Michael T. Gilmore's Books

Surface and Depth

The Quest for Legibility in American Culture

By: Michael T. Gilmore

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Surface and Depth

The Quest for Legibility in American Culture

By: Michael T. Gilmore

The idea of a common American culture has been in retreat for a generation or more. Arguments emphasizing difference have discredited the grand synthetic studies that marginalized groups and perspectives at odds with the master narrative. Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture is a fresh attempt to revitalize an interpretive overview. It seeks to recuperate a central tradition while simultaneously recognizing how much that tradition has occluded. The book focuses on the American zeal for knowing or making accessible. This compulsion has a long history stretching back to Puritan anti-monasticism; to the organization of the landscape into clearly delineated gridwork sections; and to the creation of a national government predicted on popular vigilance. It can be observed in the unmatched American receptivity to the motion pictures and to psychoanalysis: the first a technology of visual surfaces, the second a technique for plumbing interior depths. Popular literature, especially the Western and the detective story, has reinscribed the cult of legibility. Each genre features a plot that drives through impediments to transparent resolution. Elite literature has adopted a more contradictory stance. The landmarks of the American canon typically embark on journeys of discovery while simultaneously renouncing the possibility of full disclosure (as in Ahab's doomed pursuit of the "inscrutable" white whale). The notorious modernism of American literature, its precocious attraction to obscurity and multiple meaning, evolved as an effort to block the intrusions of a hegemonic cultural dynamic. The American passion for knowability has been prolific of casualties. Acts of making visible have always entailed the erasure and invisibility of racial minorities. American society has also routinely trespassed on customary areas of reserve. A nation intolerant of the hidden paradoxically pioneered the legal concept of privacy, but it did so in reaction to its own invasive excesses.

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Page Count

234

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

019803587X

ISBN 13

9780198035879

The War on Words

Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature

By: Michael T. Gilmore

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The War on Words

Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature

By: Michael T. Gilmore

How did slavery and race impact American literature in the nineteenth century? In this ambitious book, Michael T. Gilmore argues that they were the carriers of linguistic restriction, and writers from Frederick Douglass to Stephen Crane wrestled with the demands for silence and circumspection that accompanied the antebellum fear of disunion and the postwar reconciliation between the North and South. Proposing a radical new interpretation of nineteenth-century American literature, The War on Words examines struggles over permissible and impermissible utterance in works ranging from Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” to Henry James’s The Bostonians. Combining historical knowledge with groundbreaking readings of some of the classic texts of the American past, The War on Words places Lincoln’s Cooper Union address in the same constellation as Margaret Fuller’s feminism and Thomas Dixon’s defense of lynching. Arguing that slavery and race exerted coercive pressure on freedom of expression, Gilmore offers here a transformative study that alters our understanding of nineteenth-century literary culture and its fraught engagement with the right to speak.

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Page Count

342

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226294153

ISBN 13

9780226294155

Differences in the Dark

American Movies and English Theater

By: Michael T. Gilmore

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Differences in the Dark

American Movies and English Theater

By: Michael T. Gilmore

In Differences in the Dark, Michael T. Gilmore explores the divergent streams of American and British culture through each country's favorite medium: film and drama, respectively. An original cross-cultural study, this book shows the place of the movies in the country of reinvented lives and wide-open spaces, as contrasted with the disciplined traditions of the stage rigorously followed by actors and directors and British notions of class and collective memory.

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Page Count

230

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231112246

ISBN 13

9780231112246

American Romanticism and the Marketplace

By: Michael T. Gilmore

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American Romanticism and the Marketplace

By: Michael T. Gilmore

This book can take its place on the shelf beside Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden."—Choice "[Gilmore] demonstrates the profound, sustained, engagement with society embodied in the works of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Melville. In effect, he relocates the American Renaissance where it properly belongs, at the centre of a broad social, economic, and ideological movement from the Jacksonian era to the Civil War. Basically, Gilmore's argument concerns the writers' participation in what Thoreau called 'the curse of trade.' He details their mixed resistance to and complicity in the burgeoning literary marketplace and, by extension, the entire ' economic revolution' which between 1830 and 1860 'transformed the United States into a market society'. . . . "The result is a model of literary-historical revisionism. Gilmore's opening chapters on Emerson and Thoreau show that 'transcendental' thought and language can come fully alive when understood within the material processes and ideological constraints of their time. . . . The remaining five chapters, on Hawthorne and Melville, contain some of the most penetrating recent commentaries on the aesthetic strategies of American Romantic fiction, presented within and through some of the most astute, thoughtful considerations I know of commodification and the 'democratic public' in mid-nineteenth-century America. . . . Practically and methodologically, American Romanticism and the Marketplace has a significant place in the movement towards a new American literary history. It places Gilmore at the forefront of a new generation of critics who are not just reinterpreting familiar texts or discovering new texts to interpret, but reshaping our ways of thinking about literature and culture."—Sacvan Bercovitch, Times Literary Supplement "Gilmore writes with energy, clarity, and wit. The reader is enriched by this book." William H. Shurr, American Literature

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Page Count

192

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226293947

ISBN 13

9780226293943

Proteomics

From Protein Sequence to Function

By: Stephen R. Pennington,Michael J. Dunn

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Proteomics

From Protein Sequence to Function

By: Stephen R. Pennington,Michael J. Dunn

Proteomics is an emerging research area, and the book reviews genome projects in relation to the need for complementary proteomics programmes.

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Page Count

352

Publisher

Garland Science

Published Date

ISBN 10

1859962963

ISBN 13

9781859962961

Pedagogies for Internationalising Research Education

Intellectual equality, theoretic-linguistic diversity and knowledge chuàngxīn

By: Michael Singh,Jinghe Han

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Pedagogies for Internationalising Research Education

Intellectual equality, theoretic-linguistic diversity and knowledge chuàngxīn

By: Michael Singh,Jinghe Han

This book explores pedagogical concepts, metaphors and images of non-white, non-western researchers and research students on the inter/nationalization of education. Specifically, this book draws on the intellectual resources of China and India to explore the pedagogical dynamics and dimensions of the localization/globalization of education with non-Western characteristics. It introduces theoretic-linguistic non-Western concepts from the Tamil, Sanskrit and Chinese languages for use in Western, English-only education and redefines the intellectual basis for internationalising education. Debating whether ‘international education’ is Western-centric in terms of its privileging and promotion of Euro-American theoretical knowledge, this book contends that the internationalisation of Western-centric education can benefit from the intellectual power and powerfully relevant theorising performed by non-Western international students. It formulates a democratic vision for the internationalisation of education, with the potential to create transnational solidarity and constitute a forum for mobilising debates about global knowledge and power structures. It also provides key tools to use non-Western theoretic-linguistic tools and modes of critique in research undertaken in Anglophone Western universities.

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