Reviews for Exploration and early American culture

The average rating for Exploration and early American culture based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-09-26 00:00:00 Mary Jo Birgensmith A super good and often super depressing read. I will say that it was EXTREMELY interesting to read this book while simultaneously immersing myself in One Direction fandom. Here are some extremely scattered thoughts on that experience. Women's online fandom does offer a million examples that confirm Berlant's theories about women's mass culture, but I think it also provides a million more examples that, to my mind at least, seriously challenge her insights. Maybe it's just my particular corner of the Internet, but the way girls and women experience/consume/engage with mass cultural forms strikes me as a lot queerer and a lot less naive than this book suggests. Fandom definitely constitutes an "intimate public" by Berlant's definition -- that is, being a fan involves identifying with other people's (real or imagined) emotional experiences, which in turn gives you a warm fuzzy sense of intimacy and belonging. Fandom is also definitely based in/centered around certain mainstream fantasies of (heteronormative) romance and love, which is true even when you're shipping queer pairings. And I would also agree that fandoms are largely "juxtapolitical" publics, in that they usually don't directly engage with formal politics (whatever that means). So, I can see how all of those things are problems, because as a grad student I've been trained to be a good little paranoid reader. But... in my own experience, the practice of engaging in fandom, of being a practicing fan, is really a lot messier, more ambivalent, and way more wonderful than that reductive description. I won't wade in too deep here but I really do think that fandom, as a queer aesthetic and practice, can disclose and facilitate new forms of kinship, new ways of arranging your life, new experiences of intimacy and identity. And I also think that being a fan can be life-affirming without being self-confirming, if that makes sense. (Does it? Who knows.) Like ultimately, my engagement with fan culture helps me to imagine alternatives to a sort of white-bread liberal humanism just as effectively, if not more so, than someone like Foucault or Deleuze or whomever. Ugh I don't know, I have SO MANY more thoughts but I need more time to process them. tl;dr I found this book very impressive, but it also made me realize that maybe the "vast sweeping theory of everything" model of criticism is not the kind of work I want to do anymore.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-11-18 00:00:00 Marvin Wells I found this scholarly book enormously frustrating, largely because of the force and vigor of Berlant's argument. She makes a persuasive case for middlebrow women's culture as a space in which frustration with the status quo (capitalism and its discontents) gets articulated, bargained with, and recast into (variously) utopian aspiration (the possibility for revolution never present, the hope for reform--inadequate in Berlant's view--always there), repeated despair, cliché, or identity imprisonment. (Or some combination of several of these!) Berlant acknowledges a side of identity that I agree is important: the possibility that identity performance can be imitation and salve rather than innovation and salvation. Berlant is interested in genres of "female complaint," ruptures in melodramatic or conventional texts that indicate the insufficiency of feminine types and heteronormative narratives to encompass a satisfactory version of identity. Appropriately, her form of literary criticism also enacts complaint. Most of the chapters center around political failures that are aestheticized. So the thrust of these chapters is often very depressing. Which should not be a complaint (he!) in and of itself but is for me. I'm not satisfied at winding up with the conclusion that sentimentalism is unsatisfactory. I think that I represent one of the feminists that Berlant refutes in her introduction -- someone who perhaps overly optimistically looks for self-expression, political outrage, and play in even the most conventional of narratives. Berlant's arguments are forceful, and I did like her argument about Parker's love poetry of failure as a way of dramatizing the dissonance between the promise of heteronormativity as cultural belonging and the reality of unsatisfactory feminine stereotyping in the modern period. She also had some great writing in this chapter, my personal fave being this line: "[Parker:] takes consolation by playing around with the forms that bind: ironic formalism is the normativity of the middlebrow author, who can have her sex and hate it too." Great chapter on Show Boat, the culture of publicity, and the intersection of feminine ideals and racial nostalgia. I suppose I enjoyed individual formal analyses and fruitful comparisons more than I liked the dominating argument, a juggernaut of cultural disappointment and displeasure. (Ironically, Berlant focuses on the vitality of pleasure in the narratives that women create to make sense of their conventional feminine identity.)