Robert C. Hauhart - Böcker

What do we mean by the American Dream? Can we define it? Or does any discussion of the phrase end inconclusively, the solid turned liquid – like ice melting? Do we know whether the American Dream motivates and inspires or, alternately, obscures and deceives? The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream offers distinctive, authoritative, original essays by well-known scholars that address the social, economic, historical, philosophic, legal, and cultural dimensions of the American Dream for the twenty-first century. The American Dream, first discussed and defined in print by James Truslow Adams' The Epic of America (1931), has become nearly synonymous with being American. Adams’ definition, although known to scholars, is often lost in our ubiquitous use of the term. When used today, the iconic phrase seems to encapsulate every fashion, fad, trend, association, or image the user identifies with the United States or American life. The American Dream’s ubiquity, though, argues eloquently for a deeper under-standing of its heritage, its implications, and its impact—to be found in this first research handbook ever published on the topic.

Significant Food is a collaborative work of textual analysis and criticism that chews on the role and prominence of food in American literature. The volume offers close readings of many well-known, and some less well-known, examples of American writing, as studied through the food culture sensibilities of a well-stocked cupboard of contributors who offer their analyses for public consumption. Editors Jeff Birkenstein and Robert C. Hauhart find that literary criticism has focused on the role food plays in literary production to a greater extent than recognized at first glance and that its role has become increasingly common only in the last two decades. Still, while there is critical commentary regarding authors’ use of food across the expanse of American literature, there has been a lack of a unifying critical theory to guide these analyses. Birkenstein and Hauhart offer the theory of “significant food”—a method that asks literary critics to evaluate and assess the extent, nature, and role that food plays in literary production. When food and “food moments” are used intensively and “significantly” within the drama, memoir, poem, novel, short story, or other writing, then one can say that it has achieved a status that makes it indispensable to the work at hand.

Significant Food is a collaborative work of textual analysis and criticism that chews on the role and prominence of food in American literature. The volume offers close readings of many well-known, and some less well-known, examples of American writing, as studied through the food culture sensibilities of a well-stocked cupboard of contributors who offer their analyses for public consumption. Editors Jeff Birkenstein and Robert C. Hauhart find that literary criticism has focused on the role food plays in literary production to a greater extent than recognized at first glance and that its role has become increasingly common only in the last two decades. Still, while there is critical commentary regarding authors’ use of food across the expanse of American literature, there has been a lack of a unifying critical theory to guide these analyses. Birkenstein and Hauhart offer the theory of “significant food”—a method that asks literary critics to evaluate and assess the extent, nature, and role that food plays in literary production. When food and “food moments” are used intensively and “significantly” within the drama, memoir, poem, novel, short story, or other writing, then one can say that it has achieved a status that makes it indispensable to the work at hand.

The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream: Volume 2 explores the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the American Dream in both theory and reality in the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together leading scholars from a range of fields to further develop the themes and issues explored in the first volume.The concept of the American Dream, first expounded by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America in 1931, is at once both ubiquitous and difficult to define. The term perfectly captures the hopes of freedom, opportunity and upward social mobility invested in the nation. However, the American Dream appears increasingly illusory in the face of widening inequality and apparent lack of opportunity, particularly for the poor and ethnic, or otherwise marginalized, minorities in the United States. As such, an understanding of the American Dream through both theoretical analyses and empirical studies, whether qualitative or quantitative, is crucial to understanding contemporary America. Like the first volume of The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream, this collection will be of great interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences.

The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream: Volume 2 explores the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the American Dream in both theory and reality in the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together leading scholars from a range of fields to further develop the themes and issues explored in the first volume.The concept of the American Dream, first expounded by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America in 1931, is at once both ubiquitous and difficult to define. The term perfectly captures the hopes of freedom, opportunity and upward social mobility invested in the nation. However, the American Dream appears increasingly illusory in the face of widening inequality and apparent lack of opportunity, particularly for the poor and ethnic, or otherwise marginalized, minorities in the United States. As such, an understanding of the American Dream through both theoretical analyses and empirical studies, whether qualitative or quantitative, is crucial to understanding contemporary America. Like the first volume of The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream, this collection will be of great interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences.

Enrich your students and the institution with a high-impact practice Designing and Teaching Undergraduate Capstone Courses is a practical, research-backed guide to creating a course that is valuable for both the student and the school. The book covers the design, administration, and teaching of capstone courses throughout the undergraduate curriculum, guiding departments seeking to add a capstone course, and allowing those who have one to compare it to others in the discipline. The ideas presented in the book are supported by regional and national surveys that help the reader understand what's common, what's exceptional, what works, and what doesn't within capstone courses. The authors also provide additional information specific to different departments across the curriculum, including STEM, social sciences, humanities, fine arts, education, and professional programs.Identified as a high-impact practice by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Association of American Colleges and Universities' LEAP initiative, capstone courses culminate a student's final college years in a project that integrates and applies what they've learned. The project takes the form of a research paper, a performance, a portfolio, or an exhibit, and is intended to showcase the student's very best work as a graduating senior. This book is a guide to creating for your school or department a capstone course that ties together undergraduate learning in a way that enriches the student and adds value to the college experience. Understand what makes capstone courses valuable for graduating studentsDiscover the factors that make a capstone course effective, and compare existing programs, both within academic disciplines and across institutionsLearn administrative and pedagogical techniques that increase the course's successExamine discipline-specific considerations for design, administration, and instructionCapstones are generally offered in departmental programs, but are becoming increasingly common in general education as well. Faculty and administrators looking to add a capstone course or revive an existing one need to understand what constitutes an effective program. Designing and Teaching Undergraduate Capstone Courses provides an easily digested summary of existing research, and offers expert guidance on making your capstone course successful.

Americans, faced with global competition and increased social complexity, wonder whether their dwindling natural resources, polarized national and local politics, and often unregulated capitalism can support the American Dream today.

Today the United States is a country divided along lines of gender, economic inequality, educational level, and political affiliation. Democrats typically select a different range of matters of serious public concern compared to Republicans. Many Americans describe difficulty in coming to terms with the demands placed on them in their work, communities, and personal lives and achieving satisfaction. The institutional crises that pervade our politics, economy, educational systems, and communities have inspired a contemporary crisis: a widespread inability for many to live as integrated, effective selves in the twenty-first century United States. Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary research, The Lonely Quest explores the dilemma of constructing the self in the U.S. today.

Today the United States is a country divided along lines of gender, economic inequality, educational level, and political affiliation. Democrats typically select a different range of matters of serious public concern compared to Republicans. Many Americans describe difficulty in coming to terms with the demands placed on them in their work, communities, and personal lives and achieving satisfaction. The institutional crises that pervade our politics, economy, educational systems, and communities have inspired a contemporary crisis: a widespread inability for many to live as integrated, effective selves in the twenty-first century United States. Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary research, The Lonely Quest explores the dilemma of constructing the self in the U.S. today.

Americans, faced with global competition and increased social complexity, wonder whether their dwindling natural resources, polarized national and local politics, and often unregulated capitalism can support the American Dream today.

European Writers in Exile collects a series of original essays that address the writers’ universal existential dilemma, when viewed through the lens of exile: who am I, where am I from, and what do I write, and to whom? While we often understand the term “exile” to refer to writers who have either been forced to leave their home country or region or chosen self-exile, this term need not be defined so narrowly, and the contributors to this volume explore a range of interesting and evolving definitions. Various countries in Europe have long been both a refuge for people and writers from many countries and a strife-torn region which has forced many to flee within the continent or beyond it. The phrase “in exile” involves writers moving across borders in multiple directions and for multiple reasons, including for reasons of duress or personal quest, and these themes are addressed and critiqued in these essays.This volume naturally examines the cataclysmic and near-universal exilic experiences relating to the world wars, including essays on Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Additionally, essays address the unique early twentieth-century experiences of Emile Zola, Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad, and James Joyce. More contemporary essay subjects include Milan Kundera, Norman Manea, Eva Hoffman, Caryl Phillips, and W. G. Sebald. This collection of transnational, globalized European literature studies envisions understanding the intersection of our contemporary world and various writers in exile in new cultural, historical, spatial, and epistemological frameworks. How does literary production in an increasingly globalized world—when seen from exile—affect a view back towards a country or region left behind? Or, conversely, how does exile push a writer to look outward to new (trans-)nationalized space(s)? These and other questions are important to investigate. Taken in sum, European Writers in Exile offers an academically rigorous, important, and cohesive volume.

In Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story, editors Robert C. Hauhart and Jeff Birkenstein have assembled a collection of eighteen original essays written by literary critics from around the globe. Collectively, these critics argue that the reciprocal influence between Russian and American writers is integral to the development of the short story in each country as well as vital to the global status the contemporary short story has attained. This collection provides original analyses of both well-known Russian and American stories as well as some that might be more unfamiliar. Each essay is purposely crafted to display an appreciation of the techniques, subject matter, themes, and approaches that both Russian and American short story writers explored across borders and time. Stories by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Krzhizhanovsky as well as short stories by Washington Irving, Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ursula Le Guin, Raymond Carver, and Joyce Carol Oates populate this essential, multivalent collection. Perhaps more important now than at any time since the end of the Cold War, these essays will remind readers how much Russian and American culture share, as well as the extent to which their respective literatures are deeply intertwined.

What exactly is modernism and who are modernist writers? What distinguishes American modernism from its European counterpart?American Modernism (Re)Considered questions the principal distinction between modernism and other genres/movements/styles in literature through new critical readings of canonical modernist texts alongside texts which pose a problem for modernism due to their ambiguous, if not marginal, relation to some of its predominant tenets. It asks: Is modernism characterized principally by a transition from older forms (like naturalism and realism) to a style that is new, innovative, and experimental? Is it found in shared understandings and alignments regarding the nature and purpose of art? Is it identifiable by modernists’ treatment of various central themes – including as a reaction to modernity; as a response to the Boer and World wars; as an interrogation of Britain’s empire and its dissolution – and how these events fragmented modern life? Or is it all of the above? Contributors discuss a wide range of texts – by authors such as Nella Larsen, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anne Carson, Wallace Stevens, Américo Paredes, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot – to challenge the aesthetic, social, and temporal boundaries of modernism in America. Through original close readings of these texts, American Modernism (Re)Considered subjects modernism to new interrogations and offers new answers to questions that remain contemporary even as they harken back to its height of popularity and interest in the mid-1920s.