During the American sixties, the resurgent interest in Wilhelm Reich and the widespread impact of Marcuse's Eros and Civilisation encouraged the idea of coupling psychoanalysis and Marxism. Reich's works reminded radicals once again of the integral connection between political revolution and sexual freedom, while Marcuse's critique, a bold attempt of the mid-fifties to read Freud as a revolutionary utopian, suggested the desirability of a marriage between Marx and Freud, a marriage that would have seemed unnatural to many of the Old Left generation. Certainly, too, the writings of Norman O. Brown and Paul Goodman gave credence to the idea that sex, psychology, and radical politics were necessarily interrelated.

Lionel Trilling is generally regarded as one of the most important American critics self-consciously indebted to Matthew Arnold's idea of critical humanism. But his legacy draws little interest now that humanism has presumably been “unmasked” in academic circles to reveal the various political agendas beneath its program of disinterested idealism. For many critics on the Left, he is remembered, in Cornel West's phrase, as “the godfather of neo-conservatism,” and perhaps a precursor of such recent advocates of the humanities as Allan Bloom and former Secretary of Education William Bennett. Much of this is doubtless due to Trilling's opposition to the general tenor of the 1960s counter-culture, some of whose participants are now today's academic cultural critics. But if Trilling is to be remembered as a kind of mandarin apologist for “high culture,” he should be remembered as a very troubled and ambivalent one.

Under the Mormon scheme of things in 1831, somewhere in Indian territory (somewhere it was thought, west of Independence, Missouri) a city was to be built by those who accepted the gospel restored through Joseph Smith, Jr., God's prophet for the latter days. It was to be a city of refuge – a place where the saints would be safe from both the corruptions of the day and the judgement that was to fall upon the world – and a city of righteousness, endowed with the Spirit of the Lord.

Eastman Kodak was in the vanguard of those companies seeking to capitalize on newly available mass markets at home and abroad in the 1880s and 1890s. George Eastman had acute instincts for photographic innovation, cost-effective manufacturing, and the assembling of powerful corporate structures, but his greatest gift was for seizing on, and fostering, the general demand for a commodity with specious aesthetic inflections – a simple camera, together with a processing service available by mail – at a time when the appetite for such things was becoming insatiable. As Lawrence W. Levine has argued, photography

was the perfect instrument for a society with a burgeoning middle class, which could not satisfy itself with processes and images that had previously been confined to elite circles.

The aim of this article is to examine aspects of Henry James's predicament within the context of mass photography. In particular, the focus will be on “The Real Thing” (1893) and its engagement with issues of representation and reproduction in an arena forever changed by Kodak.

The subtly entrapping nature of celebrity has been a common theme of Don DeLillo's work since his third novel, Great Jones Street (1973), narrated by a twenty-six-year-old rock star, Bucky Wunderlick, who tires of fame in the middle of a national tour and goes to ground in a seedy New York bedsitter. This theme, however, finds its fullest expression in DeLillo's 1991 novel Mao II, where it is linked to a specific concern which may be closer to home for him – the paradoxical fascination with author–recluses in American celebrity culture. DeLillo, who came to reluctant terms with major league celebrity from the mid-1980s onwards after a long period of respectful reviews and polite notices, has praised reclusive authors for “refusing to become part of the all-incorporating treadmill of consumption and disposal,” in spite of the “automatic mechanism” of the media which tries “to absorb certain such reluctant entities into the weave.” Mao II is about what happens when this absorption takes place, and whether or not this wholly devalues the author's own tactics of silence and renunciation.

From his position as editor of the Nation from 1865 until 1899, E. L. Godkin steered one of the liberal standard-bearers in a transatlantic network of cosmopolitan liberals. From this position he helped define nineteenth-century cosmopolitan liberalism. However, while Godkin fitted in the mainstream of liberal thought in 1865, by the time he retired he occupied the conservative fringe. Godkin never made the transition from a nineteenth-century cosmopolitan liberalism to a newer nationalistic democratic liberalism because democracy failed him. Instead of peace, commerce, and learning, democracy created an American Empire rooted in war, protectionism, ignorance, jingoism, and plunder, culminating in the Spanish–American War. Godkin's critique of American imperialism was thus based on his pessimistic but perceptive reading of the flaws of American democracy. Godkin believed that the rise of “jingoist” democracy had doomed the American “experiment” and thought that the nation had slipped into the historical, degenerative cycle of empire. By tracing Godkin's increasingly bitter warnings about the dangers of democracy in the second half of the nineteenth century, we can catch a glimpse of a dying worldview that questioned the ability of democracy to act as a moral force in the world.

The resurgence of American evangelicalism since the 1940s unfolded in conjunction with efforts by policymakers to instrumentalize religion for the assertion of empire. Missions and foreign aid are two key areas where these dynamics intersected. They show that evangelicals were both at home in the “American century” and deeply critical of global power. Rather than being a weakness, however, these tensions enabled the movement to become a crucial arbiter at a time when the country's new role was not yet firmly legitimized at home. In particular, evangelicalism helped reconcile isolationist, antistatist, and antimilitarist sentiments with hegemonic aspirations, the national security state, and the military–industrial complex.

In October 1865 Cambridge University was offered an endowment for a lectureship in the History and Institutions of the United States. In February 1866, after full and open discussion, the Senate of the University, which was composed of all Masters of Arts, voted to reject the offer. This false start to American Studies in Cambridge was no mere donnish eccentricity, but an indication of the attitudes of conservative Englishmen to the United States at the close of the Civil War.

Jean Lartéguy's 1960 novel The Centurions, which follows a group of French paratroopers through the wars in Indochina and Algeria, is one that has achieved cult status within the US military. In embracing this novel as a valuable how-to guide for counterinsurgents, those who promote The Centurions ignore the sexual violence and misogyny at the heart of the work, reflecting deeper silences over the issue of sexual violence in war. This article explores both the depictions of sexual violence in The Centurions and the silences that surround those depictions.

This paper examines the representation of American everyday life and the language of the legal system in the work of Charles Reznikoff. It draws comparisons between Reznikoff's accounts of the lives of immigrants to America in his work, and Jacques Derrida's experience of colonial relationships as described in his book Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin. Charles Reznikoff was the son of Russian Jews who moved to America to escape the pogroms of the late nineteenth century. His parents spoke Yiddish and Russian, his grandparents spoke Hebrew, and Reznikoff's first language was English. This familial linguistic complexity was further added to by his associations with experimental modernist poetry and poetics through the “Objectivists,” an environment that provided him with the poetic forms in which to explore relationships between language, experience and its representation. I cite two other linguistic contexts: that of the law, acquired through his legal training, and that of commerce and sales, acquired through working as a hat salesman for his parents' business. Reznikoff therefore had no naturalized relationship between language and either family or national identity, or between language and place. I use Derrida's notion of “a first language that is not my own” to explore the implications for Reznikoff's poetry, and particularly the relationship between the specific accounts of experience in Testimony and the more general notions of nation and justice. While I conclude that a concern of the poems is always language, and what language means in different contexts, the poems also seek to connect with the material consequences of injustice for the fleshly bodies of the victims.

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois described African American music as a “gift” to America, contesting the tendency to regard white interest in black culture as appropriation or theft. Yet this metaphor invoked the complex circuits of indebtedness and obligation that are intrinsic to gift exchange in anthropological accounts of the practice, challenging white recipients of the gift to make adequate response. This challenge is most systematically addressed in a sequence of films that tell stories about white enthusiasm for the blues. The Blues Brothers (1980), Crossroads (1986), Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) and Black Snake Moan (2006) depict the blues as a gift and explore how whites might appropriately acknowledge and reciprocate for receiving it in a culture distorted by racial inequalities. The films develop a distinct set of narrative conventions for handling the politics of racial obligation, vacillating between seeing black music as a transracial cultural resource on the one hand and as a racially defined, inalienable possession of African Americans on the other. Using these same conventions, Honeydripper (2007) invites us to see the process of cultural exchange from a different perspective in which the problematic status of the blues as racialized property is diminished.

The Warren Court induces schizophrenia. On the one hand it is difficult for anybody with a civilized political sensibility not to admire the policy content of the Supreme Court's judgments during Earl Warren's Chief Justiceship. If the three areas of decision-making with which this paper is concerned — segregation, reapportionment, and the rights of the criminal suspect — are examined, the Supreme Court clearly was on the side of the angels. It declared segregation to be unconstitutional. In a series of decisions the Court ended the gross malapportionment of legislative districting both at state and federal levels. Finally, the Warren Court attempted to change the balance between the criminal suspect and the police, by substantially increasing the restrictions on the latter's freedom of action. And yet, despite one's approval for the policy embodied in these decisions, there is something curiously disconcerting about the Court's judgments. One has a very strong sense that something has gone awry. This sense arises from the manner and mode in which the opinions of the Court are constructed. All the judgments under consideration in this paper — Brown v. Board of Education, Baker v. Carr, Reynolds v. Sims, and Miranda v. Arizona — share a common characteristic, a curious lack of substance, a lack of historical, constitutional, and legal substance. In other words, there is an absence of the kind of argument in the Supreme Court's opinions in these cases, which distinguishes a judicial decision from any other sort of decision.

Situating Edith Wharton in the context of America's accelerating petro-culture, this essay argues that her novels critique a society that takes for granted high-volume, nonrenewable energy, and specifically revolutionary new kinds of energy: petroleum, natural gas, and the fossil-fueled power stations necessary for the large-scale, continuous production of electricity. Attention to the idiom of energy in The House of Mirth and its mirror text, The Custom of the Country, along with Ida Tarbell's History of Standard Oil and Theodore Roosevelt's conservationism, sheds new light on assumptions about moral agency, personal freedom, changing modes of thought, and the environment between 1880 and World War I. The essay shows how Wharton's allegorical treatment of Lily Bart and Undine Spragg anticipates the notion of externalities or consequences of industrial activities that affect outside parties but are not reflected in the cost of production.

As a new paradigm and frame for US geopolitical imperatives, the war on terror poses particular challenges of representation. Like other media today, American cinema screens the war on terror – that is to say, it functions both to show and to conceal the conditions and effects of perpetual war. It dramatizes the hauntology of this war and it also mystifies and demystifies its violence. This essay focusses on the example of the film Zero Dark Thirty to consider how the film re-presents the aporia of representation that structures the production of the war on terror as a field of perceptible reality and reflects the geopolitical priorities of an American worldview. Central to this aporia is the mystification of the “elusive enemy” and the naturalization of a “long war.” The hunt for Osama bin Laden has been a symbolic narrativization of this aporia and the essay comments on how Zero Dark Thirty re-presents this.

Early histories of the civil rights movement that appeared prior to the 1980s were primarily biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr. Collectively, these works helped to create the familiar “Montgomery to Memphis” narrative framework for understanding the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. This narrative begins with King's rise to leadership during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, and ends with his 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Since the 1980s, a number of studies examining the civil rights movement at local and state levels have questioned the usefulness and accuracy of the King-centric Montgomery to Memphis narrative as the sole way of understanding the civil rights movement. These studies have made it clear that civil rights struggles already existed in many of the communities where King and the organization of which he was president, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), ran civil rights campaigns in the 1960s. Moreover, those struggles continued long after King and the SCLC had left those communities. Civil rights activism also thrived in many places that King and the SCLC never visited. As a result of these local and state studies, historians have increasingly framed the civil rights movement within the context of a much longer, ongoing struggle for black freedom and equality, unfolding throughout the twentieth century at local, state and national levels. More recently, a number of books have sought to place the civil rights movement within the larger context of international relations. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott next year, the event that launched King's movement leadership, it seems an appropriate point to return to the existing literature on King and to assess what has already been done, as well as to point to the gaps that still need to be filled, in what remains important field of study.

For most of the twentieth century, the predominant view of Edgar Allan Poe held him to be a passionate aesthete with little interest in the political and social issues of his time. However, in recent years, there have been numerous scholarly efforts to place Poe back into his cultural milieu and to illustrate that rather than an apolitical romantic Poe was indeed a man very much engaged in the major debates of his day. Much of this attempt to historicize Poe has focused on the issue of slavery and has reconstructed Poe as a typical antebellum Southerner, possessing aristocratic pretensions, racist opinions, and an overwhelming – though perhaps subconscious – fear of slaves and their potential for uprising.For a sampling of recent studies that address Poe, the South, and slavery, see Richard Gray, ‘ “I am a Virginian’: Edgar Allan Poe and the South,” in Edgar Allan Poe: The Design of Order, ed. A. Robert Lee (London: Vision, 1987), 182–201; Louis Rubin, The Edge of the Swamp: A Study of Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); John Carlos Rowe, “Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism,” in Poe's Pym: Critical Explorations, ed. Richard Kopley (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 117–41; Joan Dayan, “Romance and Race,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 89–109; Dana Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading ‘Race’ in American Literature, 1638–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Scott Bradfield, Dreaming Revolution: Transgression in the Development of American Romance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993) ; James Livingston, “Subjectivity and Slavery in Poe's Autobiography of Ambitious Love,” Psychohistory Review, 21 (1993): 175–96; Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American Literature, 66 (1994): 239–73; Sam Worley, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the Ideology of Slavery,” ESQ, 40 (1994): 219–50; David Leverenz, “Poe and Gentry Virginia,” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, eds. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 210–37; Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Nancy Harrowitz, “Criminality and Poe's Orangutan: The Question of Race in Detection,” in Agonistics: Arenas of Creative Conflict, eds. Janet Lungstrum and Elizabeth Sauer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 177–95; Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Lesley Ginsberg, “Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe's ‘The Black cat,’ ” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, eds. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 99–128. Recently, Terence Whalen has challenged many of the assertions of these critics in Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum American (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). This body of work has convincingly illustrated the connections between Poe's often ignored views on slavery and fictional works such as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black cat,” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” One of Poe's final stories, “Hop-Frog” (1849), a tale of an abused dwarf's violent revenge upon his cruel master, would certainly lend itself to an examination of the author's views on slavery but has never been fruitfully employed in this discussion apart from being briefly mentioned in larger discussions of Poe and slavery by Harry Levin, Louis Rubin, and, most recently, Joan Dayan, who has argued that “Hop-Frog,” Poe's “most horrible tale of retribution,” is his “envisioned revenge for the national sin of slavery.”Dayan, “Amorous Ladies,” 258. See also Dayan, “Romance and Race,” 103–04; Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1957), 122; and Rubin, The Edge of the Swamp, 183–89.

Commenting on the flap over George W. Bush's visit to Bob Jones University during the 2000 primary election campaign, journalist Hendrik Hertzberg claimed that even staunch conservatives decried the South Carolina college's ban on inter-racial dating as “indefensible.” “This may seem unremarkable,” he noted, ”until one reflects how far it was from being the case a generation or two ago, when miscegenation was racism's trump card and even the most enlightened Americans, black and white, took it for granted that sexual fear was its unkillable heart.” Hertzberg seems unduly optimistic - violence against the bodies of racial “others’ continues to splatter across the American landscape, from the Rodney King beating to the Amadou Diallo shooting. The police rape of Abner Louima illuminates how power, not sexuality, informs such assaults.