Writing Lives: The History of Biography and Autobiography in America |
Craig Howes |
Self-Display in Our Technological Age: American Online and Digital Lives |
Craig Howes |
Mark Helbling |
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Mark Helbling |
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Barry Menikoff |
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Barry Menikoff |
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Mari Yoshihara |
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Deane Neubauer |
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Writing
Lives: The History of Biography and Autobiography in America From the earliest Western contact accounts to today's blogs and entertainment shows, Americans have been recording and communicating stories of people's lives. This talk will point out some highlights of this history of writing American lives - captivity narratives, stories of personal success, slavery and escape tales, biographical dictionaries of regions and the nation, spiritual autobiographies, muckraking exposés, immigrant narratives. My thesis will be that the eternal debate on who or what an American is, or should be, has always been conducted in part through the published lives of its people. |
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Self-Display In Our Technological Age:
American Online and Digital Lives One of the unanticipated consequences of the revolution in communications
technology has been the explosion of “personal” content
now suddenly available to the entire world. Whether in the form of
a blog, a page on one of the many online communities (Friendster,
Facebook), a comment on a list, or a conversation in a chatroom,
lives are being presented to the world, often in veiled or even deliberately
misleading forms. This talk will discuss the social, political, and
personal impact of this geometrically expanding realm of access to
the contents, often self-published, of American lives. |
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20th
Century American Literature The American Dream remains a cultural marker (a central and continuing
ideal, a moral and ethical center) that Americans use to celebrate,
to criticize, and to understand the America they experience. In
this lecture we will explore the American writer as well as American
culture through this protean moral construct first voiced by J.
Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in Letters From An American
Farmer (1782). |
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The Harlem
Renaissance and African American Identity The artists, writers, and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance
(also known as the New Negro Movement and the New Negro Renaissance
of the 1920s) were especially self conscious about their construction
and reconstruction of African American identity. We will explore
this effort in novels, poetry, and art (slides) and then trace
their significance for writers and intellectuals today. |
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Etched in
Acid: Scott Fitzgerald and Hollywood Fitzgerald spent the last four years of his life in Hollywood, focused
on learning the craft of screenwriting in order to support himself,
his small daughter, and his wife Zelda, who had been institutionalized
for mental illness. He failed as a screenwriter and this period is
commonly viewed as a disastrous end to a formerly glorious career.
However, Fitzgerald was ever the artist, continually adapting new
experiences for his major work, which was always prose fiction. Hollywood
provided this gifted writer the opportunity to develop a new manner
in his writing, and the material for an original expose of a dominant
aspect of American culture. It was Fitzgerald's final phase. |
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Jewel
in the Crown: The Modern American Short Story Nowhere is twentieth century American prose fiction more dominant than in the form of the modern short story. If Americans did not invent the form (some say they were co-parents with the French), they unquestionably made it their own. In the nineteenth century, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and James dominated in shorter fictional forms; but in the twentieth, every great and near great writer contributed to the genre, in the process exploring the range of cultural and social themes in American life. This lecture will show how the modern American short story, in the hands of its major practitioners, is not simply the jewel in the crown of prose fiction, but the revelation of twentieth century American life in all its breadth and depth. |
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American
Literary Orientalism: Then and Now From Transcendentalist thinkers of the nineteenth century, and
through modernist poets of the early twentieth century to the beat
generation of the 1960s, American writers have used their ideas
about "the East" in their works as both subject matter
and form. This presentation will discuss the politics and poetics
of such literary appropriation from the East, particularly East
Asia, focusing on writers such as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Pearl
S. Buck. Then, the presentation will address more contemporary
expressions of Orientalism in American literature and other forms
of art and culture, as well as how Asian American writers and artists
in turn have responded to Orientalism.
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Contemporary
American Issues |
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