Richard Cándida Smith – författare

This book investigates the role that the visual and performing arts play in our experience and understanding of the past. Expanding upon longstanding concerns in cultural history about the relation of text and image, the book highlights the distinction between enactive and cognitive memory and the implications of this for artists and their publics.

This book investigates the role that the visual and performing arts play in our experience and understanding of the past. Expanding upon longstanding concerns in cultural history about the relation of text and image, the book highlights the distinction between enactive and cognitive memory and the implications of this for artists and their publics.

In a narrative gracefully combining intellectual and cultural history, Richard Candida Smith unfolds the legacy of Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898), the poet who fathered the symbolist movement in poetry and art. The symbolists found themselves in the midst of the transition to a world in which new media devoured cultural products and delivered them to an ever-growing public. Their goal was to create and oversee a new elite culture, one that elevated poetry by removing it from a direct relationship to experience. Instead, symbolist poetry was dedicated to exploring discourse itself, and its practitioners to understanding how language shapes consciousness. Candida Smith investigates the intellectual context in which symbolists came to view artistic practice as a form of knowledge. He relates their work to psychology, especially the ideas of William James, and to language and the emergence of semantics. Through the lens of symbolism, he focuses on a variety of subjects: sexual liberation and the erotic, anarchism, utopianism, labor, and women's creative role. Paradoxically, the symbolists' reconfiguration of elite culture fit effectively into the modern commercial media.After Mallarme was rescued from obscurity, symbolism became a valuable commodity, exported by France to America and elsewhere in the market-driven turn-of-the-century world. "Mallarme's Children" traces not only how poets regarded their poetry and artists their art but also how the public learned to think in new ways about cultural work and to behave differently as a result.

How does a country in the process of becoming a world power prepare its citizens for the responsibilities of global leadership? In Improvised Continent, Richard CÁndida Smith answers this question by illuminating the forgotten story of how, over the course of the twentieth century, cultural exchange programs, some run by the government and others by philanthropies and major cultural institutions, brought many of the most important artists and writers of Latin America to live and work in the United States.Improvised Continent is the first book to focus on cultural exchange inside the United States and how Americans responded to Latin American writers and artists. Moving masterfully between the history of ideas, biography, institutional history and politics, and international relations, and engaging works in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, CÁndida Smith synthesizes over seventy years of Pan-American cultural activity in the United States.The stories behind Diego Rivera's murals, the movies of Alejandro G. IÑÁrritu, the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, the photography of Genevieve Naylor, and the novels of Carlos Fuentes-these works and artists, along with many others, challenged U.S. citizens about their place in the world and about the kind of global relations the country's interests could allow. Improvised Continent provides a profoundly compassionate portrayal of the Latin American artists and writers who believed their practices might create a more humane world.

More than one hundred years after her death, Elizabeth Cady Stanton still stands—along with her close friend Susan B. Anthony—as the major icon of the struggle for women's suffrage. In spite of this celebrity, Stanton's intellectual contributions have been largely overshadowed by the focus on her political activities, and she is yet to be recognized as one of the major thinkers of the nineteenth century.Here, at long last, is a single volume exploring and presenting Stanton's thoughtful, original, lifelong inquiries into the nature, origins, range, and solutions of women's subordination. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker reintroduces, contextualizes, and critiques Stanton's numerous contributions to modern thought. It juxtaposes a selection of Stanton's own writings, many of them previously unavailable, with eight original essays by prominent historians and social theorists interrogating Stanton's views on such pressing social issues as religion, marriage, race, the self and community, and her place among leading nineteenth century feminist thinkers. Taken together, these essays and documents reveal the different facets, enduring insights, and fascinating contradictions of the work of one of the great thinkers of the feminist tradition.Contributors: Barbara Caine, Richard Cándida Smith, Ellen Carol DuBois, Ann D. Gordon, Vivian Gornick, Kathi Kern, Michele Mitchell, and Christine Stansell.