Dream a Little: Land and Social Justice in Modern AmericaUniversity of California Press, 19. sep. 2000 - 255 strani In this innovative and exciting synthesis of historical analysis, literary criticism, and personal essay, Dorothee E. Kocks explores the links between place and political ideals in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the iconography of the American West. Dream a Little explores the American tradition of using the land to reveal and elaborate our dreams for social justice. Writing with a novelist's sensitivity toward language, Kocks explores the idea that Americans have historically looked to the land for answers to society's problems. To illustrate this point, she shows that the frontier state with its homestead program was actually the predecessor of the modern welfare state. Instead of money, the federal government gave away land. Kocks shows how we have "forgotten" the politics and history behind this giveaway and unravels the significance of this forgetting for our national consciousness. In the second half of the book, Kocks journeys into three symbolic landscapes: the West, the family farm, and the small community. She looks at these landscapes through the eyes of writers Mari Sandoz and Josephine Johnson, and civil rights activist Ella Baker. Interweaving her own life experiences in this analysis, she traces the relationship between geography and democracy, and of the hopes we attach to the West. |
Vsebina
A Tale of Forgetting | 3 |
A Tale of Remembering | 30 |
Notes | 203 |
Bibliographic Essay | 235 |
Acknowledgments of Permissions | 243 |
Druge izdaje - Prikaži vse
Pogosti izrazi in povedi
Acting locally American argued Baker Bernard DeVoto century Cheyenne Autumn City civil rights context Crazy Horse create cultural democracy dream a little earth economic Ella Baker environmental example faith family farm farmers father freedom frontier gender geographic embrace Grapes of Wrath hard Hayden White historians homestead Homestead Act hope human ideals ideas imagination Inland Island intellectual Josephine Johnson Kerrin kind labor land landscape language letter live look Marget Mari Sandoz Mary Fehr McMurtry mean mind modern moral mother myth nation nature nature's novel November Old Jules organize Oxford University Press Patricia Nelson Limerick philosophical pleasure programs reason role Seamus Heaney sense social justice society Stauffer story struggle things tion tradition truth turn Wallace Stegner Walter Prescott Webb welfare Wendell Berry West Western history women words Worster writing wrote York