From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, and American Studies (New Americanists)

<div>Paul Lauter, an icon of American Studies who has been a primary agent in its transformation and its chief ambassador abroad, offers a wide-ranging collection of essays that demonstrate and reflect on this important and often highly politicized discipline. While American Studies was formerly seen as a wholly subsidiary academic program that loosely combined the study of American history, literature, and art,<i>From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park</i>reveals the evolution of an independent, highly interdisciplinary program with distinctive subjects, methods, and goals that are much different than the traditional academic departments that nurtured it.<br /> With anecdote peppered discussions ranging from specific literary texts and movies to the future of higher education and the efficacy of unions,<i>From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park</i>entertains even as it offers a twenty-first century account of how and why Americanists at home and abroad now do what they do. Drawing on his forty-five years of teaching and research as well as his experience as a political activist and a cultural radical, Lauter shows how a multifaceted increase in the United States#x19; global dominion has infused a particular political urgency into American Studies. With its military and economic influence, its cultural and linguistic reach, the United States is-for better or for worse-too formidable and potent<i>not</i>to be understood clearly and critically.</div

Author: Paul Lauter

Language: English

Binding: Paperback

Pages: 304

Publisher: Duke University Press Books

Publication Date: 2001-04-17