Simon Pokagon's writings exemplify a complex process of linguistic‐material worldmaking. His birch‐bark booklets bring together multiple cultural traditions, including nineteenth‐century tourist art, traditional Algonquian writing, and a long history of writing on bark that dates to the early history of writing itself. Neither purely things nor purely texts, these documents interweave nature and culture in such a way that Pokagon can be said to be engaging in a process of naturalization whereby the cultural is presented as a feature of nature. To promote his reformist agenda, Pokagon capitalizes on a rich cache of naturalist symbolism that was of particularly high cultural value in Victorian America. What is perhaps most notable about Pokagon's use of naturalization is that he makes this linguistic trope into a materialist discourse. (JB)
In July 1892, the People’s Party held its first political convention in Omaha, Nebraska. Although the candidate nominated by the party, General James B. Weaver, placed far behind the major party candidates, the Party platform included a number of reforms that were adopted in the United States over the next generation: direct election of senators, a graduated income tax, the secret ballot, ballot initiatives and election referenda, and labor laws enforcing workplace standards. The party platform also included several proposals of a more socialistic nature that did not come to pass in the near term—for example, state ownership of transportation and communication networks. The Populists, as they came to be known, however, were essentially individualistic in their outlook, firmly in support of private property. As they saw it, individual freedoms were eroding under the ascendant system of corporate capitalism, and the role of the state was to ensure that the citizenry maintained its access to those freedoms. One of the most outspoken supporters of the People’s Party was a young writer based in Boston named Hamlin Garland. He had moved to the Northeast from the Midwest in 1884 to pursue a teaching and literary career. As his activity on behalf of the Populists increased, 1891 marked a turning point for him: he published the literary work which would solidify his lasting reputation—the collection of six short stories entitled Main-Travelled Roads, which depicted the downtrodden farmers who formed the central core of Populist support.
William Faulkner and the Materials of Writing examines the many physical texts in Faulkner's novels and stories from letters and telegrams to Bibles, billboards, and even the alphabetic shape of airport runways. Current investigations in print culture, book history, and media studies often emphasize the controlling power of technological form; instead, this book demonstrates how media should be understood in the context of its use. Throughout Faulkner's oeuvre, various kinds of writing become central to characters forming a sense of the self as well as bonds of intimacy, while ideologies of race and gender connect to the body through the vehicle of writing. This book combines close reading analysis of Faulkner's fiction with the publication history of his works that together offer a case study about what it means to live in a world permeated by media.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.