences, and expressions. We need a name for the sense of American destiny and identity—a sense that first seized the Puritans and that their successors have changed and recombined into the stuff of a patriotic tradition. This paper will explore two systems within that mythical complex, stories about American destiny and about American identity, tales that tell us where we are going and who we are who are going wherever we are going.
Margaret Fuller and Myth
Authors: Richardson Robert D.
Published: April 2011

Margaret Fuller Was “many women in one,” and, as Thomas W. Higginson observed, “there is room for a difference of opinion even in assigning a key-note to her life.” Higginson thought the early biographies made too much of her “desire for self-culture.” Some more recent studies put their chief emphasis on her feminist and revolutionary activities. Higginson's own view, persuasively expressed in his 1884 account of her life, is that “what she always most desired was not merely self-culture, but a career of mingled thought and action such as she finally found.” It is clear that after her father died in 1835, leaving twenty-five-year-old Margaret the head of the family, her life became more and more public. From teaching school to conducting her famous Conversations, to editingThe Dial, to working for Horace Greeley'sTribunein New York, to her involvement with Mazzini and the Roman revolution of 1848, the intellectual radicalism of the Transcendentalist steadily widened into the social and political activism of the revolutionary. The increasingly active side of the last ten years of her short life was not so much a reaction against her earlier beliefs as it was, in important ways, a natural outgrowth of them. The two sides of her life were closely, causally connected; nowhere is this clearer than in her considerable but largely ignored interest in myth.
The Etiquette of Grief: A Literary Generation's Response to Death
Authors: Aaron Daniel
Published: April 2011

In October 1854, a Georgia clergyman wrote to his son a circumstantial account of a death in the family. The deceased, a younger brother of the clergyman's wife, had contracted yellow fever and died in his twenty-ninth year. The letter-writer reports every detail he can remember:

We found your uncle in the shed room off the parlor pulseless, his hands blackened, the blood settling under the nails, perfectly calm and conscious when roused, then falling into sleep. He turned over and gave me his hand, saying, “What do you think of my case?” He had taken much quinine, and was then taking brandy at intervals; his hands and feet rubbed with brandy and pepper, and blisters applied on legs, thighs, stomach, breast, and arms and back of neck. Every effort made to bring on reaction. Your dear mother rubbed his hands and arms incessantly, others his feet.

A version of this essay was delivered as the Kenneth B. Murdock Memorial Lecture at Leverett House, Harvard University, March 8, 1978.
Upton Sinclair's Escape from The Jungle: The Narrative Strategy and Suppressed Conclusion of America's First Proletarian Novel
Authors: Folsom Michael Brewster
Published: April 2011

When upton sinclair committed himself to writing The Jungle, he had no idea how he was going to pull it off, and he ended up improvising all the way. The result was a novel, the first ever to be called “proletarian,” which is far more complex and revealing than is generally understood. We still tend to break the book in two, and read it, as its first public did, for the sensational early chapters, dismissing the rest as a tedious tract. However, taken whole, in light of the story of its conception, composition, and revision, The Jungle comes to look less like an episode in the muckrake movement, and more like a major text of American social fiction, one of those compelling, garbled, perplexing, sometimes amusing encounters between the conventionally literate and the working class, which became a fixture of imaginative life in America by the end of the nineteenth century.
From Quebec with Love: Familiar Letters from William Cooper Howells to the Ashtabula Sentinel
Authors: Payne Alma J.
Published: April 2011

On July 2. 1874, the Ashtabula Sentinel carried the following announcement: “Hon. W. C. Howells left home for Quebec on last Thursday morning. He will enter immediately upon his duties as Consul.” At first glance, there seems to be little of importance in this editorial lead: but, in fact, it marked the end of an era. For the first time since 1840, it seemed, the influential editorial voice of William Cooper Howells would be missing in Ohio. As editor of the Scioto Gazette, he had first put William Henry Harrison's name “at the head” of the paper for nomination; his first number as editor of the Hamilton Intelligencer recounted the Columbus nominating convention; and he marked his first year as editor there with the official announcement of Harrison's election—“the crowning of that great struggle for right principles that has characterized the past year.”
January 1: The Afro-American's “Day of Days”
Authors: Wiggins William H.
Published: April 2011

There has never been a day in Afro-American history to equal January 1, 1863. This was the “day of days” in which the morning sunshine of freedom finally faded the long night of slavery. It is impossible to adequately assess the human effort that went into making this day a reality. All of the slaves' prayers for freedom were finally answered; all of the abolitionists' speeches were finally heeded; and the ceaseless arguments for human freedom published in theLiberator, theDouglass Monthly, and other abolitionist newspapers finally caused President Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. This day was the culmination of the hope for freedom expressed in the August 1 celebrations and the promise of freedom issued in Lincoln's preliminary proclamation of September 22, 1862. The one-hundred days had passed and, wonder of wonders, Lincoln had not reneged on his promise to set the slaves free! As the Brenham, Texas, barber Rupert Secrett put it: “Abe Lincoln touched the pen and four million slave chains were heard to rattle in the southland.”
Robert Henri's Good Theory and Earnest Practice: The Humanistic Values of an American Painter
Authors: Kwiat Joseph J.
Published: April 2011

Robert Henri, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1865, was the acknowledged leader of the “Ash-Can” School of painters. The other members were George Luks, William J. Glackens, John Sloan, and Everett Shinn. Branded as “revolutionaries” and “apostles of ugliness” after the turn of the century, because their work and theory seemed to rub against the grain of contemporary American artistic taste and its conception of acceptable aesthetic good manners, they came into conflict with the respectable and conventional painters, critics, and art dealers in the early years of the twentieth century. Although they were a group of artists obviously in the minority, their independent exhibitions were applauded by a proportionately small—yet highly vocal—number of newspaper and magazine critics. However, it was Henri, rather than any critic, who led the way in articulating their theories and practice and who made it impossible for their work to be ignored. He was the group's intellectual spokesman, artistic catalyst, and revered father figure.
Frontier Films: Trying the Impossible
Authors: Alexander William
Published: April 2011

If Frontier Films seemed an impossibility to Paul Strand in the 1930s, it seemed even more so to the cultural imagination of the subsequent decades. As a result, the production company now is scarcely known, even to film historians, and has only begun, like farleft dance and theater, to emerge from obscurity. It is striking that Richard Pells's and William Stott's recent studies of radical art and thought and of documentary form in the 1930s do not mention Frontier Films. Early film histories, with some exceptions, ignored Frontier, and it is only in the last several years that documentary-film historians Erik Barnouw, Richard Barsam, and Lewis Jacobs have given the organization equal time if by no means intensive investigation.
Some Elementary Axioms for an American Culture Studies
Authors: Wise Gene
Published: April 2011

Since the mid-1960s and the waning of the symbol-myth-image school, American culture studies has been adrift intellectually. It has first of all lacked a grounding center—at least of the culture if not always of the social structure—gave energy and direction to Americanist symbol-myth-image studies during their heyday in the decade and a half after 1950. Lacking such a consensus since then, American culture studies have also been uprooted from the holistic rhetoric of the interdisciplinary that gave impetus to teaching and scholarship in the movement during past years. We still hear exhortations to “see the culture whole,” or to “integrate all of American experience.” But such injunctions seem out of place now, when the culture itself appears not as all of a piece, but as divided—rent with strains and gaps which make it look like not a single thing but as several. American Studies has not faced up to the intellectual consequences of this change. A brief review of the past should indicate why.
Protest and Policy: Women Make Waves
Authors: Freeman Jo
Published: April 2011

The 1960s were one of those decades that occur two or three times a century and have a profound transformative effect on a society by compelling it to either reaffirm its values or reorient itself in a different direction. Our country has done both in response to the questions raised during those tumultuous years. Domestically, it has reaffirmed the basic value of equality, and given it a prominence it has not enjoyed in a century. In foreign policy a reorientation has occurred, and although we are not quite sure of what kind, America no longer glibly views itself as the annointed leader of the “free world” with the right—the duty—to spread the “American Way of Life.”
“Playing Indian” and the Search for Authenticity in Modern White America
Authors: Mechling Jay
Published: April 2011

Modern society, it would seem, is a conspiracy against authentic existence. Freud thought this true of all civilization, but a generation of literary critics, historians, and social scientists are laying at the door of modern civilization responsibility for the pathologies of everyday life. The time scales vary greatly, some scholars insisting that the modern revolution in the conception of the self has taken centuries, while others see this process as having taken place within the last century, but the savants all seem to arrive at roughly the same conclusion, namely, that what characterizes modern American life in this century is an unconsummated search for authenticity. The social pathology of this search, those most critical of modernity conclude, is narcissism. Clearly, whatever form the argument takes and regardless of the willingness of the analyst to moralize on the basis of his or her analysis, authenticity is a “hot” subject.
Berenice Abbott's Work in the 1930s
Authors: Sundell Michael G.
Published: April 2011

In a pioneering article on the “Documentary Approach to Photography” published in 1938, Beaumont Newhall cited two large-scale contemporary photodocumentations to exemplify what he saw as the commitment of “younger photographers” to “this materialistic approach [as] the basis for an esthetic of photography.” Both projects had been supported by the federal government since 1935, and both were massive in scope. One was the monumental survey of rural America conducted for the Farm Security Administration by a team of photographers directed by the economist Roy Emerson Stryker. The other was “Changing New York”—the “courageous and sweeping documentation of New York City” by a single artist, Berenice Abbott, aided by a small group of research and technical assistants provided by the Federal Art Project of the WPA.
Again with Fair Creation: Holy Places in American Literature
Authors: Benoit Raymond
Published: April 2011

When the Reverend Mr. Wilson confronts the little girl Pearl in The Scarlet Letter (Chapter 8), his mind is stymied by the fullness of her being, but his imagination responds to what she is and nostalgically recalls a religion and its sacramental art that could comprehend in her what baffles the Puritan and Ramistic approach of either/or: “Methinks I have seen just such figures, when the sun has been shining through a richly painted window, and tracing out the golden and crimson images across the floor. But that was in the old land.” It seems that ever since the Puritan logic of exclusion our major writers have longed for such an “imagined place” as the floor of the church in the old land,

Where finally the way the world feels

really means how things are,

in dear detail,

by ideal light all around us.
Historicizing Fiction and Fictionalizing History: The Case of E. L. Doctorow
Authors: Strout Cushing
Published: April 2011

Histories and novels are old allies, but the alliance is now troubled. The historian C. Vann Woodward told a convention of historians a decade ago that “our kindship is actually much closer to novelists” than to social scientists. Both the novel and history, he pointed out, “sprang from a common parentage of story-telling” and “competed with each other to satisfy the demand for historical understanding.” Over the last two centuries, he maintained, “novelists have been becoming ever more deeply historically conscious.” In the same year in which Woodward's remarks were published another historian, Sigfried Kracauer, struck a different note. The pioneers of the modern novel, Joyce, Proust, and Woolf, he observed, “no longer care to render biographical developments and chronological sequences after the manner of the older novel; on the contrary, they resolutely decompose (fictitious) continuity over time.” Thus modern art has “radically challenged the artistic ideals from which the general historian draws his inspiration—from which he must draw it to establish his genre.” But Kracauer explicitly cautioned against confusing his observations with attempts to “question the faithfulness to reality of the general historian's accounts.” He only drew the conclusion that general, large-scale narrative history as a genre survives only because metaphysical and political interests invite the historian to look at the past “from above” as a whole, instead of looking at it “from below” in the form of analytical specialized histories.
The Political Development of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Authors: Donaldson Scott
Published: April 2011

The image of the frivolous playboy clings to F. Scott Fitzgerald's reputation like a barnacle on a ship. He helped build the image himself, of course, but ita's a false one, or partially false at any rate. Most of the time Fitzgerald was a serious, committed artist. Yet people persist in thinking of him as an artist in spite of himself, a Pooh Bear of remarkable talent but lamentably little brain.