A study of imperialism that stretches from ancient Rome to the post-Cold War World, this provocative work boldly revises our assumptions about the genealogy of the West. Rather than locating its source in classical Greece, William V. Spanos argues, we should look to ancient Rome, which first articulated the ideas that would become fundamental to the West's imperial project. These founding ideas, he claims, have informed the American national identity and its foreign policy from its origins.
The Vietnam War is at the center of this book. In the contradiction between the "free world" logic...
A study of imperialism that stretches from ancient Rome to the post-Cold War World, this provocative work boldly revises our assumptions about the gen...
A study of imperialism that stretches from ancient Rome to the post-Cold War World, this provocative work boldly revises our assumptions about the genealogy of the West. Rather than locating its source in classical Greece, William V. Spanos argues, we should look to ancient Rome, which first articulated the ideas that would become fundamental to the West's imperial project. These founding ideas, he claims, have informed the American national identity and its foreign policy from its origins.
The Vietnam War is at the center of this book. In the contradiction between the "free world" logic...
A study of imperialism that stretches from ancient Rome to the post-Cold War World, this provocative work boldly revises our assumptions about the gen...
In "The Errant Art of "Moby-Dick, one of America's most distinguished critics reexamines Melville's monumental novel and turns the occasion into a meditation on the history and implications of canon formation. In "Moby-Dick"--a work virtually ignored and discredited at the time of its publication--William V. Spanos uncovers a text remarkably suited as a foundation for a "New Americanist" critique of the ideology based on Puritan origins that was codified in the canon established by "Old Americanist" critics from F. O. Matthiessen to Lionel Trilling. But Spanos also shows, with the novel still...
In "The Errant Art of "Moby-Dick, one of America's most distinguished critics reexamines Melville's monumental novel and turns the occasion into a med...
With the untimely death of Edward W. Said in 2003, various academic and public intellectuals worldwide have begun to reassess the writings of this powerful oppositional intellectual. Figures on the neoconservative right have already begun to discredit Said s work as that of a subversive intent on slandering America s benign global image and undermining its global authority. On the left, a significant number of oppositional intellectuals are eager to counter this neoconservative vilification, proffering a Said who, in marked opposition to the anti-humanism of the great poststructuralist...
With the untimely death of Edward W. Said in 2003, various academic and public intellectuals worldwide have begun to reassess the writings of this ...
Oriented by the new Americanist perspective, this book constitutes a rereading of Herman Melville's most prominent fiction after Moby-Dick. In contrast to prior readings of this fiction, William V. Spanos's interpretation takes as its point of departure the theme of spectrality precipitated by the metaphor of orphanage--disaffiliation from the symbolic fatherland, on the one hand, and the myth of American exceptionalism on the other--that emerged as an abiding motif in Melville's creative imagination. This book voices an original argument about Melville's status as an "American" writer, and...
Oriented by the new Americanist perspective, this book constitutes a rereading of Herman Melville's most prominent fiction after Moby-Dick. In contras...
Oriented by the new Americanist perspective, this book constitutes a rereading of Herman Melville's most prominent fiction after Moby-Dick. In contrast to prior readings of this fiction, William V. Spanos's interpretation takes as its point of departure the theme of spectrality precipitated by the metaphor of orphanage--disaffiliation from the symbolic fatherland, on the one hand, and the myth of American exceptionalism on the other--that emerged as an abiding motif in Melville's creative imagination. This book voices an original argument about Melville's status as an "American" writer, and...
Oriented by the new Americanist perspective, this book constitutes a rereading of Herman Melville's most prominent fiction after Moby-Dick. In contras...
Like so many soldiers of his generation, William V. Spanos was not much more than a boy when he went off to fight in World War II. In the chaos of his first battle, what would later become legendary as the Battle of the Bulge, he was separated from his antitank gun crew and taken prisoner in the Ardennes forest. Along with a procession of other prisoners of war, he was marched and conveyed by freight train to Dresden. Surviving the brutal conditions of the labor camps and the Allies' devastating firebombing of the city, he escaped as the losing German army retreated.
For...
Like so many soldiers of his generation, William V. Spanos was not much more than a boy when he went off to fight in World War II. In the ...
