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Title: The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History by Richard Wightman Fox, T.J. Jackson Lears ISBN: 0-226-25954-4 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1993 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $58.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: A Pot Pourri of Cultural Studies at its Best
Comment: This is an important collection of essays on culture in the history of America. It bears all of the strengths and weaknesses of an anthology, repetition and disjointedness as well as insight and sometimes brilliant analysis. The nine original essays in this volume run the gamut from analysis of early American murder narratives through middlebrow culture to representations of technology at the 1964 New York World's Fair and Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" as public art. In each the authors seek to explore the culture of Americans and how it relates to larger public and private issues.

The study of American history has been in crisis for some years, as older constructs have succumbed to the onslaught of deconstruction and other methodologies for exploring the past. Perhaps cultural analysis-a combination of sociology and anthropology applied to historical episodes-would help historians out of this cul-de-sac. As the editors comment: "At a time of deep intellectual disarray, 'culture' offers a provisional, nominalist version of coherence: whatever the fragmentation of knowledge, however centrifugal the spinning of the scholarly wheel, 'culture'--which (even etymologically) conveys a sense of safe nurture, warm growth, budding or ever--present wholeness--will shelter us" (p. 1).

I found two of the essays in this volume especially interesting. The first was Karen Halttunen's "Early American Murder Narratives: The Birth of Horror," chapter 3 in the volume. She argues that the dominant narrative of murder was dramatically transformed in the latter half of the eighteenth century from a salvation story of the condemned murderer into a secular account of the horror of the murder itself. In other words, earlier accounts emphasized a jeremiad of redemption in which the murderer might make amends and achieve foregiveness through the forfeiture of life. The innocent slain played a critical role here not for the gruesome nature of their murders, but for providing the act for which the murderer needed salvation. It was very much, according to Halttunen, a morality play in which the condemned prisoner received justice and atonement. Evil is punished and those suffering are redeemed. Because of the Enlightenment and its secularization of culture this began to change. Instead of emphasizing the redemption of the murderer, the accounts after the end of the eighteenth century began to move away from questions of good and evil to discuss the nature of horror without the explicit value judgments associated with characterizing good and evil and religious terms.

The other essay that I found especially interesting was Michael L. Smith's "Making Time: Representations of Technology at the 1964 World's Fair," chapter 8 in the volume. The 1964 New York World's Fair was, in the words of Robert Moses, "an Olympics of Progress" and "an endless parade of the wonders of mankind" (p. 223). Smith argues that historians have long commented on the failure of depictions of the past and the future in such extravaganzas to reflect reality. "In so doing," Smith writes, "many of us have overlooked not only the particular dynamics by which these fairs (and corporations, and governments) codify and represent cultural values, but also the tactics with which the 'audience' receives or reappropriates what they see" (p. 224). Smith suggests that the depiction of the future in the 1964 World's Fair strove "to be comforting, to evoke of sense of change only in the most cosmetic and unthreatening forms" (p. 226). In this context social strife disappeared, any other problems-economic or political or religious or cultural-also homogenized into a gentle positivistic structure in which all participated. Smith added, "the future it depicted, like its versions of the past, was an exercise in nostalgia. Its corporate exhibits applied images of technology as a way of dressing belief systems of the past in the trappings of future wonders" (p. 226). The inevitable march of "progress," as Smith notes, solidifies and supports the dominant vision of the United States. The World's Fair, in essence, omits more than it portrays and in so doing offers a powerful commentary on the nature of American society in the 1960s.

"The Power of Culture" is an impressive book in many ways. The Halttunen and Smith essays represent what I consider the best of the book, but all of the essays may be read with profit. I certainly recommend this work as an example of cultural studies at the end of the twentieth century.