bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Demonic New World and Wilderness Land: The Making Strange of America
Authors: King John Owen
Published: April 2011

The American scholar claims for himself the forgotten wastes and undisclosed lands. Like a character from Cooper, he travels from the walls and academes into the burnings of a prairie, thence to return and publish his message, discovering the horrid and yet holy measures of controls, the ways of fencing the wilds, and the singular terrors of his mind. He demands not the allegory Bunyan offered, nor the timeless locations Bunyan portrayed, but that allegory be stripped, that dream and its terror be held to place, located exactly where the scholar stands. He demands a material, measurement, place—somewhere and sometime in which to describe his crisis. He demands a particular machine, some object foreign enough, lawful enough, against which to measure himself and then destroy himself unto another life. He demands a compulsion to declare compulsion is fatal. He builds control and provides structure and works thereby his irony, tearing apart his devices, declaring his strangeness, his living out of place, his sense of himself as removed, of himself as a holy or at least as a special seer. He conflates history to the point of himself, places a local or even a world economy within himself, locates in his own psychomachia the material history of his culture. His expression of history, whatever the material or “artifact” claimed, is psychological, for the generative force, the historical explanation, is one of terror and of terror's control, of building not from innate designs or material exigencies or clashes of class or movements of world and regional economies but from the terrors of a bewilderment, from horrors to be externalized in the uniqueness of the American place—for Cotton Mather, Satan's home, the most vile and holy of deserts.
Criticism, Biography, and Popular Culture: Comment
Authors: Sollors Werner
Published: April 2011

The preceding essays by David Stineback, David Nye, and V. P. Bynack argue that there is a crisis in our discipline and proceed to make, or at least imply, suggestions for the future of American Studies.

1. We have failed to do justice to authors like Willa Cather; we have, in fact, not even approached the achievement of popular newspaper reviewers.

2. We have indulged in the old “pretense of biography” and overlooked the most significant sources while looking for such dubious entities as the one called, for example, “Thomas Edison.”

3. We are incurable nineteenth-century organicists and don't even know that we should know that we don't know what we are talking about.
A Patriotic Landscape: Gettysburg, 1863–1913
Authors: Patterson John S.
Published: April 2011

The Union and Confederate soldiers who moved south from Gettysburg in July 1863 left behind thousands of fallen comrades, a devastated Pennsylvania landscape, and the basis for one of our most powerful patriotic legends. Almost at once the battle was recognized not merely as a crucial Union victory but also as an event with broader cultural significance. In its bloody way the engagement clearly seemed to have enhanced America's position in the wider sweep of Western experience. “Waterloo Eclipsed!!” announced a headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer three days after the fighting ended. On the same day, a New York Times correspondent, whose eldest son had been mortally wounded at Gettysburg, assured his readers that “there never was better fighting since Thermopylae.” In the years that followed, such comparisons—which contributed to national self-importance—were often repeated, as Americans demonstrated an almost insatiable interest in the three-day struggle and in Abraham Lincoln's two-minute address at the consecration of the Soldiers' National Cemetery.
The Social Construction of Reality:Implications for Future Directions in American Studies
Authors: Kelly R. Gordon
Published: April 2011

As originally planned,The Social Construction of Realitywas to have been a collaboration among three sociologists and two philosophers and would presumably have been addressed to an audience composed of practitioners in both disciplines. As written, however, it is a work of “systematic theoretical reasoning” addressed to sociologists by sociologists. Although Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman may have anticipated a somewhat wider audience for their argument, they locate themselves and their theoretical position firmly within the history and discipline of sociology.
Realism, Cultural Politics, and Language as Mediation in Mark Twain and Others
Authors: Chametzky Jules
Published: April 2011

American classical realists in the period 1865–1900 sought, in one way or another, to grasp the essence of their new concern and method. William Dean Howells defined it as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” Mark Twain claimed in the preface to his first book, “I am sure I have written honestly, whether wisely or not,” whereas Henry James (in The Art of Fiction, 1884) enjoined the aspiring writer not to “think too much about optimism and pessimism; try and catch the color of life itself.” Truth, honesty, faithfulness to the “color of life itself”—what serious writer, in any period and writing in any mode, is not committed to those things? The problem, of course, lies in what we mean by each term, where the “material” and the “color of life” are, and by what standards (and by whom) they are to be validated. The resolution of those questions is a version of cultural politics.
The Scarlet Letter: A Political Reading
Authors: Moers Ellen
Published: April 2011

It was something of an accident that Hawthorne's masterpiece appeared in bifurcated form: an adultery novel — that ancient female form — preceded by a long political introduction, as masculine in tone as anything Hawthorne ever wrote, called “The Custom-House.” This introduction deals with Hawthorne's three-year tenure as surveyor of the Salem Custom House, a post he was given as a Democratic Party stalwart, and which he took on solely for its salary. He describes his fellow officials (mostly Whigs) as stupid, sluggish, lazy, animal-like, senile, and gluttonous, and himself as little better than the rest:

a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or any thing else but their own independent exertions … And here, some six months ago, - pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged stool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eye wandering up and down the columns of the morning newspaper, —you might have recognized … the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery little study … on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go hither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The bosom of reform has swept him out of office; and a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his emoluments.
Women and Space: The Flowering of Desire
Authors: Fryer Judith
Published: April 2011

Thomas pynchon's oedipa maas sees in the Varo triptych echoes of her own Rapunzel-like state, her world a tower from which Pierce Inverariety has ineffectually tried to rescue her. Pynchon does not comment on the other two panels of the triptych. In the first, the young women (more slender than frail) file away on bicycles from their conventlike towers – out for exercise or a trip to town; in the last, one of the maidens departs with her knight of deliverance. Nor does Pynchon observe that in the middle panel the young women, embroidering the tapestry of the world in their communal solitude,create the world. In which panel, one might ask, are the young women most free?

The work of Remedios Varo is filled with women in towers; spinning, weaving, writing poetry, composing music – creating the world. All of the women are the same woman. She frightens Pynchon. “Such a captive maiden,” he writes, “soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant.”
The “Intellectual and Moral Made Visible”: The 1839 Washington Allston Exhibition and Unitarian Taste in Boston
Authors: Ellis Elizabeth Garrity
Published: April 2011

“I have Just come from the Gallery—my third visit,” announced a correspondent to the Boston Daily Advertiser on the second day of the Washington Allston retrospective at Harding's Gallery (Figures 1 and 2), “where I stood in the very midst… of the glowing colors and glorious subjects [of] the artist who stands alone in this his age, in this his art.” He was part of a chorus of dazzled spectators who crowded the exhibition, “filled with enthusiastic admiration” in “surveying forty-five pictures, many of which only the golden time of art could equal.” For the young Henry T. Tuckerman, who would recall it vividly in his influential Book of the Artists, the show “proved an epoch in the history of Art in the United States.” It was also the signal event of the artist's old age: a benefit exhibition that recalled the fifty-nine-year-old Allston from “a life of great seclusion” in suburban Cambridgeport, was extended from six to eleven weeks by popular demand, and fascinated some of the most critical minds in Boston.
Putting the Past under Glass: Preservation and the Idea of History in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Authors: Shapiro Henry D.
Published: April 2011

In 1840, edward jarvis of the two-year-old Kentucky Historical Society wrote to Samuel Haven, Librarian of the American Antiguarian Society, complaining of the difficulties faced by the new organization in its efforts to collect and preserve materials relating to Kentucky's past. Despite enthusiastic support from the citizens of Louisville and from the state legislature, Jarvis explained, the task was an enormous one, for “the southern and western people are not in the habit of saving documents.”
The Unexpurgated A Connecticut Yankee: Mark Twain and His Illustrator, Daniel Carter Beard
Authors: David Beverly R.
Published: April 2011

Readers must have reacted with shock and surprise when in December, 1889, they entered the sixth-century world of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee and found it peopled with familiar nineteenthcentury figures. Sarah Bernhardt, whose exploits had charmed and embarrassed audiences during her 1880 and 1887 American tours, was pictured as a young page who befriends the Yankee, Hank Morgan. The petite actress Annie Russell, whose success in the hit play Esmeralda filled New York theaters in the eighties, appeared “in the pages as Sandy, the heroine” of the novel. One “supercilious young knight was modelled after the ex-Kaiser Wilhelm; the jovial Baron after the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII); and the greedy, grasping merchant after one of the important American capitalists of the eighties,” Jay Gould.
Ralph Adams Cram: The Architect as Communitarian
Authors: Muccigrosso Robert
Published: April 2011

By and large, Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942) is remembered today as the creator of impressive Gothic churches and collegiate buildings. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine and St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in New York, the Princeton Graduate College and Chapel, and a variety of turn-of-the-century buildings at West Point—these are the most prominent, though not necessarily the best, of his works. By the 1920s, with Frank Lloyd Wright in temporary eclipse owing to a personal scandal and the European modernist movement not yet having reached American shores, Cram was quite possibly the most famous architect in the nation and was certainly the arbiter of its Gothic tastes. Yet, neither personal success nor the widespread acceptance of his preferred style of building satisfied Cram. For one thing, he recognized that Gothicism was an anomaly in America, contrasting oddly with its spirit and institutions. He was convinced, moreover, that to achieve and maintain a consistently high level of artistic expression, it was first necessary to achieve a wholesome society. Given this conviction, it is not surprising that Cram devoted himself quite as earnestly to the nation's social reconstruction as he did to its architectural construction.
Shelby Foote's Civil War
Authors: Rubin Louis D.
Published: April 2011

Publication in November, 1974, of the third and final volume of Shelby Foote's magnificent history of the Civil War makes me. think back to the time when he first began it. It was early in 1955, I think, that Random House announced its contract with Foote, who until then had written only fiction. These were the years prior to the Centennial of the war, and the book industry was getting ready for it. Since the 1930s, with the publication of Douglas Southall Freeman's fourvolume biography, R. E. Lee, and then his three-volume sequel, Lee's Lieutenants, there had been a rising demand for Civil War military history, and by the early 1950s, with the Centennial less than ten years away, not only publishers but historians both amateur and professional saw a veritable bonanza in sight. The old saw, to the effect that the ideal recipe for a best-seller would be one entitled “Lincoln's Doctor's Dog,” was being revised; interest in the Great Emancipator was turning into interest in the military events of the war.
Donald Barthelme and the Death of Fiction
Authors: Stott William
Published: April 2011

That illuminating exchange occurs in “The Explanation,” a short story in Donald Barthelme's City Life (1970). I put it at the beginning of this paper because I hope by the end to have explained it.

A great many critics—Mary McCarthy chief among them—believe that the novel as we have known it is dying in America. I agree and, in the next pages, throw a few clods on its coffin. But while I think that fiction as we have known it is dying, I think fiction itself is being reborn in unlooked-for ways. This paper contends that Donald Barthelme's works—particularly his early works, the short story collections Come Back, Doctor Caligari (1964), and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), and the minimalist novel Snow White (1967)— analyze the older fiction's failure to come to grips with reality in America as we now experience it and offer us a new kind of fiction.
A Silent Woman Speaks: The Poetry in a Woman's Scrapbook of the 1840s
Authors: Buckler Patricia Prandini
Published: April 2011

In these words, Tillie Olsen dedicated her book, Silences, to the women whose lives for centuries were constricted by sexual role and social custom, yet who struggled nevertheless to express themselves (pp. 42–43). She further urged women who write and women who teach to give voice to these silent women by moving beyond the novel and the published poem to the journals, letters, memoirs, and other personal utterances that “add to the authentic story of human life, human experience” (pp. 45n).
Pride Without Prejudice: The Day New York “Drew No Color Line”
Authors: Badger Reid
Published: April 2011

On an unusually bright, faintly springlike morning in mid–February of 1919 in New York City, a huge crowd of perhaps a million people gathered along Fifth Avenue all the way from Madison Square Park to 110th Street and from there along Lenox Avenue north to 145th Street. Along with Governor Al Smith, ex-Governor Charles Whitman, Acting-Mayor Robert Moran, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War Emmett J. Scott, William Randolph Hearst, Rodman Wanamaker, and other notables, they had come to welcome home the men of the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment of New York's National Guard, who had fought so well in France as the 369th Infantry Regiment of the American Expeditionary Force (Figure 1).
The American Generational Autobiography: Malcolm Cowley and Michael Rossman
Authors: Hazlett John Downton
Published: April 2011

In the prologue to his 1951 revision ofExile's Return, Malcolm Cowley (Figure 1) described the first edition of 1934 as “the story of the lost generation” written “while its adventures were still fresh in my mind.”He then added, “since I had shared in many of the adventures I planned to tell a little of my own story, but only as an illustration of what had happened to others.” In fact, this modest description of his method drastically understates the importance of Cowley's own life in the originalstory. In the first edition, he does combine stretches of narrative about his own life — including chapters on his childhood, high-school and college years, exile in Europe, disillusionment with bohemian life, and political conversion — with a narrative of the generation's coming of age. But even the story ofthe collective self that he means to tell — beginning with their early innocence ina pastoral, Edenic America; continuing through their exile and refuge in the religion of art and the subculture of bohemianism; and ending with their final repatriation and salvation via the political and historical insights of Marxism — is in every important respect simply his own writ large. It is a story in which the personal, individualized “I” of conventional autobiography is transformed into a collective “we.”
“Vindicating the Equality of Female Intellect”: Women and Authority in the Early Republic
Authors: Kelley Mary
Published: April 2011

In the wake of the Revolution and establishment of the republic, the essayist Judith Sargent Murray anticipated consequences beyond those typically proclaimed by newly independent Americans. “I expect,” she declared, “to see our young women forming a new era in female history.” Basing her claim upon already visible changes in the education of women, Murray noted that “female academies are every where establishing.” Their presence suggested that schooling in the use of the needle, once thought all that was necessary for a woman, was now being integrated with “studies of a more elevated and elevating nature.” Murray was prescient. Established in both the North and the South during the 19th Century's opening decades, private academies and seminaries included in their curriculum subjects such as history, geography, mathematics, and the natural sciences. Nearly four hundred of these schools were founded exclusively for women between 1790 and 1830.
Henry James's The Bostonians: Controlling Verena Tarrant
Authors: Anderson Beatrice
Published: April 2011

The plot of Henry James's The Bostonians is deceptively simple. A wealthy young Boston feminist, Olive Chancellor, passionately admires and subsequently takes into her home a beautiful and malleable young girl with a gift for public speaking: Verena Tarrant. Basil Ransom, Miss Chancellor's aristocratic but impoverished Southern cousin, who is similarly struck by Verena, manages, after a long and relentless struggle, to snatch Verena from the clutches of Olive Chancellor and win her for himself.
Johnny Ace: A Case Study in the Diffusion and Transformation of Minority Culture
Authors: Salem James M.
Published: April 2011

Johnny Ace, the mellow crooner of “Pledging My Love” (1955), may have been an influential transitional figure between rhythm & blues and rock ‘n’ roll, but he certainly did not die at age twenty-four playing Russian roulette with the singer Little Esther in a motel room in El Dorado, Arkansas. I heard this account from a black woman who saw him in person on the chitlin circuit, and who paid $2.50 in December of 1953 (“a hard amount to get in those days”) to attend a “Colored Only” dance featuring the Johnny Ace Band at the Elk's Rest Club in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The details she recalls of Ace's death are inaccurate, but the general story she remembers – the legend of Johnny Ace the rhythm & blues star as it exists today in the oral tradition of African-American culture – is closer to the truthin spiritthan almost everything ever written about him by rock historians.
Days of Reckoning in Russian and American Novellas: A Cross-Cultural Triptych
Authors: Gelfant Blanche H.
Published: April 2011

In saul bellow's novella,Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm, a preposterously superfluous, suffering man, articulates a belief in truth that postmodern literary and cultural critics generally disavow. Wilhelm conceives of truth as a vaguely reified “Something” - an object of size, located in space, and accessible to the human gaze. Throughout his fateful day of reckoning, Wilhelm hotly pursues this oxymoronic reification, following small and seemingly foolish signs, like a man's hat bobbing up in a crowd, until at last he discovers the ultimate reality he has been seeking - truth simultaneously embodied and disembodied by death. This ambiguous representation affects Wilhelm profoundly, consummating “his heart's ultimate need” but sundering his physical being. His vulnerable creaturely body convulses and seems to come apart, its disjunct segments independently bending, bowing, twisting, shaking, crippling, swelling, nodding, being clutched. These bodily contortions apparently signify Wilhelm's deliverance from this world to another, a higher, freer, world of “happy oblivion” where he can forget his earthly troubles. In the novella's final tableau, an ecstatically sobbing Wilhelm enters this transcendent realm in his own perverse way: instead of rising to its heights, he sinks. Thus he completes the drowning action with which the novella begins by losing — and finding — himself in undefinable depths. There, murkily, mortality evokes self-love as the essence of truth.
Reading the Indians: The Ramona Myth in American Culture
Authors: Moylan Michele
Published: April 2011

Despite, or perhaps because of, its popularity in 19th-century America,Ramona(1884), Helen Hunt Jackson's nostalgic novel of the California mission Indians, has seemed to offer little to academic readers. Seldom appearing on the lists of required reading for college courses in American literature, Jackson's novel has also been virtually ignored by literary and cultural scholars. Nevertheless,Ramonahas had an active and influential “cultural life.” Jackson's Indian novel appealed to generations of readers from a wide variety of regions and socioeconomic classes. Published in the same year asHuckleberry Finn, Ramonafirst ran as a six-month serial in theChristian Unionand subsequently amassed tremendous sales figures both in the United States and abroad. In 1885; for example,Ramonasold 21,000 copies as one of the year's best-sellers, and by 1900 readers had purchased more than 74,000 copies. Despite the lack of cheap, reprint editions, the novel continued to sell roughly 10,000 copies per year for most years through 1935. Held by 68 percent of U.S. libraries in 1893, it was one of only three contemporary novels held by 50 percent or more of the public libraries in the United States. Indeed, at least one of them had enormous trouble meeting public demand for the novel: in 1914 the Los Angeles Public Library was circulating 105 copies ofRamona, but it still had a waiting list; by 1946 the library had bought over a thousand copies of the novel. Never out of print,Ramonahas been translated into “all known languages” and has been printed hundreds of times in dozens of editions. The popularity ofUncle Tom's Cabinwas phenomenal, but inRamonaHarriet Beecher Stowe's novel had a worthy rival. Clearly a powerful explanatory myth for generations of American readers,Ramonadeserves serious attention from literary and cultural scholars alike.
Dreiser's Suit Against Paramount: Authorship, Professionalism, and the Hollywood Film Industry
Authors: Strychacz Thomas
Published: April 2011

In the 1930s, Dorothy Parker wrote to Alexander Woollcott that the “Kiss of Death has come.” She was referring, in her inimitably morbid way, to a contract from the Paramount Film Corporation, and in so doing became one of a long line of writers to establish themselves as different than and superior to the Hollywood script factories, while welcoming that vampirish — but lucrative — kiss of death. Behind Parker's remark lies an already long history of writers struggling to reconceive their authorial functions, their professional standing, and the nature of their literary work in an age of mass culture. One of the most remarkable moments in that struggle was Theodore Dreiser's suit in 1931 against Paramount-Publix Corporation, which was brought in at attempt to halt the release of an (in his opinion) “inartistic” version of An American Tragedy (1925).
The Landscape of Display: The Ashcan School, Spectacle, and the Staging of Everyday Life
Authors: Fairman Deborah
Published: April 2011

With the late-19th-Century rise of the metropolis came new ways of seeing in the American city. Observers attempting to decipher the “mysteries” of an urban landscape radically transformed by industrial and mercantile capitalism responded in a variety of ways: some chose to portray the “underside” of the city, some its expansive beauty, others its vast and disorienting scale. But what these different perspectives share is an assumption that one can comprehend and order the sprawling urban scene through a knowledge and experience predicated on sight; to “see” the city is, quite literally, to understand it.
Lynching and Antilynching: Art and Politics in the 1930s
Authors: Park Marlene
Published: April 2011

Lynching became a fact of American life after the Civil War, but it only became an important subject for writers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and a subject for visual artists in the 1930s. During the Depression, antilynching works were first a reaction to the widespread outrage over the Scottsboro case and then part of the political and legislative efforts to make lynching a federal offense. In early 1935, both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Communist Party's John Reed Club held competing art exhibitions that not only condemned lynching but also supported their legislative objectives. After World War II, when Civil Rights legislation became the main priority, images of lynching continued primarily in the works of African-American artists. But in these later works, lynching became the prime symbol of American racism, springing from a black perspective rather than from particular political campaigns or from contemporary experience.
The Hearts of Nineteenth-Century Men: Bigamy and Working-Class Marriage in New York City, 1800–1890
Authors: Gilfoyle Timothy J.
Published: April 2011

In 19th-century america, the bigamous marriage became a controversial subject and repeated cultural metaphor. From popular fiction to sensationalistic journalism to purity reform literature, writers repeatedly employed bigamy as a moral signpost warning readers of the sexual dangers and illicit deceptions of urban life. Middle-class Americans in particular envisioned the male bigamist as a particular type of confidence man. Like gamblers and “sporting men,” these figures prowled the parlors of respectable households in search of hapless, innocent women whom they looked to conquer and seduce, dupe and destroy. Such status-conscious social climbers deceptively passed for something they were not. Most authors depicted the practice in Manichaean terms of good versus evil, innocence versus corruption. Bigamy thus enabled writers to contrast the nostalgic, virtuous, agrarian republicanism of postrevolutionary America with the perceived urban depravity of the coarse, new metropolis. Such illegal matrimony, editorialized one newspaper, “speaks volumes for man's duplicity and woman's weakness.” Pure and simple, bigamy was “mere wickedness.”
Tourist Photographs as Souvenirs
Authors: Bensen Joe , Silberman Robert
Published: April 2011

No matter what karl malden says in the American Express ads, it is a camera, not a charge card, that most tourists don't want to leave home without. The camera has become the definitive symbol of tourism (Figure 1). To be a tourist without taking pictures is somehow a violation of the rules; as Paul Fussell has noted, the only people who don't bring cameras on trips are those who are playing at being “antitourists,” ostentatiously flaunting their supposed freedom from being “mere” tourists.
Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White: You Have Seen Their Faces
Authors: Snyder Robert E.
Published: April 2011

In 1937, Erskine Caldwell, the noted Southern author ofTobacco RoadandGod's Little Acre, and Margaret Bourke-White, the famous photographer forFortuneandLifemagazines, publishedYou Have Seen Their Faces. The documentary was a devastating broadside on Southern delinquencies. Right from the opening paragraph, Caldwell began painting an image of the South as a benighted region.
Bergson in America
Authors: Quirk Thomas
Published: April 2011

“O My Bergson, you are a magician,” wrote William James shortly after he had finished readingL'evolution Creatrice(1907), “and your book is a marvel.” He continued to praise the book in the letter, finding it a “pure classic in point of form,” its persistent “flavor of euphony” oddly reminding him of the “aftertaste” ofMadame Bovary. If he was not in the “mood” to make any definite comment about the content of the book, James vaguely recognized certain coincident features between his “pragmatism” and what had already come to be called “Bergsonism”; and this shock of recognition was personally gratifying. (Indeed, in this respect, James was rather backward, for Bergson had read and been influenced by James' work long before the American had fully grasped the relevance of Bergson's thought to his own.) James felt they were “fighting the same fight” against what he called in the letter the great “beast,” “Intellectualism,” but which Bergson would have variously described as a pernicious Spencerian mechanism or the stubborn and habitual claims of a Platonic idealism. In any event, in James' mind, it was the much younger French philosopher who had delivered the “death wound,” and James was personally content to serve modestly “in the ranks” behind such an exquisite “commander.”
The Twilight of Transcendentalism: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Weston, and the End of Nineteenth-Century Literary Nature
Authors: Bogardus Ralph F.
Published: April 2011

That there is a striking correspondence between the thinking of such A nineteenth-century transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and that of the twentieth-century American master of photography Edward Weston should come as no great surprise, for it is widely recognized that transcendentalism has been an essential ingredient in the lives and work of numerous major American artists. During the nineteenth century, this influence was most fully expressed by poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, by the painter Thomas Eakins, and by the architect Louis Sullivan. At the turn of the century, the composer Charles Ives and painters Robert Henri and his “Ashcan” colleagues John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn continued to draw sustenance from the ideas and example of the transcendentalists. And during the early twentieth century, the brilliant architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the gifted painter Georgia O'Keeffe, and major poets Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams made clear through their work the looming presence of the transcendentalist tradition. Thus, well before the 1920s, when Edward Weston began making his most innovative photographs, transcendentalism consciously and unconsciously pervaded American intellectual and artistic life: It was something to absorb or reject-or both. “Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, the army of unalterable law,” was how Eliot put it. Weston was not exempt from this law.
The Last Tycoon and Max Eastman: Fitzgerald's Complete Political Primer
Authors: Joy Neill R.
Published: April 2011

Unfortunately for American letters, when F. Scott Fitzgerald died he left behind a brilliant and extensive but critically problematical set of fragments of a Hollywood novel, tentatively entitled Stahr a Romance or The Love of the Last Tycoon A Western, but published as The Last Tycoon. Although the published edition has been available for fortyodd years, the need to decipher its unfinished design persists. The plot is cut off; the disorderly notes provide contradictions and minimal help in interpretation; the extant texts exist in a number of states, none final; and Edmund Wilson's edition raises grave doubts. Nevertheless, Tycoon is a most ambitiously planned novel, conceived in the moral and metaphorical amplitude of Fitzgerald's full artistic maturity, assimilating at least as absolutely as elsewhere in the canon his cultural perceptions and ambiguities regarding the quality of American civilization.
Ladies, Gentlemen, Flirts, Mashers, Snoozers, and the Breaking of Etiquette's Code
Authors: Szuberla Guy
Published: April 2011

Some time after the Civil War, writers of American etiquette books marked the rise of the city by introducing new sections on “etiquette in the street” and “conduct in a crowd.” No one should look to their texts and the accompanying illustrations for a faithfully detailed and documented history of 19th-century city life. The stiff, cutout figures that walk through city streets in these old line drawings represent a particular fantasy of social order, focused in the figure and type of the lady and gentleman. “Walk slowly, do not turn your head … and,”The Ladies' Book of Etiquette(1876) warned, “avoid any gesture or word that would attract attention.” That advice is illustrated, with punctilious care, inGentleman Meeting a Lady, a line drawing in John Young's 1882 guide,Our Deportment(Figure 1). The gentleman and the lady make no apparent eye contact; they, in strict observance of propriety, look off and away from each other. Again, in Alice Emma Ives'sSocial Mirror(1886), the ladies who illustrate the way to give a gentleman “formal street recognition” grant it with averted eyes and unturned heads. Ives quite properly avoids the word “meet” (Figure 2).
Thomas Hart Benton's Jealous Lover and the Ballad of Middle-Brow Culture
Authors: Ladner Barbara E.
Published: April 2011

This article is about who or what art is for and what, if anything, art J. can do. It begins with the assumption that art can indeed function beyond itself and the specifically aesthetic premises that conditioned its production and that it is acceptable for the audience to consider such broader, cultural functions for it. In particular this article examines Thomas Hart Benton's The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley with an eye toward the ways in which uninitiated viewers might respond to that painting and how it can be read as responding to certain cultural conditions in which contemporary viewers would have found themselves. By offering viewers several levels on which to respond, as well as by responding itself to viewers' lives, the painting provides one example of Benton's desire, not to undermine high art in this country – as is often implied by accusations that his art is little more than kitsch – but rather to build the sophistication of the viewing public.
Cut Off from Words: Robert Lowell's “Tranquilized Fifties”
Authors: Doreski William
Published: April 2011

In a 1961 letter to his cousin Harriet Winslow, Robert Lowell, reflecting on the Cold War crises of the period, particularly the erection of the Berlin Wall, wrote

The world's really strange isn't it? I mean the world of the news and the nations and the bomb testings. I feel it this fall and wonder, if it's just being forty three. Under a certain calm, there seems to be a question that must be answered. If one could think of the question. (Papers)

Though this passage illustrates Lowell's tendency to read the world in autobiographical terms, it also displays his sensitivity to the role of language in crisis situations. The rhetorical, public, and communal problem of voicing the required question may be the key to “the world of the news,” yet asking that question is not only beyond Lowell but beyond everyone else (the uncharacteristically impersonal “one”). By the end of the 1950s, voicing the need to ask such a question had become an intrinsic part of Lowell's poetics, most clearly formulated in “For the Union Dead,” a poem completed in 1960 in which the public and the personal dimensions powerfully cohere. However, Lowell's work of the previous decade, collected in Life Studies (1959), in a subtle way had already explored the clichés, aporia, rhetorical corruption, and general verbal difficulties of the first decade of the television era.
Frederick Douglass and the Work of Freedom: Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic in the Fugitive Slave Narrative
Authors: Cassuto Leonard
Published: April 2011

When Frederick L. Olmstead came face to face with slavery in his travels through the South, he wrote that it was “difficult” to treat a human as property, but “embarrass[ing]” to treat property as human. Olmstead's dilemma encapsulates the difficulties that white slaveholders had in objectifying their slaves. American slaveholders tried to treat the slave as property, but couldn't consistently maintain that stance because they understood all along that the slave was human. Furthermore, the owners had to exploit that humanity in daily practice in order to manage the slave as property. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this conflict in action when he visited the South and witnessed the treatment of slaves: “Not wishing to raise them to their own level, [the owners] keep themas close to the beasts as possible”(emphasis added). Tocqueville's qualification is important. The masters do not succeed in turning the slaves into beasts; they can only approximate doing so. (The “almost” that Tocqueville includes in the epigraph quotation above further suggests this key gap.) Tocqueville's phrasing shows that he sees slaves as people who are being degraded to the status of objects — but who are nonetheless not objects. Moreover, Tocqueville's use of “we” suggests that he is not the only one who sees them as people. For Tocqueville and others unnamed, the slaves retain their human connection. They are not things, but people who are being uneasily forced into the category of “thing.”
“Split flee hide vanish disintegrate”: Tom Wolfe and the Arrest of New Journalism
Authors: Lehman Daniel W.
Published: April 2011

Reading Tom Wolfe's nonfiction across its grain, for the manner by which its chameleon narrators and its historical author reverberate and intersect, is to enter a sustained fantasy of escape and recapture. For not only are Wolfe's fugitive plots – a psychedelic novelist on the lam in Mexico, a test pilot reeled to earth after eluding the clutches of the Mach One barrier, even his fictional Master of the Universe wriggling in a tangled web of transgression and punishment – the stuff of rights and wrongs, but for nearly a third of a century Tom Wolfe has made a habit of breaking every established rule and then denying he has done so.
The possible pollen cone of the Late Triassic conifer Heidiphyllum/Telemachus (Voltziales) from Antarctica
Authors: Bomfleur Benjamin , Serbet Rudolph , Taylor Edith L. , Taylor Thomas N.
Published: April 2011

Fossil leaves of the Voltziales, an ancestral group of conifers, rank among the most common plant fossils in the Triassic of Gondwana. Even though the foliage taxon Heidiphyllum has been known for more than 150 years, our knowledge of the reproductive organs of these conifers still remains very incomplete. Seed cones assigned to Telemachus have become increasingly well understood in recent decades, but the pollen cones belonging to these Mesozoic conifers are rare. In this contribution we describe the first compression material of a voltzialean pollen cone from Upper Triassic strata of the Transantarctic Mountains. The cone can be assigned to Switzianthus Anderson & Anderson, a genus that was previously assumed to belong to an enigmatic group of pteridosperms from the Triassic Molteno Formation of South Africa. The similarities of cuticle and pollen morphology, together with co-occurrence at all known localities, indicate that Switzianthus most probably represents the pollen organ of the ubiquitous Heidiphyllum/Telemachus plant.
What Longevity Predictors Should be Allowed for When Valuing Pension Scheme Liabilities? ‐ Abstract of the Discussion
Authors: Baxter Steven
Published: April 2011

This abstract relates to the following paper:

MadrigalA.M., MatthewsF.E., PatelD.D., GachesA.T. & BaxterS.D.What Longevity Predictors Should Be Allowed for When Valuing Pension Scheme Liabilities?British Actuarial Journal, doi:10.1017/S1357321711000018.
Estimated portion sizes of snacks and beverages differ from reference amounts and are affected by appetite status in non-obese men
Authors: Brogden Nina , Almiron-Roig Eva
Published: April 2011

Objective

To explore the extent to which appetite status influences portion size estimation in men under laboratory conditions and to quantify how much participants’ portion estimates differed from the recommended portion sizes defined by authoritative bodies (i.e. government and health professionals’ reference amounts).

Design

Repeated, randomized cross-over trial with each participant attending the laboratory on four separate occasions. At each session, participants rated the number of portions of eight foods and beverages displayed in front of them. Participants rated portions twice after consuming breakfast (full conditions) and twice after an overnight fast (hungry conditions). Portion estimates were compared with reference amounts from the British and American Dietetic Associations, from the UK Food Standards Agency and from the US Food and Drug Administration.

Setting

Food skills laboratory, University of Chester, UK.

Subjects

Twenty-seven non-obese men (mean age 24·9 (sd6·5) years).

Results

Portion size estimates for all items were significantly smaller under hungry than under full conditions (P< 0·01). Relative to reference instruments, estimates were significantly smaller for all foods except banana, irrespective of appetite status (P< 0·001).

Conclusions

In this data set, appetite status altered the perception of food amounts. There were large discrepancies between participants’ perception of a portion and recommendations from health professionals and government standards. Nutritional educational strategies should take into account the role of hunger along with a person's familiarity with existing portion size systems when advising on portion sizes.
A highly effective bifunctional ligand for radioimmunotherapy applications
Authors: Chong Hyun-Soon , Song Hyun A. , Kang Chi Soo , Le Thien , Sun Xiang , Dadwal Mamta , Lee Hyunbeom , Lan Xiaoli , Chen Yunwei , Dai Anzhi
Published: April 2011

A novel bifunctional ligand (3p-C-NETA) for antibody-targeted radioimmunotherapy of 90Y and 177Lu was efficiently synthesized via regiospecific ring opening of an aziridinium ion.
Tunable reagents for multi-functional bioconjugation: reversible or permanent chemical modification of proteins and peptides by control of maleimide hydrolysis
Authors: Ryan Chris P. , Smith Mark E. B. , Schumacher Felix F. , Grohmann Dina , Papaioannou Danai , Waksman Gabriel , Werner Finn , Baker James R. , Caddick Stephen
Published: April 2011

Controlling maleimide hydrolysis allows the modular construction of bromomaleimide-mediated bioconjugates which are either stable or cleavable in an aqueous, thiol-mediated reducing environment.
Structures of p63 DNA binding domain in complexes with half-site and with spacer-containing full response elements
Authors: Chen Chen , Gorlatova Natalia , Kelman Zvi , Herzberg Osnat
Published: April 2011

Transcription factor p63, a p53 family member, plays a role in epithelial cell development, cell cycle arrest, apoptosis, and tumorigenesis. Point mutations, primarily in the DNA binding domain (p63DBD), lead to malformation syndromes. To gain insight into differences between p63 and p53 and the impact of mutations on the structure, we have determined two crystal structures of p63DBD in complex with A/T-rich response elements. One complex contains a 10-bp DNA half-site response element (5′AAACATGTTT3′) and the other contains a 22-bp DNA full response element with a 2-bp spacer between two half-sites (5′AAACATGTTTTAAAACATGTTT3′). In both structures, each half-site binds a p63DBD dimer. The two p63DBD dimers do not interact in the presence of the DNA spacer, whereas they interact with one another in the p63DBD/10-bp complex where the DNA simulates a full response element by packing end-to-end. A unique dimer–dimer interaction involves a variable loop region, which differs in length and sequence from the counterpart loop of p53DBD. The DNA trajectories in both structures assume superhelical conformations. Surface plasmon resonance studies of p63DBD/DNA binding yielded
K
d
 = 11.7 μM for a continuous full response element, whereas binding was undetectable with the 22-bp DNA, suggesting an important contribution of a p63DBD interdimer interface to binding and establishing that p63DBD affinity to the response element is approximately 1,000-fold lower than that of p53DBD. Analyses of the structural consequences of p63DBD mutations that cause developmental defects show that, although some mutations affect DNA binding directly, the majority affects protein stability.
Transitions between three swimming gaits in
Paramecium
escape
Authors: Hamel Amandine , Fisch Cathy , Combettes Laurent , Dupuis-Williams Pascale , Baroud Charles N.
Published: April 2011

Paramecium
and other protists are able to swim at velocities reaching several times their body size per second by beating their cilia in an organized fashion. The cilia beat in an asymmetric stroke, which breaks the time reversal symmetry of small scale flows. Here we show that
Paramecium
uses three different swimming gaits to escape from an aggression, applied in the form of a focused laser heating. For a weak aggression, normal swimming is sufficient and produces a steady swimming velocity. As the heating amplitude is increased, a higher acceleration and faster swimming are achieved through synchronized beating of the cilia, which begin by producing oscillating swimming velocities and later give way to the usual gait. Finally, escape from a life-threatening aggression is achieved by a “jumping” gait, which does not rely on the cilia but is achieved through the explosive release of a group of trichocysts in the direction of the hot spot. Measurements through high-speed video explain the role of trichocysts in defending against aggressions while showing unexpected transitions in the swimming of microorganisms. These measurements also demonstrate that
Paramecium
optimizes its escape pattern by taking advantage of its inertia.