Misplaced Pages

#201798

27-451: Paul Fussell Jr. (22 March 1924 – 23 May 2012) was an American cultural and literary historian , author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America's class system . Fussell served in the 103rd Infantry Division during World War II and was wounded in fighting in France. Returning to

54-697: A 20-year-old second lieutenant with the 103rd Infantry Division , was wounded while fighting in Alsace , and was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart . Following the end of the war in Europe, Fussell returned to the United States where he was assigned to the 45th Infantry Division , which was preparing for the invasion of Japan . Fussell's recollection of hearing the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , while waiting stateside to deploy, would later form

81-614: A particular phenomenon relates to matters of ideology , nationality , ethnicity , social class , and/or gender . The term was coined by Richard Hoggart in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies . It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall , who succeeded Hoggart as Director. The BBC has produced and broadcast a number of educational television programmes on different aspects of human cultural history: in 1969 Civilisation , in 1973 The Ascent of Man , in 1985 The Triumph of

108-659: Is an artist-teacher in Arizona and the author of a graphic novel, Mammoir: A Pictorial Odyssey of the Adventures of a Fourth Grade Teacher with Breast Cancer . His son, Samuel Wilson Fussell, a writer and hunter in Montana, is the author of Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder . Fussell attended Pomona College from 1941 until he was commissioned as an officer in the United States Army in 1943. He landed in France in 1944 as

135-456: Is often characterized as replacing the allegedly dominant, allegedly Marxist , "social interpretation" which locates the causes of the Revolution in class dynamics. The revisionist approach has tended to put more emphasis on " political culture ". Reading ideas of political culture through Habermas' conception of the public sphere, historians of the Revolution in the past few decades have looked at

162-711: The Internet (culture of capitalism ). Its modern approaches come from art history , Annales , Marxist school, microhistory and new cultural history. Common theoretical touchstones for recent cultural history have included: Jürgen Habermas 's formulation of the public sphere in The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere ; Clifford Geertz 's notion of ' thick description ' (expounded in The Interpretation of Cultures ); and

189-575: The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The War in 2007, and in the 1999 ABC-produced documentary The Century: America's Time . Fussell died of natural causes on 23 May 2012, at a long-term care facility in Medford, Oregon . He had previously lived in Portland, Oregon , for two years. He was 88. Cultural history Many current cultural historians claim it to be a new approach, but cultural history

216-738: The National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa . It was ranked number 75 in the Modern Library 's Board's List of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century. He was elected in 1977 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature . He won the 2005 Hessell-Tiltman Prize for The Boys' Crusade . Fussell was one of several veterans interviewed in

243-718: The University of Pennsylvania in 1983. He also taught at the University of Heidelberg (1957–58) and King's College London (1990–92). As a professor, he travelled widely with his family throughout Europe from the 1950s to '70s, taking Fulbright and sabbatical years in Germany, England and France. Betty Fussell has described their marriage and its breakup in 1981 in her memoir, My Kitchen Wars . After Fussell moved from his home in Princeton, New Jersey, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he divorced Betty and married Harriette Behringer. He retired from

270-655: The 'revisionist' approach retains the idea of the French Revolution as a watershed in the history of (so-called) modernity and that the problematic notion of modernity has itself attracted scant attention. Cultural studies is an academic discipline popular among a diverse group of scholars. It combines political economy , geography , sociology , social theory , literary theory , film/video studies , cultural anthropology , philosophy , and art history / criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on how

297-551: The 19th century by Burckhardt, in relation to the Italian Renaissance , cultural history was oriented to the study of a particular historical period in its entirety, with regard not only to its painting, sculpture, and architecture, but to the economic basis underpinning society, and to the social institutions of its daily life. Echoes of Burkhardt's approach in the 20th century can be seen in Johan Huizinga 's The Waning of

SECTION 10

#1733093799202

324-539: The Atom Bomb and Other Essays (1988) confirmed his war against governmental and military doublespeak and prepared the way for Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989). The epiphany of his earlier essay, "My War", found full expression in his memoir Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (1996), "My Adolescent illusions, largely intact to that moment, fell away all at once, and I suddenly knew I

351-798: The Middle Ages (1919). Most often the focus is on phenomena shared by non-elite groups in a society, such as: carnival , festival , and public rituals ; performance traditions of tale , epic , and other verbal forms; cultural evolutions in human relations (ideas, sciences, arts, techniques); and cultural expressions of social movements such as nationalism . Cultural history also examines main historical concepts as power , ideology , class , culture , cultural identity , attitude , race , perception and new historical methods as narration of body. Many studies consider adaptations of traditional culture to mass media (television, radio, newspapers, magazines, posters, etc.), from print to film and, now, to

378-537: The US, Fussell wrote extensively and held several faculty positions, most prominently at Rutgers University (1955–1983) and at the University of Pennsylvania (1983–1994). He is best known for his writings about World War I and II, which explore what he felt was the gap between the romantic myth and the reality of war; he made a "career out of refusing to disguise it or elevate it". Born and raised in Pasadena, California , Fussell

405-532: The University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and lived with his wife in Oregon. When he first entered college, Fussell intended a career in journalism. His plans changed when his sergeant was killed beside him in combat, about which he wrote in his memoir Doing Battle (1996). In his writings he opposed war, promoting instead a vision of rational enlightenment. He pointed to what he saw as the hypocrisy of governmental speech and

432-582: The Wars (1980) was a pioneering academic examination of travel literature which examined the travel books of Evelyn Waugh , Graham Greene , D. H. Lawrence and Robert Byron . Fussell stated that he relished the inevitable controversy of Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983) and indulged his increasing public status as a loved or hated "curmudgeon" in the rant called BAD: or, The Dumbing of America (1991). In between, Thank God for

459-494: The West and in 2012 Andrew Marr's History of the World . Poetic Meter and Poetic Form Poetic Meter and Poetic Form is a book by Paul Fussell , published by McGraw Hill in 1965, and later as a revised edition in 1979 ( ISBN   0-07-553606-4 ). Fussell distinguishes four types of meter : This article about a non-fiction book on literature or literary criticism

486-459: The basis of his essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb". He was honorably discharged from the Army in 1946, returned to Pomona to finish his B.A. degree in 1946–1947, married fellow Pomona graduate Betty Harper in 1949, and completed his MA (1949) and PhD (1952) at Harvard University . He began his teaching career at Connecticut College (1951–55) before moving to Rutgers University in 1955 and finally

513-526: The corruption of popular culture. His published thesis, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England , was developed into Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (1965), a popular textbook for understanding poetry. Samuel Johnson and The Life of Writing (1971) offered an analysis of the work of the English lexicographer, Samuel Johnson . The Anti-Egotist, Kingsley Amis: Man of Letters was a study of

540-528: The idea of memory as a cultural-historical category, as discussed in Paul Connerton 's How Societies Remember . The area where new-style cultural history is often pointed to as being almost a paradigm is the " revisionist " history of the French Revolution , dated somewhere since François Furet 's massively influential 1978 essay Interpreting the French Revolution . The "revisionist interpretation"

567-428: The life and work of friend and colleague, Kingsley Amis . The award-winning The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) was a cultural and literary analysis of the impact of World War I on the development of modern literature and modern literary conventions. John Keegan said its effect was "revolutionary", in that it showed how literature could be a vehicle for expressing the experience of large groups. "What Paul did

SECTION 20

#1733093799202

594-527: The paradigmatic nature of the new history of the French Revolution. Colin Jones, for example, is no stranger to cultural history, Habermas , or Marxism, and has persistently argued that the Marxist interpretation is not dead, but can be revivified; after all, Habermas' logic was heavily indebted to a Marxist understanding. Meanwhile, Rebecca Spang has also recently argued that for all its emphasis on difference and newness,

621-441: The role and position of cultural themes such as gender , ritual , and ideology in the context of pre-revolutionary French political culture. Historians who might be grouped under this umbrella are Roger Chartier , Robert Darnton , Patrice Higonnet , Lynn Hunt , Keith Baker, Joan Landes, Mona Ozouf, and Sarah Maza . Of course, these scholars all pursue fairly diverse interests, and perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on

648-504: Was already referred to by nineteenth-century historians, notably the Swiss scholar of Renaissance history Jacob Burckhardt . Cultural history overlaps in its approaches with the French movements of histoire des mentalités (Philippe Poirrier, 2004) and the so-called new history, and in the U.S. it is closely associated with the field of American studies . As originally conceived and practiced in

675-444: Was go to the literary treatments of the war by 20 or 30 participants and turn them into an encapsulation of a collective European experience". ( John Keegan ) Joseph Heller called it "the best book I know of about world war one". However, a number of modern historians have criticised Fussell's treatment of the war as deeply flawed with significant factual errors and tendentious conclusions. Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between

702-582: Was not and never would be in a world that was reasonable or just". The last book by Fussell published while he was alive, The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944–45 (2003) was once again concerned with the experience of combat in World War II. Fussell's 1975 literary study The Great War and Modern Memory won the National Book Award in category Arts and Letters ,

729-720: Was the second of three children. His father, Paul Fussell (1895–1973), son of a widowed schoolteacher, became a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles with the firm of O'Melveny & Myers . His mother, Wilhma Wilson Sill (1893–1971), was the daughter of a carriage trimmer in Illinois. His brother, Edwin Sill Fussell , was an author, poet, and professor of American Studies at the University of California, San Diego ; his sister Florence Fussell Lind lives in Berkeley, California . His daughter, Rosalind,

#201798