Few historians are bold enough to go after America's sacred cows in their very own pastures. But Michael Zuckerman is no ordinary historian, and this collection of his essays is no ordinary book. In his effort to remake the meaning of the American tradition, Zuckerman takes the entire sweep of American history for his province. The essays in this collection, including two never before published and a new autobiographical introduction, range from early New England settlements to the hallowed corridors of modern Washington. Among his subjects are Puritans and Southern gentry, Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Spock, P. T. Barnum and Ronald Reagan. Collecting scammers and scoundrels, racists and rebels, as well as the purest genius, he writes to capture the unadorned American character. Recognized for his energy, eloquence, and iconoclasm, Zuckerman is known for provoking—and sometimes almost seducing—historians into rethinking their most cherished assumptions about the American past. Now his many fans, and readers of every persuasion, can newly appreciate the distinctive talents of one of America's most powerful social critics.
Any institution whose actors have included the likes of Ben Franklin, Noam Chomsky, Ezra Pound, Leon Higginbotham, Zane Grey, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, William Carlos Williams, Alan Kors, Thomas Evans, Martin Seligman, and Robert Strausz-Hup-to name just a few-has the potential for pretty amazing theater. The lives and times of these and other outsized characters are explored in this rich collection of essays, which first appeared in The Pennsylvania Gazette, the University of Pennsylvania's alumni magazine.
Seminar paper from the year 1998 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3 (A), Humboldt-University of Berlin (Institute for Anglistics/ American Studies), course: American Postmodernism, language: English, abstract: “By now you are a walking text“ (FACTS, 162), Zuckerman writes back to Philip Roth, having been asked whether or not Roth should publish his autobiography The Facts (1988). Zuckerman is one of the characters from Roth’s books, the hero of the trilogy Zuckerman Bound (1985) and some short stories. He is a fictional character whom Roth addresses in the prologue to The Facts, asking for advice concerning the publication of what Roth calls the result of “...writing a book absolutely backward, taking what I have already imagined and, as it were, desiccating it, so as to restore my experience to the original, prefictionalized factuality.“ (FACTS, 3) Reading Philip Roth in a context of postmodern literature in America I have come to wonder what it actually is he himself is trying to do with his writing. Comparing Roth’s early narratives to more recent works I am tempted to say that a development can be observed towards an incorporation of narrative features which can be described as ‘postmodern’, i.e. that there are strong influences of a ‘postmodern reality’ in the work of Philip Roth, although he himself can probably not be called a postmodern writer in the strict meaning of the term. Here, of course, already appears a major problem for my assumption: What is ‘postmodern writing’ at all? Are there common features shared by (all) the representatives of postmodernism which could justify the application of such a classification? And if so, what precisely are these features and how can they be described?
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.