front cover of Humans
Humans
Edited by Laura Bieger, Joshua Shannon, and Jason Weems
Terra Foundation for American Art, 2021
Surveys the representations and constructions of the human being in American art.
 
Humans are organisms, but “the human being” is a term referring to a complicated, self-contradictory, and historically evolving set of concepts and practices. Humans explores competing versions, constructs, and ideas of the human being that have figured prominently in the arts of the United States. These essays consider a range of artworks from the colonial period to the present, examining how they have reflected, shaped, and modeled ideas of the human in American culture and politics. The book addresses to what extent artworks have conferred more humanity on some human beings than others, how art has shaped ideas about the relationships between humans and other beings and things, and in what ways different artistic constructions of the human being evolved, clashed, and intermingled over the course of American history. Humans both tells the history of a concept foundational to US civilization and proposes new means for its urgently needed rethinking.
 
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front cover of The Imaginary and Its Worlds
The Imaginary and Its Worlds
American Studies after the Transnational Turn
Edited by Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar, and Johannes Voelz
Dartmouth College Press, 2013
The Imaginary and Its Worlds collects essays that boldly rethink the imaginary as a key concept for cultural criticism. Addressing both the emergence and the reproduction of the social, the imaginary is ideally suited to chart the consequences of the transnational turn in American studies. Leading scholars in the field from the United States and Europe address the literary, social, and political dimensions of the imaginary, providing a methodological and theoretical groundwork for American studies scholarship in the transnational era and opening new arenas for conceptualizing formations of imaginary belonging and subjectivity. This important state-of-the-field collection will appeal to a broad constituency of humanists working to overcome methodological nationalism. The Imaginary and Its Worlds: An Introduction • LITERARY IMAGINARIES • Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America - Ramón Saldívar • The Necessary Fragmentation of the (U.S.) Literary-Cultural Imaginary - Lawrence Buell • Imaginaries of American Modernism - Heinz Ickstadt • SOCIAL IMAGINARIES • William James versus Charles Taylor: Philosophy of Religion and the Confines of the Social and Cultural Imaginaries - Herwig Friedl • The Shaping of We-Group Identities in the African American Community: A Perspective of Figurational Sociology on the Cultural Imaginary - Christa Buschendorf • Russia’s Californio Romance: The Other Shores of Whitman’s Pacific - Lene Johannessen • Form Games: Staging Life in the Systems Epoch - Mark Seltzer • POLITICAL IMAGINARIES • Real Toads - Walter Benn Michaels • Obama Unwound: The Romanticism of Victory and the Defeat of Compromise - Christopher Newfield • Barack Obama’s Orphic Mysteries - Donald E. Pease • Coda. The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer - Winfried Fluck • Contributors • Index
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front cover of Revisiting the Sixties
Revisiting the Sixties
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on America's Longest Decade
Edited by Laura Bieger and Christian Lammert
Campus Verlag, 2013
The Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Summer of Love—the 1960s were one of the most turbulent decades in US history. These years launched an unprecedented public debate over the meaning of “America,” dividing US society in deep and troubling ways. Yet despite the passage of time, the contemporary crises in the “American way of life” and the political system that sustain it might well make one wonder: to what degree are we still living on the outskirts of the '60s? By examining crucial events, trends, and individuals from the civic, social, political, intellectual, cultural, and economic spheres across a range of disciplines, this volume offers a nuanced and pluralist account of the longest decade in America.
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