Research Catalog

Title

Composing cultures : modernism, American literary studies, and the problem of culture / Eric Aronoff.

Author

Aronoff, Eric Paul Wallach

Publication

Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2013.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 226 pages; 23 cm.

Summary

"The term "culture" has become ubiquitous in both academic and popular conversations, but its usefulness is a point of dispute. Taking the current shift from cultural studies to aesthetics as the latest form of this discussion, Eric Aronoff contends that in American modernism, the concepts of culture and of aesthetics have always been inseparable. The modernist concept of culture, he argues, arose out of an interdisciplinary dialogue about value, meaning, and form among social critics, artists, anthropologists, and literary critics, including figures as diverse as Van Wyck Brooks, Edward Sapir, Willa Cather, Lewis Mumford, John Crowe Ransom, Raymond Weaver, and Allen Tate. These figures proposed new ways to conceive of culture that intertwined theories of aesthetic and literary value with theories of national, racial, and regional identity. Through close readings, Aronoff shows that disciplines and approaches that are often thought of as opposed--cultural anthropology and aesthetics, American literary history and literary criticism, and multiculturalism and regionalism--are in fact engaged in common debate and proceed from shared arguments about culture and form." -- Publisher website.

Series Statement

Cultural frames, framing culture

Uniform Title

Cultural frames, framing culture.

Subject

• American literature > History and criticism
• Popular culture in literature
• Literature and society > United States
• Culture in literature
• Modernism (Literature) > United States
• Anthropology in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: The problem of culture -- Van Wyck Brooks and Edward Sapir: Divided American and the form of genuine culture -- Possessing culture: Willa Cather's aesthetic of culture in The song of the lark and The professor's house -- Culture, canons, and cetology: Modernist culture and the Melville revival -- Recovering the whole: Culture, region and poetry in the literary criticism of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate -- Conclusion: Composing critical cultures.

Call Number

JFE 13-9078

ISBN

• 9780813934839 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
• 0813934834 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
• 9780813934846 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
• 0813934842 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
• 9780813934853 (e-book) (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

2013004998

OCLC

829387037

Author

Aronoff, Eric Paul Wallach, author.

Title

Composing cultures : modernism, American literary studies, and the problem of culture / Eric Aronoff.

Publisher

Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2013.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Cultural frames, framing culture

Cultural frames, framing culture.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Research Call Number

JFE 13-9078