American Allegory

Download or read book American Allegory written by Black Hawk Hancock and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-05-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Perhaps,” wrote Ralph Ellison more than seventy years ago, “the zoot suit contains profound political meaning; perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the Lindy-hop conceals clues to great potential power.” As Ellison noted then, many of our most mundane cultural forms are larger and more important than they appear, taking on great significance and an unexpected depth of meaning. What he saw in the power of the Lindy Hop—the dance that Life magazine once billed as “America’s True National Folk Dance”—would spread from black America to make a lasting impression on white America and offer us a truly compelling means of understanding our culture. But with what hidden implications? In American Allegory, Black Hawk Hancock offers an embedded and embodied ethnography that situates dance within a larger Chicago landscape of segregated social practices. Delving into two Chicago dance worlds, the Lindy and Steppin’, Hancock uses a combination of participant-observation and interviews to bring to the surface the racial tension that surrounds white use of black cultural forms. Focusing on new forms of appropriation in an era of multiculturalism, Hancock underscores the institutionalization of racial disparities and offers wonderful insights into the intersection of race and culture in America.

Download or read book Allegory in America written by D. Madsen and published by Springer. This book was released on 1995-12-18 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allegory in America surveys the history of American allegorical writing from the Puritans through the period of American romanticism to postmodernism. In a series of theoretical chapters the cultural function of allegory is discussed in relation to the mythology of American exceptionalism. Each theoretical chapter is followed by a chapter that analyzes a specific text or group of texts. Allegorical indeterminacy is seen to produce a literary tradition that both represents and subverts the ideals of American orthodoxy.

Download or read book Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory written by J. Elliott and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-06-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that popular feminist fiction provided a key means by which American culture narrated and negotiated the perceived breakdown of American progress after the 1960s. It explores the intersection of two key features of late twentieth-century American culture.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Allegory written by Rita Copeland and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the development of allegory in the European and American tradition from antiquity to the modern era.

Download or read book Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theater written by Ana Elena Puga and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-05-05 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theater traces the shaping of a resistant identity in memory, its direct expression in testimony, and its indirect elaboration in two different kinds of allegory. Each chapter focuses on one contemporary playwright (or one collaborative team, in the case of Brazil) from each of four Southern Cone countries and compares the playwrights’ aesthetic strategies for subverting ideologies of dictatorship: Carlos Manuel Varela (memory in Uruguay), Juan Radrigán (testimony in Chile), Augusto Boal and his co-author Gianfrancesco Guarnieri (historical allegory in Brazil), Griselda Gambaro (abstract allegory in Argentina).

Download or read book Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance written by K. Sugg and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-10-27 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By rethinking contemporary debates regarding the politics of aesthetic forms, Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance explores how allegory can be used to resolve the "problem" of identity in both political theory and literary studies. Examining fiction and performance from Zoé Valdés and Cherríe Moraga to Def Poetry Jam and Carmelita Tropicana, Sugg suggests that the representational oscillations of allegory can reflect and illuminate the fraught dynamics of identity discourses and categories in the Americas. Using a wide array of theoretical and aesthetic sources from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this book argues for the crucial and potentially transformative role of feminist cultural production in transamerican public cultures.

Download or read book The Language of Allegory written by Maureen Quilligan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively and innovative work treats a body of literature not previously regarded as a unified genre. Offering comparative readings of a number of texts that are traditionally called allegories and that cover a wide time span, Maureen Quilligan formulates a vocabulary for talking about the distinctive generic elements they share. The texts she considers range from the twelfth-century De planctu naturae to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and include such works as Le Roman de la Rose, Langland's Piers Plowman, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Melville's Confidence Man, and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Whether or not readers agree with this book, they will enjoy and profit from it.