Terry Caesar – författare

Forgiving the Boundaries is the first major study of American writing about foreign travel. Considering travel memoirs and journals, guidebooks, and novels, Terry Caesar applies recent forms of ideological and postcolonial criticism to a body of work published during the period extending roughly from Benjamin Silliman's Journal of Travels in England, Holland, and Scotland (1810) to Moritz Thomsen's The Saddest Pleasure (1992).Herman Melville, Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Edmund Wilson, and Paul Theroux are only a few of the writers whose works Caesar examines. But his focus is informed by more comprehensive notions of both noncanonical figures, such as Marietta Holley, John Gunther, James Baldwin, S. J. Perelman, and Mary Morris, and the marginal practices of African Americans and women.In the tension between fact and fiction implicit in the American romance genre, Caesar finds parallels--across time and place--in the dualities that characterize American travel writing. Although the overarching purpose of American travel writing is to enable the representation of home and the authentication of our culture, says Caesar, "the experience of some primal condition of homelessness has never finally offered sufficient reason to go abroad." That the experiences travel writers presume to represent might be worthless, pointless, and either inferior to or no different from those in the land they already know leads to an intense skepticism that complicates and subverts notions of home and abroad, difference and sameness, self and other, British and American, representation and representativeness, and innocence and sophistication.Caesar attempts to historicize the sustaining interplay between romanticism and travel writing, but also emphasizes that his understanding of American travel writing has more to do with narrative form, epistemology, and cultural inheritance than particular historical shapings. Whether we travel to England or Brazil, he concludes, and whether we choose to represent our journeys as fact or fiction, our need to be Americans has never precluded our need to be other than ourselves--and yet our need to be other than ourselves has ultimately only functioned to enable us to be more completely American.

Breaking the silence on a number of sacrosanct aspects of higher education—and now and then raising the clamor about some highly politicized issues—Conspiring with Forms is a critique of both the academy and the discourse concerning its purposes and direction.Academic life is embedded among forms, says Terry P. Caesar. It is a milieu of customs and conventions, practices and pretenses, all bursting with implications and hidden costs for the mainly mute and complicitous scholars who perpetuate them. Many of these forms are texts—proposals, letters of application and recommendation, dissertations, freshman compositionthemes, and prefaces and acknowledgments in books. It is impossible, Caesar says, to be an academic and not produce them or, more important, be produced by them.To discuss these texts, Caesar combines theoretical sophistication with subjective depth and a measure of urbane wit. Essentially, he turns some of the techniques of contemporary theory and criticism back onto the system from which they evolved. At the same time, he draws on his personal experiences, supplemented with excerpts from actual texts of his own and others.

Writing in Disguise is a series of increasingly personal essays that both discuss and dramatize through firsthand experience the significance of subordination in academic life, in terms of issues and structures but above all in terms of texts. Some are written: memos, rejection letters, even resignation letters. Some are not: anecdotes, protests, jokes, parodies. All of these texts have in common the imperative of disguise, represented as the most crucial consequence of dominant discourse, within which subordination might speak only by knowing its place, and write only by producing hidden transcripts. Caustic, pointed, satiric, Writing in Disguise is an engaging critique of aspects of academia involving the misuse, misappropriation, and misappreciation of verbal communication in its many guises.

Can scholarly pursuit of soap operas and folk art actually reveal a national imagination? This innovative collection features studies of iconography in Mexico, telenovelas in Venezuela, drama in Chile, cinema in Brazil, comic strips and tango in Argentina, and ceramics in Peru. In examining these popular arts, the scholars gathered here ask the same broad questions: what precisely is a national culture at the level of the popular? The national idea in Latin America emerges from these pages as a problematic, divided one, worth sustained attention in the field of culture studies. Many different arts come forth in all their richness and vitality, compelling us to look, listen, and understand.