This essay examines the significance of the American Revolution as a literary trope and a rhetorical device in shaping US political imagination. The Revolution fostered both utopian and dystopian ...rationales, justifying radical experiences such as fascism. I will examine this relevance in Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934) and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935).
This essay sets out to observe the significance of the American Revolution as a literary trope and a rhetorical device in shaping US political imagination. Particularly, the Revolution served both ...utopian and dystopian rationales, including radical experiences such as fascism. I will examine this relevance in Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934) and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935).Fascismo, populismo e mito della Rivoluzione Americana nella letteratura statunitense del XX secoloIl saggio intende analizzare il ruolo della Rivoluzione americana come tropo letterario e strategia retorica nella formazione dell’immaginario politico statunitense. In particolare, la Rivoluzione ha alimentato logiche sia utopiche sia distopiche, sfociando in derive radicali come il fascismo. Saranno qui esaminati A Cool Million (1934) di N. West e It Can’t Happen Here (1935) di S. Lewis.
Modes and Moves of Protest Paladin, Nicola
Review of International American studies,
12/2019, Letnik:
12, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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The role of mass protest has been recurrently central yet controversial in the American culture. Central because American history presents a constellation of significant collective protest movements, ...very different among them but generally symptomatic of a contrast between the people and the state: from the 1775 Boston Massacre and the 1787 Shays’s Rebellion, to the 1863 Draft Riots, but also considering the 1917 Houston Riot or anti-Vietnam war pacifist protests. Controversial, since despite—or because of—its historical persistence, American mass protest has generated a media bias which labelled mobs and crowds as a disruptive popular expression, thus constructing an opposition—practical and rhetorical—between popular subversive tensions, and the so-called middle class “conservative” and self-preserving struggle. During the 20th century, this scenario was significantly influenced by 1968. “The sixties were not fictional”, Stephen King claims in Hearts of Atlantis (1999), in fact “they actually happened”, and had a strong impact on the American culture of protest to the point that their legacy has spread into the post 9/11 era manifestations of dissent. Yet, in the light of this evolution, I believe the very perception of protesting crowds has transformed, producing a narrative in which collectivity functions both as “perpetrator” and “victim”, unlike in the traditional dichotomy. Hence, my purpose is to demonstrate the emergence of this new and historically peculiar connotation of crowds and mobs in America as a result of recent reinterpretations of the history and practice of protest in the 1960s, namely re-thinking the tropes of protest movements of those years, and relocating them in contemporary forms of protest. For this reason, I will concentrate on Nathan Hill’s recent novel, The Nix (2016), and focus on the constant dialogue it establishes between the 1968 modes of protest and the Occupy movement.
The role of mass protest has been recurrently central yet controversial in the American culture. Central because American history presents a constellation of significant collective protest movements, ...very different among them but generally symptomatic of a contrast between the people and the state: from the 1775 Boston Massacre and the 1787 Shays’s Rebellion, to the 1863 Draft Riots, but also considering the 1917 Houston Riot or anti-Vietnam war pacifist protests. Controversial, since despite—or because of—its historical persistence, American mass protest has generated a media bias which labelled mobs and crowds as a disruptive popular expression, thus constructing an opposition—practical and rhetorical—between popular subversive tensions, and the so-called middle class “conservative” and self-preserving struggle.
Military iconography has always been a crucial aspect in the relationship between consensus and the outcome of US military interventions. A recurrent and elastic visual component of war master ...narratives is the representation of death on the battlefield, a classic trope in Western tradition whose first American photographic stage was the Civil War. By focusing on Civil war photography observed against the grain of early republic paintings of the American Revolution, I intend to analyze the cultural transformations determined by the advent of photography on the US perception of war in contrast with the pictorial tradition. My purpose is to demonstrate how such a shift implied a radical reshaping of the visual (and cultural) paradigm of death on the battlefield in the way it was represented and perceived by the audience. I propose a comparison of the aesthetics and the ethos of the most well-known Civil war photos of dead soldiers with one of the most famous paintings of the American Revolution representing death on the battlefield, John Trumbull’s The Death of Joseph Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and significant literary counterparts from the Revolution (Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s homonymous tragedy which inspired Trumbull's paintings), and the Civil war literature (with particular reference to Stephen Crane).
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