Horizons of Enchantment

by Johannessen, Lene M.

• ISBN13: 9781584659990
• ISBN10: 1584659998
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-06-14
• Publisher: Dartmouth College

Summary

Horizons of Enchantment is about the peculiar power and exceptional pull of the imaginary in American culture, mainly the literary. Johannessen's subject here is the almost mystical American belief in the promise and potential of the individual, or the reliance on a kind of "modern magic" that can loosely be characterized as a fundamental and unwavering faith in the secular sanctity of the American project of modernity. Among the diverse topics and cultural artifacts she examines are the Norwegian American novel A Saloonkeeper's Daughter by Drude Krog Janson, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, Rodolfo Gonzales's I Am Joaquin, Richard Ford's The Sportwriter, Ana Menendez's In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, essays by Samuel Huntington and Richard Rodriquez, and the 2009 film Sugar, about a Dominican baseball player trying to make it in the big leagues. In both her subject matter and perspective, Johannessen reconfigures and enriches questions of the transnational and exceptional in American studies.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. vii
Preface and Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
The Imaginary	p. 13
ôPerpetual Progressö in Drude Krog Janson's A Saloonkeeper's Daughter	p. 33
Songs of Different Selves: Whitman and Gonzales	p. 52
The ôLong Empty Momentö: Richard Ford's The Sportswriter	p. 78
ôRelations Stretched Outö in the American Imaginary	p. 97
Recalling America: Huntington and Rodriguez	p. 125
Notes	p. 141
Bibliography	p. 155
Index	p. 163
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