Rent 9780312201579 | Cultural Conversations The Presence of the Past | Dilks, Stephen; Hansen, Regina; Parfitt, Matthew @knetbooks.com

Summary Table of Contents Author Biography

This unique new thematic composition reader brings together 6 key texts from the past and multiple contemporary reverberations to engage students in some of today's most significant cultural conversations.

Preface for Instructors

Introduction

(16)

Gender: Is One Born a Woman?

(110)

Text

... MORE

(24)

From A Room of One's Own

(24)

Virginia Woolf

``It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.''

Context

(21)

From The New Generation of Women

(2)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

From Orlando

(5)

Virginia Woolf

Studio Portrait of Virginia Woolf, 1925

(1)

Dust Jacket for A Room of One's Own

(1)

Vanessa Bell

The Four Marys

(1)

Reviews of A Room of One's Own

From The Criterion

(3)

Orlo Williams

From The Yale Review

(2)

Elisabeth Woodbridge

Anonymous Review from Punch

(1)

From ``Queen of the High-Brows,'' Evening Standard

(2)

Arnold Bennett

Anonymous Review from Times Literary Supplement

(3)

Contemporary Conversation

(60)

Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression

(14)

Bell Hooks

``To emphasize ... engagement with feminist struggle as political commitment we could avoid using the phrase `I am a feminist' (a linguistic structure designed to refer to some personal aspect of identity and self-definition) and could state `I advocate feminism.'''

The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

(4)

Audre Lorde

``... we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.''

Owning the Self in a Disowned World (a menagerie of nightmares and hallucinations)

(17)

Patricia Williams

``I wonder, in my disintegration into senselessness, in whom I shall be reborn. What would `the white Pat Williams' look like? Have I yet given birth to myself as `the black Pat Williams'?''

From The Straight Mind and Other Essays

(1)

Monique Wittig

The Category of Sex

100

(5)

One Is Not Born a Woman

105

(8)

``The category of sex is the category that ordains slavery for women, and it works specifically, as it did for black slaves, through an operation of reduction, by taking the part for the whole...''

Sex and Gender

113

(11)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

``The newly virulent homophobia of the past decade, directed alike against women and men even though logically its medical pretext ought...to give a relative exemptive privilege to lesbians, reminds ungently that it is more to our friends than to our enemies that sexually nonconforming women and men are perceptible as distinct groups.''

Extending Your Work

124

(3)

African American Identity: How Does Race Shape the Arts?

127

(82)

Text

128

(19)

From The Souls of Black Folk

128

(2)

W. E. B. Du Bois

Of Our Spiritual Strivings

130

(6)

The Sorrow Songs

``It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciouness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, --- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings...''

136

(11)

Context

147

(16)

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

148

(1)

Langston Hughes

Portrait of W. E. B. Du Bois

149

(1)

The Atlanta Exposition Address

150

(3)

Booker T. Washington

Motive of the NAACP Exposed

153

(2)

Marcus Garvey

Our Raison d'Etre

155

(1)

Anna Julia Cooper

Ethiopia

156

(1)

Frances E. W. Harper

Anonymous Review of The Souls of Black Folk, New York Times

157

(2)

From Criteria of Negro Art

159

(3)

W. E. B. Du Bois

Go Down Moses

162

(1)

Contemporary Conversation

163

(44)

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

163

(9)

Alice Walker

``But when, you will ask, did my overworked mother have time to know or care about feeding the creative spirit? ``The answer is so simple that many of us have spent years discovering it. We have constantly looked high, when we should have looked high---and low.''

Free at Last? A Personal Perspective on Race and Identity in America

172

(9)

Glenn Loury

``I no longer believe that the camaraderie engendered among blacks by our collective experience of racism constitutes an adequate basis for any person's self-definition.''

Lethal Weapons and City Games

181

(19)

Hazel Carby

``What Grand Canyon, the Lethal Weapon series, and a number of other contemporary Hollywood films have in common is their unspoken attempt to resolve and overcome a national, racialized crisis through an intimate interracial male partnership.''

From Fly-Girls to Bitches and Hos

200

(7)

Joan Morgan

``Like it or not, hip-hop is not only the dominion of the young, black and male, it is also the world in which young black women live and survive. A functional game plan for us... has to recognize hip-hop's ability to articulate the pain our community is in and use that knowledge to create a redemptive, healing space.''

Extending Your Work

207

(2)

Disabled Persons: How Do Individuals Form a Culture?

209

(102)

Text

210

(13)

From The World I Live In

210

(2)

Helen Keller

The Seeing Hand

212

(3)

The Five-Sensed World

215

(2)

Analogies in Sense Perception

217

(2)

Before the Soul Dawn

219

(4)

``Our blindness changes not a whit the course of inner realities. Of us it is as true as it is of the seeing that the most beautiful world is always entered through imagination.''

Context

223

(12)

Remarks upon Meeting Miss Laura Bridgman

223

(1)

Charles Dickens

Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race

224

(2)

Alexander Graham Bell

Letter on Behalf of Helen Keller

226

(1)

Mark Twain

Advertisement for The World I Live In, New York Times Saturday Review

227

(1)

Anonymous Review of The World I Live In, New York Times Book Review

227

(1)

From The Story of My Life

228

(2)

Helen Keller

The Water-Pump Scene from William Gibson's The Miracle Worker

230

(1)

Photograph of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan

231

(1)

Photograph of Helen Keller, Annie Sullivan, and Alexander Graham Bell

232

(1)

Photograph of Helen Keller with Winged Victory

233

(1)

Photograph of Twelve-Year-Old Helen with John Hitz

234

(1)

Contemporary Conversation

235

(73)

Protest at Gallaudet

235

(27)

Oliver Sacks

``Now, for the first time, there was an `identity' for the deaf, not merely a personal one, but a social, cultural one. They were no longer just individuals, with an individual's plights or triumphs; they were a people, with their own culture, like the Jews or the Welsh.''

Representations of Deaf People: The Infirmity and Cultural Models

262

(11)

Harlan Lane

``Most people who were born deaf or became so early in life ... and who grew up deaf as part of the deaf community have a different point of view. They see themselves as fundamentally visual people, with their own language, social organization, history, and mores---in short, with their own way of being, their own language and culture.''

Blind Rage: An Open Letter to Helen Keller

273

(7)

Georgiana Kleege

``... Helen ... you couldn't help yourself. Once you figured out that the only way your words would be read by anyone was if you took on the role of the first, original disability poster child.''

Reassigning Meaning

280

(19)

Simi Linton

``... the medicalization of disability casts human variation as deviance from the norm, as pathological condition, as deficit, and, significantly, as an individual burden and personal tragedy.''

Getting Hip to the Lights-Out Way

299

(9)

Slackjaw

``Suicide no longer interests me. Nor do I have any interest in becoming one of those over-compensatory types who learns how to ski and sky-dive. Nor am I interested in joining the blind subculture, full of blind people talking about blind things all the time, wasting their days wallowing in memories of sight.''

Extending Your Work

308

(3)

The Unconscious: How Can We Understand Ourselves?

311

(132)

Text

314

(43)

From A Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

314

(1)

Sigmund Freud

The Clinical Picture

315

(24)

The Second Dream

339

(18)

``I let the patient himself choose the subject of the day's work, and in that way I start out from whatever surface his unconsious happens to be presenting to his notice at the moment. But on this plan everything that has to do with the clearing-up of a particular symptom emerges piecemeal, woven into various contexts, and distributed over widely separated periods of time.''

Context

357

(17)

Picture of Jean-Martin Charcot with Patient and Observers

358

(1)

Drawing of Electric Brush and Probe Used to Treat Hysteria before Freud

359

(1)

From The Hidden Self

359

(2)

William James

Photograph of Freud's Consulting Room in Vienna

361

(1)

Photograph of Freud in 1906

362

(1)

From Veiling and Unveiling Psychotherapy

363

(3)

Fritz Wittels

From Postscript to Dora Case

366

(2)

Sigmund Freud

From Determinism and Superstition

368

(1)

Sigmund Freud

Summary of Early Responses to the Dora Analysis

369

(3)

Ernest Jones

``Stangled Emotion,'' New York Times

372

(2)

Contemporary Conversation

374

(64)

Scientia Sexualis

374

(15)

Michel Foucault

``The essential point is that sex was not only a matter of sensation and pleasure, of law and taboo, but also of truth and falsehood, that the truth of sex became something fundamental, useful, or dangerous, precious or formidable: in short, that sex was constituted as a problem of truth.''

Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle

389

(18)

Carol Gilligan

``Only when life-cycle theorists divide their attention and begin to live with women as they have lived with men will their vision encompass the experience of both sexes and their theories become correspondingly more fertile.''

Histories

407

(13)

Carolyn Steedman

``Using these two accounts [of Dora and the watercress girl], we may suddenly see the nineteenth century peopled by middle-aged men who, propelled by the compulsions of scientific inquiry, demanded stories from young women and girls; and then expressed their dissatisfaction with the form of the narratives they obtained.''

Dora

420

(18)

Janet Malcolm

``Today, everyone knows---except possible a few literary theorists---that the chief subject of the psychoanalytic dialogue is not the patient's repressed memories but the analyst's vacation.''

Extending Your Work

438

(5)

Nonviolence: A Weapon of Peace?

443

(84)

Text

444

(17)

Mahatma Gandhi

The Theory and Practice of Passive Resistance

445

(2)

Meaning of Satyagraha

447

(2)

Religion of Nonviolence

449

(2)

The Law of Suffering

451

(2)

The Doctrine of the Sword I

453

(3)

The Doctrine of the Sword II

456

(5)

``Only those who realize that there is something in man which is superior to the brute nature in him, and that the latter always yields to it, can effectively be Passive Resisters.''

Context

461

(10)

The Sermon on the Mount, 5.38-39

461

(1)

Matthew

From the Bhagavad Gita: The Yoga of Renunciation

461

(3)

Letter to Gandhi

464

(2)

Leo Tolstoy

Letter to Gandhi and Accompanying Poems

466

(1)

Rabindranath Tagore

All-India Radio Speech following the Assassination of Gandhi

467

(2)

Jawaharlal Nehru

Photograph of Young, Westernized Gandhi

469

(1)

Photograph of Gandhi Picking Up Salt on the Beach at Dandi

470

(1)

Contemporary Conversation

471

(53)

Letter from Birmingham Jail

471

(16)

Martin Luther King Jr.

``I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law.''

Ideologies of Madness

487

(9)

Susan Griffin

``The illusion this civilization retains, that we are somehow above nature, is so severe that in a sense we have come to believe that we can end material existence without dying. The absurdity of nuclear weaponry as a strategy for defense, when the use of those weapons would annihilate us, would in itself argue this.''

Nonviolent Social Defense

496

(9)

Petra Kelly

``Independent, resourceful, freedom-loving people that are prepared and organized to resist aggression cannot be conquered. No number of tanks and missiles can dominate a society unwilling to cooperate.''

Resistance and the Will to Resistance

505

(6)

Susanne Kappeler

``If white fascists are against the rights of Black people and thus against Black people, we seem to think it fit to describe them as being in resistance to them. Resistance is demoted to a mere synonym for opposition---aggresive enmity---ennobled by the positive connotations of a beleagured fight against oppression.''

Nonviolence and Peacemaking Today

511

(13)

Michael Nagler

``Once we accept that violence tears at the fabric of life (and nonviolence repairs it), it becomes clear that there are endless ways nonvilent energy could be brought to bear on almost any relationship.''

Extending Your Work

524

(3)

The Frontier: How Do We Imagine the West?

527

(134)

Text

529

(25)

The Significance of the Frontier in American History

529

(25)

Frederick Jackson Turner

``Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them.''

Context

554

(17)

From The Great West; or The Garden of the World

555

(2)

C. W. Dana

From Ranch Life in the Far West

557

(4)

Theodore Roosevelt

Photograph of a ``Dugout'' Home, exterior

561

(1)

Photograph of a ``Dugout'' Home, interior

561

(1)

Plenty Coups Travels to Washington

562

(2)

Plenty Coups

We Want to Tell You Something

564

(2)

Albert Yava

Map of Native American Diasporas

566

(2)

Photograph of Leadville, Colorado, ca. 1890

568

(3)

Contemporary Conversation

571

(81)

Denial and Dependence

571

(16)

Patricia Nelson Limerick

``As powerful and persistent as the fantasy that the West set Americans free from relying on the federal government was the fantasy that westward movement could set one free from the past.''

At the Buffalo Bill Museum, June 1988

587

(18)

Jane Tompkins

``I cannot resolve the contradiction between my experience at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center ... and my response to the shining figure of Buffalo Bill as it emerged from the pages of books---on the one hand a history of shame; on the other, an image of the heart's desire. But I have reached one conclusion that for a while will have to serve.''

Unearthing Herstory

605

(11)

Annette Kolodny

``... we need ... a radically new symbolic mode for relating to `the fairest, frutefullest, and pleasauntest [land] of all the worlde'; we can no longer afford to keep turning `America the Beautiful' into America the Raped.''

America's Debt to the Indian Nations: Atoning for a Sordid Past

616

(3)

Leslie Marmon Silko

The Border Patrol State

619

(6)

``The American public has difficultly believing such injustice continues to be inflicted upon Indian people because Amercians assume that the sympathy or tolerance they feel toward Indians is somehow felt or transferred to the government policy that deals with Indians. This is not the case.''

The American West and the Burden of Belief

625

(15)

N. Scott Momaday

``The oral tradition demands the greatest clarity of speech and hearing, the whole strength of memory, and an absolute faith in the efficacy of language. Every word spoken, every word heard, is the utterance of prayer.''

Unsettling Frontiers: Billy the Kid and the Outlaw Southwest

640

(12)

Eric Gary Anderson

``Despite Turner's footnoted refusal to speak of outlaws, then, the outlaw as satanic antihero was a well-known and very popular figure, and as the `archfiend' of them all, Billy the Kid was fast attaining the status of national legend.''

Extending Your Work

652

(9)

Index of Authors and Titles

661

STEPHEN DILKS (Ph.D. Rutgers University) is Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Missouri�Kansas City.

REGINA HANSEN (Ph.D. Boston College) is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at the College of General Studies, Boston University.

MATTHEW PARFITT (Ph.D. Boston College) is Associate Professor and Rhetoric Coordinator at the College of General Studies, Boston University.

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