Patterns for America. Modernism and the concept of culture
- Type Paperback
- Publisher PRINCETON
- Author/s Hegeman, Susan
- ISBN13 9780691001340
- ISBN10 0691001340
- Pages 264
- Published 1999
Sections
Anthropology. General ThemesPatterns for America. Modernism and the concept of culture
Hegeman points to the significant similarities between the conceptions of culture produced by anthropologists Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, and a diversity of other intellectuals, including Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Dwight Macdonald. Hegeman reveals how relativist anthropological ideas of human culture--which stressed the distance between modern centers and "primitive" peripheries--came into alliance with the evaluating judgments of artists and critics. This anthropological conception provided a spatial awareness that helped develop the notion of a specifically American "culture." She also shows the connections between this new view of "culture" and the artistic work of the period by, among others, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, Thomas Hart Benton, Nathanael West, and James Agee and depicts in a new way the richness and complexity of the modernist milieu in the United States.
- Type Paperback
- Publisher PRINCETON
- Author/s Hegeman, Susan
- ISBN13 9780691001340
- ISBN10 0691001340
- Pages 264
- Published 1999