The insignificance or inferiority of American culture. Consensus School of American Studies, 1927-65 Intellectual agreement on what the American experience is like and how to study it. FIVE major characteristics of Consensus scholarship. Henry Nash Smith, Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen, Leo Marx, and Alan Trachtenberg. It is not a pioneering movement but a very conservative one that reinforces old historical and cultural assumptions about America and Americans.
Cultural synthesis is no longer possible.
The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought. Social structures always mediate between a particular cultural artifact and the larger society in which it is situated. Everything is read through the myth and it makes all things familiar. Its purpose is to reveal the interests that reinforce myths and culture. The power of words, things, images, and ideas to create and subvert culture.