: Eric Aronoff
: Composing Cultures Modernism, American Literary Studies, and the Problem of Culture
: University of Virginia Press
: 9780813934853
: 1
: CHF 34.60
:
: Belletristik
: English
The term",culture", has become ubiquitous in both academic and popularconversations, but its usefulness is a point of dispute. Taking the current shift from culturalstudies to aesthetics as the latest form of this discussion, Eric Aronoff contends that in Americanmodernism, the concepts of culture and of aesthetics have always been inseparable. The modernistconcept of culture, he argues, arose out of an interdisciplinary dialogue about value, meaning, andform among social critics, artists, anthropologists, and literary critics, including figures asdiverse as Van Wyck Brooks, Edward Sapir, Willa Cather, Lewis Mumford, John Crowe Ransom, RaymondWeaver, and Allen Tate. These figures proposed new ways to conceive of culture that intertwinedtheories 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 asopposed-cultural anthropology and aesthetics, American literary history and literarycriticism, and multiculturalism and regionalism-are in fact engaged in common debate andproceed from shared arguments about culture and form.