In this Book

Horizons of Enchantment: Essays in the American Imaginary

Book
Lene M. Johannessen
2011
Published by: Dartmouth College Press
Series: Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies
summary
Horizons of Enchantment is about the peculiar power and exceptional pull of the imaginary in American culture. 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

open access

Cover

Series

Title Page

Contents

pp. v

Foreword

pp. vii-ix

Preface and Acknowledgments

pp. xi-xiii

Introduction

pp. 1-12

[1] The Imaginary

pp. 13-32

[2] “Perpetual Progress” in Drude Krog Janson’s A Saloon Keeper’s Daughter

pp. 33-51

[3] Songs of Different Selves: Whitman and Gonzales

pp. 52-77

[4] The “Long Empty Moment”: Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter

pp. 78-96

[5] “Relations Stretched Out” in the American Imaginary

pp. 97-124

[6] Recalling America: Huntington and Rodriguez

pp. 125-140

Notes

pp. 141-154

Bibliography

pp. 155-162

Index

pp. 163-166
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