When and why did it become chic for members of the white middle and upper classes to perceive and value themselves as neurotic, primitive, and emotionally fragile? Is the popular tendency to define the self in psychological language derived from revealed (Freudian) "truths," or does American culture for various purposes invent and promote "emotional" and "psychological" identities?
In this fascinating book, distinguished interdisciplinary scholars show that the ways Americans imagine "innerness" and emotions have been shaped by mass media, economics, domesticity, and the arts. The authors...

Explores the drive of whites to "individualize" Indians -- showing them how they should pursue happiness, find the meaning of life and how they should labor.

Spanning the 1870s to the present, "Individuality Incorporated "demonstrates how crucial a knowledge of Native American-White history is to rethinking key issues in American studies, cultural studies, and the history of subjectivity. Joel Pfister proposes an ingenious critical and historical reinterpretation of constructions of "Indians" and "individuals." Native Americans have long contemplated the irony that the government used its schools to coerce children from diverse tribes to view themselves first as "Indians"--encoded as the evolutionary problem--and then as "individuals"--defined as...

Students want to know: What does one do with critique? Fortunately, some of the most provocative self-critical intellectuals, from the postwar period to the postmodern present, have wrestled with this. Joel Pfister, in Critique for What?, criss-crosses the Atlantic to take stock of exciting British and US cultural studies, American studies, and Left studies that challenge the academic critique-for-critique's-sake and career's-sake business and ask: Critique for what and for whom? Historicizing for what and for whom? Politicizing for what and for whom? America for what and for whom? Here New...

The first published biography to date of Henry Roe Cloud, who was an anthropologist, advocate for Indian education, policy maker, and leader.

Honored in his own time as one of the most prominent Indian public intellectuals, Henry Roe Cloud (c. 1884-1950) fought to open higher education to Indians. Joel Pfister's extensive archival research establishes the historical significance of key chapters in the Winnebago's remarkable life. Roe Cloud was the first Indian to receive undergraduate and graduate degrees from Yale University, where he was elected to the prestigious and intellectual Elihu Club. Pfister compares Roe Cloud's experience to that of other "college Indians" and also to African Americans such as W. E. B. Du Bois. Roe...

This book aims both to demystify and to reconstitute 'Hawthorne' as an object of study by rereading Hawthorne's fictions, mainly those from the early 1840's to 1860, in the context of the emergence of a distinctively middle-class personal life (the domestic emotional revolution that accompanied the industrial revolution. Recent histories of middle-class private life, gender, the body, and sexuality now enable us to bring a more encompassing grasp of history to our reading of the 'psychological' in Hawthorne's writing. Rather than taking the conventional view that Freud explains Hawthorne's...

Students want to know: What does one do with critique? Fortunately, some of the most provocative self-critical intellectuals, from the postwar period to the postmodern present, have wrestled with this. Joel Pfister, in Critique for What?, criss-crosses the Atlantic to take stock of exciting British and US cultural studies, American studies, and Left studies that challenge the academic critique-for-critique's-sake and career's-sake business and ask: Critique for what and for whom? Historicizing for what and for whom? Politicizing for what and for whom? America for what and for whom? Here New...

In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, fired from Salem's Custom House and returning to writing, reconceived his old job title, Surveyor of Customs, as his new one. Taking seriously this naming of the American author's project, Joel Pfister argues that writers from Benjamin Franklin to Louise Erdrich can be read as critical "surveyors" of customs, culture, hegemony, capitalism's emotional logic, and much else.

Literary surveyors have helped make possible and can advance what we now call cultural analysis. In recent decades cultural theory and history have changed how we read literature. Literature...

Surveyors of Customs explores literature's insights into how America-its soft capitalism, its "democratized" inequality, its Americanization of power-"ticks." Joel Pfister argues that writers from Benjamin Franklin to Louise Erdrich can be read as critical "surveyors" of customs, culture, hegemony, capitalism's emotional logic, and much else.