Becoming America: A History for the 21st Century

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The way we once learned history is now history.

Representations editorial board members David Henkin and Rebecca McLennan have just published a new US history survey, Becoming America: A History for the 21st Century.

Developed for students and instructors of the twenty-first century, Becoming America excites learners by connecting history to their experience of contemporary life. You can’t travel back in time, but you can be transported, and Becoming America does so by expanding the traditional core of the US survey to include the most contemporary scholarship on cultural, technological, and environmental transformations. At the same time, the program transforms the student learning experience through innovative technology that is at the forefront of the digital revolution. As a result, the Becoming America program makes it easier for students to grasp both the distinctiveness and the familiarity of bygone eras, and to think in a historically focused way about the urgent questions of our times.

 

 

Denotatively, Technically, Literally

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For literary readers, the categories of the denotative, literal, and technical do not, cannot, or should not exist. No language can be denotative or literal for us, since language, above all literary language, never means what it says, pace recent attempts to declare otherwise. A purely technical language would be the opposite of the language of the literary text: operational in precisely the way the literary text is not. We do not use Heart of Darkness as a sailing manual or a handbook for the extraction of natural resources from colonized places, and we have no doubt that those who treat Thomas Hardy’s novels as travel guides to southwestern England are missing the point (although a large tourist industry does thus operationalize them, and quite successfully)….

–Elaine Freedgood and Cannon Schmitt

Continue reading this introduction to Representations 125, the special issue Denotatively, Technically, Literally, here.

New Issue, Representations 125

SPECIAL ISSUE: Denotatively, Technically, Literally
Edited by Elaine Freedgood and Cannon Schmitt

ELAINE FREEDGOOD AND CANNON SCHMITT
Denotatively, Technically, Literally

IAN DUNCAN
George Eliot’s Science Fiction

ELAINE FREEDGOOD
Ghostly Reference

CANNON SCHMITT
Technical Maturity in
Robert Louis Stevenson

RACHEL SAGNER BUURMA AND LAURA HEFFERNAN
Notation After the ‘‘Reality Effect’’:
Remaking Reference with
Roland Barthes and Sheila Heti

MARGARET COHEN
Denotation in Alien Environments:
The Underwater Je Ne Sais Quoi