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An American Body | Politic: A Deleuzian Approach

Book
Bernd Herzogenrath
2010
Published by: Dartmouth College Press
Series: Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies
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summary
A reflection on the metaphor of the body politic throughout American history Bernd Herzogenrath’s An American Body|Politic is a study of the intersection between the material, biological body and body as political and cultural metaphor in American politics, religion, literature, and popular culture. Deeply influenced by the thought of Gilles Deleuze, Herzogenrath’s approach to American culture encompasses endless possibilities and potentials, eschewing the mechanic and structural. He traipses through American history and culture, pausing to examine such varied facets as the Puritans’ “two bodies,” Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy, Cotton Mather and smallpox, the poetics|politics of Whitman, Henry Adams’s stroll along the shores of complexity, and the Detroit-based techno music of today.

Table of Contents

open access

Cover

pp. C-1

Title Page, Copyright Page

pp. i-vi

Contents

pp. vii-viii

List of Illustrations

pp. ix-x

Acknowledgments

pp. xi-xiv

Introduction

pp. 1-19

0, Body, Theory, Politic

pp. 20-53

1. The Puritans’ Two Bodies

pp. 54-91

2. A "'Physics' of Power": Phase Transitions and Turbulence in the Antinomian Controversy

pp. 92-115

3. Cotton Mather: The Angel and the Animalcula

pp. 116-170

4. "I am the Poet of Little Things": Walt Whitman and Minor Poetics, Politics

pp. 171-207

5. A Physical Theory of Herdity, Heresy: The Education of Henry Adams

pp. 208-232

6. "A Sonorous People": Techno, Music and the Joyful Body, Politic

pp. 233-252

Conclusion

pp. 253-258

Notes

pp. 259-284

Bibliography

pp. 285-312

Index

pp. 313-321
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