In modern life, we encounter stories of people with a frequency unfathomable even twenty years ago. In American culture, the lives of celebrities, in particular, have proven the dominant form of mainstream life-texts from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Dynamic, volatile and open-ended, celebrity lives are useful for examining the renegotiation and revision of biographical narratives within culture over time. In this article, I will use the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to analyze a specific life-story's flow through culture. Focussing upon the intersections between multiple stories in a given historical moment, this article will demonstrate the revision such intersections prompt and the ways in which those revisions reverberate through subsequent scholarship. The article will argue that these narrative corruptions should be accounted for when we use stories of lives as a mode of cultural analysis.

In the cinema of Joel and Ethan Coen, contemporary America is depicted as an incoherent space in which traditional beliefs constantly collide with the new world order. Shaped by the erosion of commonly accepted values and the ubiquitous presence of the media and advertisements, this hybrid America is a world of commerce, consumption, and economic plight. While its cities are plagued by segregation, outbursts of casual violence undermine the myth of an unspoiled life in the countryside. Illustrating postmodern culture's preference for the periphery versus the center, the movies of the Coen brothers find a glimmer of morality remaining on the margin of society. Unimposing and compassionate characters such as the pregnant small-town detective in Fargo or the naive yet brilliant protagonist of The Hudsucker Proxy personify an idealistic, innocent America that is about to be displaced by selfish greed. Focusing on Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and The Man Who Wasn't There, my essay argues that the Coens’ visual playfulness, and their tendency to mine various cinematic genres, serve to emphasize their scathing critique of the American victory narrative.

To reconsider the affective turn in American literary studies, this essay reads Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), with reference to “Benito Cereno” (1855) and The Confidence-Man (1857), as an anti-affect story. By shedding light on silent characters in these works – Bartleby, Babo, and Black Guinea – it argues that Melville endeavors to adumbrate, not articulate, their private interiorities through language. Calling the inner recesses of his silent characters “secret emotions,” Melville probes into the boundaries between the effable and the ineffable by testing the limits of literary language. If “affect” refers to the kind of emotion that eludes signification through language, reading Melville in this manner encourages a reappraisal of the relationship between affect as a non-linguistic emotion and literature as a linguistic construct.

This article reassesses the so-called “Radical Right,” a political phenomenon that emerged in the early 1960s and was especially associated with a controversial conservative anticommunism. The article argues that the National Education Program (NEP), which was founded in Arkansas in 1943, made an important and unheralded contribution to the Radical Right and the consequential activism it stimulated in pockets of the South and Southwest. The article also, however, argues that the Radical Right ultimately made a less significant contribution to the subsequent resurgence of conservatism than has often been suggested. Conventional wisdom maintains that it aligned religious, economic, and racial concerns under the umbrella of anticommunism and thereby fostered a distinctly modern conservatism; the NEP demonstrates that these concerns were not as disparate or marginal prior to the 1960s as this narrative assumes. The Radical Right's fixation with communist subversion also often diluted efforts to promote conservative principles – the NEP became less focussed on advancing ideological principles during this period. After the mid-1950s, moreover, the declining legitimacy of McCarthyite politics outwith parts of the South and Southwest undermined the NEP's wider efforts, precipitated the organization's terminal decline, and ensured that the Radical Right created problems for the broader conservative movement.

Beginning with Talal Asad's (2007) claim that torture is a hermeneutic, this article investigates the ongoing relationship between torture and the US university's primary ways of making meaning about racialized difference. The Stanford prison experiment is routinely referenced as a seminal study revealing why people engage in torture. Through a close reading of Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, the major account of the SPE, I raise concerns about how torture is used to enable moral development and to promote an understanding of difference as a “problem” to be managed by institutionalized diversity projects.

2016 marked the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Martin Luther King Day, which honors the civil rights leader and recognizes the contributions of African Americans. However, the holiday has also become a day of debate over King's legacy and, in turn, over the (mis)use of the nation's civil religion. On the one hand, the civil religious narrative of enduring unity, of the Promised Land, and of King as the nation's redeemer, which evolved around the implementation of the holiday during the 1970s and early 1980s, appealed to a broad audience and forged a sense of unity. On the other hand, it also masked real progress and lead to a symbolic “pseudo-integration” of African Americans. Hence, as the ideals of the Declaration of Independence seemed to be finally achieved, it is not surprising that King has been succcessfully turned into a poster boy against affirmative action.

Historians seeking to explain the late twentieth-century rightward shift of urban ethnic whites have tended to ignore the shifting meaning and content of white ethnic identity in this transition, and the utility of these changes to conservative political discourse. This article, focussing on the ethnic strategies of the Republican mayor of Cleveland, Ralph Perk, seeks to illustrate the importance of the “New Ethnicity” of the 1970s, and its reconceptualization of white ethnicity as a series of “values,” in the making of urban ethnic Republicans. In doing so it reorients our understanding of Perk – the “Ethnic Mayor” – and places ethnicity at the heart of the conservative insurgency reshaping urban and national politics during this period.

Writers and critics in the Gilded Age United States frequently debated the relations between literature and science. A common contemporary interpretation of this relationship held that these two ways of knowing and writing were fundamentally opposed and that the advancement of science in American culture came at the expense of literary sensibilities. Nevertheless, and often as an effort to challenge this supposed opposition, many scientists also cultivated reputations as literary figures, and produced or planned diverse works ranging from travel writing and novels to verse drama. Such authors as Clarence King, J. Peter Lesley, Simon Newcomb and Nathaniel Southgate Shaler sustained a hybrid literary–scientific culture in the late nineteenth century. This interdisciplinary cultural zone was fragile and increasingly fractured by around 1900, as the emergence and consolidation of new categories of intellectual labour became increasingly wedded to the images of the “professional author” and the “scientist” as mutually exclusive identities. This article seeks to contribute to recurrent debates about the “two cultures” of literature and science by foregrounding the differentiation of these new forms of professional and intellectual identity as a decisive factor which constrained the possibility of a shared literary–scientific culture by the turn of the twentieth century.

This article analyzes America Today, a United States Information Service publication circulated to Southeast Asian Chinese between 1949 and 1952. Although the federal government had no intention of lifting immigration restrictions, the magazine promoted the idea that the United States provided humanitarian assistance and abundant opportunities to Chinese immigrants as well as their American-born Chinese counterparts to achieve upward mobility, form a conjugal family, and enjoy patriarchal authority. The stories demonstrated an attempt to inspire Chinese male readers in Southeast Asia to support the United States and the “free world,” rather than Communism and the People's Republic of China.

The Transcendentalist legacy in Auster's Leviathan faces many questions posed by postmodern cultural politics. Previous studies of the novel have highlighted the irresolvable tension between writerly solitude and political engagement, which largely accounts for Benjamin Sachs's undoing. Departing from this interpretation, the present essay provides an alternative reading that links Auster's Thoreauvian representation with Cavell's idea of Emersonian Perfectionism. It seeks to cast further light on the idea of America, examine its relation to self-transformation, and reevaluate Sachs's life and work within a philosophical framework.

Recalling his work as cofounder and contributor to Universities and Left Review, or the ULR group, in the lead-up to the founding of cultural studies during the 1950s, Stuart Hall noted that much of that work had to do with the United States. “In geopolitical terms we were of course neutralists, hostile to the politics emanating from the State Department in Washington,” Hall wrote, “but culturally we were nonetheless attracted by the vitality of American popular life, indeed to the domain of mass culture itself.” If the ULR group and similar collectives shared an “anxiety about the stupendous power of the booming consumer capitalism of post-war America,” they were also united by an appreciation for the ways the “vitality and raucousness of American culture certainly loosened England's tight-lipped, hierarchical class cultures and carried inside it possibilities – or the collective dream? – for a better future, which we felt was a serious political loss to deny.” Not unrelatedly, by the 1960s and 1970s, cultural studies and certain quarters of American intellectual life were proceeding along comparable tracks. Many American scholars and at least some working in cultural studies moved toward social history that emphasized the “hidden experiences of subordinated groups and classes.” Undertaken in concert with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this version of social history would ramify widely, furnishing the very questions and analytic habits of many fields, not least American studies.