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Race, Ralph Ellison and American Cold War Intellectual CultureEllison From the Heart of Europe

Race, Ralph Ellison and American Cold War Intellectual Culture: Ellison From the Heart of Europe [The use of birth and rebirth as a trope to represent historical change or to demarcate historical periods is not new. But the metaphor has held the USA in a particularly tight grasp since the late nineteenth century. At the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the fires that forged the USA’s present sense of modernity burned particularly hot. The country’s identity as a modern place with modern people is partially bound up with the ascendant valuation of rational, scientific modes of inquiry and industrial capitalism. Alongside this industrial modernity, American scholars and industrialists also yoked the country’s identity to newly forged intellectual ties to classical Renaissance antiquity. It is in the late nineteenth-century historiography of Jacob Burckhardt and his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1867) that we first find the identification of the Italian medieval period as a “renaissance.” And as Jonathan Arac writes in “F.O. Matthiessen: Authorizing an American Renaissance”, Burckhardt’s intellectual influence had an effect on the way Americans undertook classical studies as well as the way Americans saw themselves connected to the ancient past (94).] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Race, Ralph Ellison and American Cold War Intellectual CultureEllison From the Heart of Europe

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2013
ISBN
978-1-349-34043-9
Pages
59 –89
DOI
10.1057/9781137313843_3
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[The use of birth and rebirth as a trope to represent historical change or to demarcate historical periods is not new. But the metaphor has held the USA in a particularly tight grasp since the late nineteenth century. At the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the fires that forged the USA’s present sense of modernity burned particularly hot. The country’s identity as a modern place with modern people is partially bound up with the ascendant valuation of rational, scientific modes of inquiry and industrial capitalism. Alongside this industrial modernity, American scholars and industrialists also yoked the country’s identity to newly forged intellectual ties to classical Renaissance antiquity. It is in the late nineteenth-century historiography of Jacob Burckhardt and his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1867) that we first find the identification of the Italian medieval period as a “renaissance.” And as Jonathan Arac writes in “F.O. Matthiessen: Authorizing an American Renaissance”, Burckhardt’s intellectual influence had an effect on the way Americans undertook classical studies as well as the way Americans saw themselves connected to the ancient past (94).]

Published: Oct 26, 2015

Keywords: Classical Tradition; American Literature; Sovereign Power; Literary Humanism; Chattel Slavery

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