Race and Nation in American Popular Culture
Focuses on three seminal works in the history of American culture: the first full-length narrative film, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation; the first integrated musical, Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern's Showboat; and the first great American opera, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.
Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that scholars play a unique role in liberal society, manifesting in refined form the freedoms it guarantees and demanding that it make good on those same guarantees. Far from ivory-tower intellectuals, scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Linda Nochlin undertake the radical social act of questioning received wisdom.
This text defines and discusses terms, critical theories and points of view that are commonly applied to the classification, analysis, interpretation and history of works of literature. Entries are arranged alphabetically.
Joseph Conrad has traditionally been seen as a master - a master mariner, master storyteller, master of the secrets of the human heart, master of fictional technique. Recently, however, these compliments have given way to charges that Conrad is complicit in the various masteries associated with racism, imperialism, and the patriarchy. In this book, Geoffrey Galt Harpham inquires not only into Conrad's work and reputation, but also into the idea of mastery as such.