Ideology and Rhetoric: Constructing America

Product Description The discovery of America and its further development into a modern state and a nation are the clear instance of how ideology and rhetoric are entwined and how they can encompass widely disparate viewpoints. The essays collected in this book address the topical issues of modern American Studies: cultural difference and otherness; gender, race and ethnicity; class and power. They represent new texts and contexts, approached through the revision, reevaluation, and reconfiguration of cannons, thus accommodating the expectations of the heterodox audience. Femininity reconsidered; an ideology of passing away in contemporary world of technical development; race captured within the framework of identity and gender; the rhetoric of blackness approached through racial exploitation; American conquest ideology revealed in a mission of Manifest Destiny; the 20th century assimilation rhetoric in the relations between Native Americans and the US federal government; the conservative ideology and apologetic rhetoric of the Antebellum South; the critique of the 21st century American legal system; the evolution of the presidential rhetoric which today addresses a large heterogeneous audience - all these topics impose a transnational interpretation of American culture which developed as a result of the cross-cultural transformation of European culture/cultures, moulded on American soil to finally become a unique reformulation of the very idea of America itself. About the Author Bozenna Chylinska is Professor of American History and Culture at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. Her academic research includes Jewish American Studies, specifically American Zionism and the Holocaust, and African American Studies approached through race and gender. She is the author of In Search of Greener Pastures. A Hundred Years of the Zionist Idea in the United States: from Zionism to Israelism. She was Visiting Professor at the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, and at the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.