A New Context for a New American Studies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2731970 |
|---|---|
| Authors | R F Berkhofer (0000-0002-5972-2089, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1989 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 588 |
| Publication date | 1989-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2713094 |
| OpenAlex | W2326585167 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 4 |
War II was the effort to escape the narrow focus of the New Criticism in favor of a broader interpretation based upon contextual study. Context seemed to be found in a vague but polysemic definition of culture. Under the rubric of culture, scholars of America in disciplines as diverse as music, art, literature, and intellectual history believed that they were all studying and thereby constituting a common context in order to move beyond the special interests and methods of their separate fields. By exploring the myths, symbols, and images embedded in texts, tales, and artifacts, those scholars thought they exposed the masked and other deep patterns underlying American culture. Those covert foundations revealed the ambivalences, ironies, and paradoxes of the American mind whether found in the dream of the self-made man, classic and later individualism, industrialism and agrarianism, the Brooklyn Bridge and the American Adam.' Today's American Studies scholarship repudiates most of the cultural and political premises of the myth-symbol-image school; less clear is how far current approaches to context supersede past practices. New subject matter and new terminology would seem to indicate at first reading a new approach to American Studies, if not a new American Studies. The concern with myths
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,21 |
| Citation span | 2002 - 2016 (15) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |