Horizons of Enchantment: Essays in the American Imaginary [Paperback]

Horizons of Enchantment is about the peculiar power and exceptional pull of the imaginary in American culture. Johannessens 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 Saloonkeepers Daughter by Drude Krog Janson, Walt Whitmans Song of Myself, Rodolfo Gonzaless I Am Joaqu?n, Richard Fords The Sportwriter, Ana Men?ndezs 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.

LENE M. JOHANNESSEN is a professor of American literature and culture in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen, Norway. She is the author of Threshold Time: Passage of Crisis in Chicano Literature and has edited several books on American Studies.

Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Introduction The Imaginary Perpetual Progress in Drude Krog Jansons A Saloonkeepers Daughter Songs of Different Selves: Whitman and Gonzales The Long Empty Moment: Richard Fords The Sportswriter Relations Stretched Out in the American Imaginary Recalling America: Huntington and Rodriguez Notes Bibliography Index