Benjamin DeMott - Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America
Here you can read online Benjamin DeMott - Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2018, publisher: Routledge, genre: Romance novel. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America
- Author:
- Publisher:Routledge
- Genre:
- Year:2018
- Rating:5 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Supergrow is a collection of fifteen essays that appeared between 1966 and 1969 in publications such as the American Scholar, the New York Times, Antioch Review, Esquire, and the Saturday Review. Author Benjamin DeMott discusses everything under the sun--music, improving ones sex life, violence in Mississippi, theater, student revolts--but a single theme unifies the material: people ought to use their imaginations more. The book starts from the assumption that our troubles stem from failures of the imagination. Overcome by mass media, we are often too oblivious to fresh and original ideas. As DeMott states, the right use of the constructive imagination increases the effectiveness of our energies, enables people to anticipate moves and countermoves, prevents them from becoming frozen into postures of intransigence or martyrdom which, though possessing a terrible beauty, have as their main consequence the stiffening of resistance and the slowing of change. Supergrow is a sociological and political critique of various aspects of everyday life in America, one informed by a powerful moral sensibility and an Emersonian sense of self-reliance. DeMott takes pop culture seriously, but exhibits a refreshing unwillingness to go with the flow and get caught up in fashionable intellectual fads. Graced with a new introduction by the author, Supergrow is an insightful work that is not afraid to tackle difficult subject matter. Whether discussing homosexuality, racism, popular music, or child rearing, Supergrow is well-reasoned, perceptive, and entertaining. As DeMott would hope, it will stimulate the imagination. Devastating, sustained, profoundly witty, resounding. --New York Times Book Review I didnt think it possible for a long time to come for any writer to say anything about black-and-white relations or lack of them that had freshness and pertinence. I was wrong.--Nat Hentoff, Village Voice Benjamin DeMott is an essayist, novelist, and journalist. He was professor of English at Amherst College, and a consultant and writer for National Educational Television. He is the author of The Bodys Cage, Killer Blues: Why Americans Cant Think Straight about Gender and Power, and You Dont Say, available from Transaction.
Benjamin DeMott: author's other books
Who wrote Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Benjamin DeMott
Benjamin DeMott
Benjamin DeMott
Walter Benjamin
McCaul
Franklin Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Lionel Trilling
Bromwich
Walter Benjamin
John Charles Hawley
Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
SIPERGROW
Originally published in 1969 by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.
Published 2003 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
New material this edition copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2002045196
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DeMott, Benjamin, 1924-
Supergrow: essays and reports on imagination in America / Benjamin DeMott; with a new introduction by the author,
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Dutton, 1969.
ISBN 0-7658-0521-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. United StatesCivilization1945-I. Title.
E169.12.D4 2003
973.92dc21 2002045196
ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0521-8 (pbk)
NOTE : The essays in this book appeared originally (in some instances under different titles or in different form) in The American Scholar, Antioch Review, Book World, Educational Record, Esquire, New American Review, The New York Times, Saturday Review, and The Urban Review.
HOW TO RAISE A BRIGHTER CHILD (excerpt): 1967 by Joan Beck. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.; GIVE YOUR CHILD A SUPERIOR MIND (excerpt): 1966 by Siegfried and Therese Engelmann. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.; Excerpt from poetry of Joel Oppenheimer: THE LOVE BIT. 1962, Joel Oppenheimer. Published by Corinth Books, New York; Excerpt from UNDERSTANDING MEDIA by Marshall McLuhan: From UNDERSTANDING MEDIA by Marshall McLuhan. 1964 by Marshall McLuhan. Used with permission of McGraw-Hill Book Company ; Excerpt from W. H. Audens Lullaby: 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted from collected shorter poems 1927-1957 by W. H. Auden by permission of Random House, Inc.; Florida Road Workers by Langston Hughes: From the panther and the lash by Langston Hughes. 1967 by Arna Bontemps and George Houston Bass. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; Life Story by Tennessee Williams: Tennessee Williams, in the winter of cities. 1956 by Tennessee Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation; Merritt Parkway by Denise Levertov: Denise Levertov, the jacobs ladder. 1958 by Denise Levertov Goodman. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
To Joey
Tom
Benj
&
Megan
Love from the old man
Tom
Benj
&
Megan
Love from the old man
Rereading this book I remember bits of the experiences in which it originatedmoments left out or glancingly treated that grew more resonant with time. An evening, for instance, outside a bar/beer store in the town of West Point, Mississippi in the summer of 1966.1 had just come south to teach black kids who were about to enter integrated schools (see Mississippi Learning). Plane from Hartford to Memphis, down the road in a rented car to Mary Holmes Junior College in West Point, some nervousness on the way. (Orientation materials had passed the word that state police trailed strangers from the north and I kept thinking I saw them.)
I was frazzled, hungry, and in no mood for errands when I found the college, but the rules of the tutoring project designated the most recently arrived volunteer as that nights beer manit was up to me therefore to make a trip back to town in the college station wagon to pick up sixpacks. On the way out somebody advised caution because townies were given to firing BBs and throwing rocks and pop bottles at the wagon as it passed.
West Point equaled a muddy Main Street with a covered boardwalk running on one side in front of a row of three or four rickety stores and a bar. I parked, went in the bar, bought the beer, and returned to the campus without incident. No drama, no shots fired. Just this moment Im remembering now, as Ive done often in the last almost forty years.
As I was parking I noticed a black man and his wife (baby in her arms) on the boardwalk peering in the window of the bar. It was dark but still hot and I was sweating. I stood with the car door open drying my hands and face on a handkerchief. Engrossed in the show, the TV watchers didnt look my way. When I shut the car door, though, things happened. The black man jumped. He turned, bobbed his head toward me, and in a single movement swept wife, child, and himself from the covered boardwalk onto the muddy street. A single swooping movement. I see this movement clearly as I write and, in memory, as I say, Ive seen it often before. It shocked and outraged me. I understood at once, of course, that fear, deference, and knowledge of the odds figured in this seemingly frightened movement. The odds were unreckonably high against the possibility of a civil greeting being offered to a black man showing uppityness by standing motionless in an oncoming white strangers path.
What took longer to grasp concerned not race relations but relations between past fact and present identityhistory, in other words. I had a glimmer in those few seconds, a chance to learn. History never afterward talked louder to me. No war, death, passing of a baton, interview with greatness at the White House, afternoon in a hushed library with a volume of Shakespeare marked up by John Keatsnothing ever homed me in so directly on the weight of the past. The instinct that told the black man to move wife, child, and himself in a hurrydemanding that he project fear and powerlessness toward a threathad little to do with traits of individual character. The same held for my reaction of shock and outrage at the behaviorat the assumption that I meant harm to another human beingthat implicitly arraigned me. There was no me. No more than he saw a particular white did I see a particular black. Oppression, resistance, humanitarian idealismHistorical Forces drain selfhood away. Were lost in them as the sleeping baby in the mothers arms was lost in the mans panicky movement over the boardwalk into the mud, prized identities (including that of the outraged individual do-gooder, me) weightless in the face of the incomprehensibly massive Yesterday. As for the glimmer I mention: it was simply that there are many agents big and small out there waiting to put you in your place, and history is far the biggest.
This idea stayed vivid for some seconds back at our trailer headquartersuntil I awoke as beer man and commenced banging on the metal door with the Blue Ribbon. Intermittently since, it comes clear again. When this happens its like being goaded by a serious teacher into stretching myselftold to widen my outlook and raise the level of my game.
* * *
Other bits of past experience brought back by rereading the book have an oddly energizing effect Theyre reminders of moments when one or another intimidating challenge worked, by a paradox, to fend off selfpity and feelings of personal inconsequence. Theres a paragraph in this books title essay about children in a ghetto classroom killing time at assignments they dont understand:
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America»
Look at similar books to Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Benjamin DeMott
Walter Benjamin
McCaul
Franklin Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Lionel Trilling
Bromwich
Walter Benjamin
John Charles Hawley
Reviews about «Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America»
Discussion, reviews of the book Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.