Dan P. McAdams
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195176933
- eISBN:
- 9780199786787
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195176933.001.0001
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology
Drawing from the author's psychological research on especially generative (that is, caring and productive) midlife American adults and on a reading of American cultural history and literature, this ...
More
Drawing from the author's psychological research on especially generative (that is, caring and productive) midlife American adults and on a reading of American cultural history and literature, this book identifies a prototypical story of the good life that many Americans employ to make sense of who they are, who they have been, and who they will be in the future. The central theme in this story is redemption — the deliverance from suffering to a positive status or outcome. Empirical research suggests that highly generative American adults are much more likely than their less generative counterparts to construe their lives as tales of redemption. Redemptive life stories promote psychological well-being, physical health, and the adult's commitment to making a positive contribution to society. But stories of redemption are as much cultural texts as they are individual psychological constructions. From the spiritual autobiographies composed by the Massachusetts Bay Puritans to the most recent episodes of the Oprah Winfrey Show, common scripts for the redemptive self may be found in religious accounts of conversion and atonement, the rags-to-riches stories of the American dream, and canonical cultural narratives about personal liberation, freedom, and recovery. The book examines the psychological and cultural dynamics of redemptive life narratives, including the role of American religion and self-help as sources for the construction of life stories and the broad similarities, as well as the striking differences in how African-American and Euro-American adults construct redemptive stories of the self. For all their psychological and cultural power, redemptive life stories sometimes reveal important limitations in American identity. For example, some versions of the redemptive self underscore the naïve expectation that suffering will always be overcome and the arrogance of seeing one's own life as the living out of a personal manifest destiny.Less
Drawing from the author's psychological research on especially generative (that is, caring and productive) midlife American adults and on a reading of American cultural history and literature, this book identifies a prototypical story of the good life that many Americans employ to make sense of who they are, who they have been, and who they will be in the future. The central theme in this story is redemption — the deliverance from suffering to a positive status or outcome. Empirical research suggests that highly generative American adults are much more likely than their less generative counterparts to construe their lives as tales of redemption. Redemptive life stories promote psychological well-being, physical health, and the adult's commitment to making a positive contribution to society. But stories of redemption are as much cultural texts as they are individual psychological constructions. From the spiritual autobiographies composed by the Massachusetts Bay Puritans to the most recent episodes of the Oprah Winfrey Show, common scripts for the redemptive self may be found in religious accounts of conversion and atonement, the rags-to-riches stories of the American dream, and canonical cultural narratives about personal liberation, freedom, and recovery. The book examines the psychological and cultural dynamics of redemptive life narratives, including the role of American religion and self-help as sources for the construction of life stories and the broad similarities, as well as the striking differences in how African-American and Euro-American adults construct redemptive stories of the self. For all their psychological and cultural power, redemptive life stories sometimes reveal important limitations in American identity. For example, some versions of the redemptive self underscore the naïve expectation that suffering will always be overcome and the arrogance of seeing one's own life as the living out of a personal manifest destiny.
Sylvia Jenkins Cook
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195327809
- eISBN:
- 9780199870547
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195327809.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter considers some dramatic changes in the population of working women by the beginning of the 20th century, as well as continuities of the same ideals that had animated the earliest female ...
More
This chapter considers some dramatic changes in the population of working women by the beginning of the 20th century, as well as continuities of the same ideals that had animated the earliest female industrial workers. It juxtaposes the hopes for self-culture of a generation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who worked in the sweatshops of New York with those of the earlier Lowell workers, and explores the fiction that they wrote and that was written about them. It looks closely at Emma Goldman as an extreme manifestation, both celebrated and notorious, of the consequences of working women's aspirations to literariness and self-reliance. Like Margaret Fuller, Goldman edited a literary periodical, Mother Earth, asserted the romantic primacy of her individual mind, and ignored the sexual restrictions of her time. Like Fuller's working-class contemporaries, she appropriated from the romantic ideals of transcendentalism principles probably not developed with someone like herself in mind. Like those factory workers, too, she was a passionate reader and writer and, like them, she was the subject, sometimes admired, frequently ridiculed, of other people's fascinated fictions.Less
This chapter considers some dramatic changes in the population of working women by the beginning of the 20th century, as well as continuities of the same ideals that had animated the earliest female industrial workers. It juxtaposes the hopes for self-culture of a generation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who worked in the sweatshops of New York with those of the earlier Lowell workers, and explores the fiction that they wrote and that was written about them. It looks closely at Emma Goldman as an extreme manifestation, both celebrated and notorious, of the consequences of working women's aspirations to literariness and self-reliance. Like Margaret Fuller, Goldman edited a literary periodical, Mother Earth, asserted the romantic primacy of her individual mind, and ignored the sexual restrictions of her time. Like Fuller's working-class contemporaries, she appropriated from the romantic ideals of transcendentalism principles probably not developed with someone like herself in mind. Like those factory workers, too, she was a passionate reader and writer and, like them, she was the subject, sometimes admired, frequently ridiculed, of other people's fascinated fictions.
Susan O’Neill
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199214389
- eISBN:
- 9780191594779
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199214389.003.0008
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology, Music Psychology
Recent work in cultural psychology has begun to explore theoretical frameworks that involve the mutual inclusion of self and culture in action. These frameworks draw on the concepts of dialogue and ...
More
Recent work in cultural psychology has begun to explore theoretical frameworks that involve the mutual inclusion of self and culture in action. These frameworks draw on the concepts of dialogue and experience-based inquiry to illustrate the ways that learning in and through our experiences offers the potential and possibility for changing our perceptions of both self and other. This chapter discusses these ideas in relation to music performance and cultural diversity in education. It begins by describing some of the challenges that music performance educators face as they respond to the growing and problematic cultural-political agendas associated with multiculturalism.Less
Recent work in cultural psychology has begun to explore theoretical frameworks that involve the mutual inclusion of self and culture in action. These frameworks draw on the concepts of dialogue and experience-based inquiry to illustrate the ways that learning in and through our experiences offers the potential and possibility for changing our perceptions of both self and other. This chapter discusses these ideas in relation to music performance and cultural diversity in education. It begins by describing some of the challenges that music performance educators face as they respond to the growing and problematic cultural-political agendas associated with multiculturalism.
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814785980
- eISBN:
- 9780814724927
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814785980.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter looks at men's chat-room exchanges alongside the emergence of a self-help culture and the formation of global masculinity wedded to U.S. expansion, free trade, and empire. It also draws ...
More
This chapter looks at men's chat-room exchanges alongside the emergence of a self-help culture and the formation of global masculinity wedded to U.S. expansion, free trade, and empire. It also draws from interviews with men at the Vacation Romance Tours. In line with website images and narratives, for U.S. men, Latin American women's bodies figure as pure bodies and superior genes that are highly valued within a capitalist culture that men describe as devoid of domestic care, affection, and intimacy. American men's access to foreign markets and bodies promises to patriotically rejuvenate not only their identities (across race, class, and regional differences) but also the national stock and to provide an alternative to lonely and alienating lifestyles. The ethnographic interviews and web narratives explored here offer some clues as to how personal fantasies naturalize the global marketplace as the moral and patriotic force that propels men abroad.Less
This chapter looks at men's chat-room exchanges alongside the emergence of a self-help culture and the formation of global masculinity wedded to U.S. expansion, free trade, and empire. It also draws from interviews with men at the Vacation Romance Tours. In line with website images and narratives, for U.S. men, Latin American women's bodies figure as pure bodies and superior genes that are highly valued within a capitalist culture that men describe as devoid of domestic care, affection, and intimacy. American men's access to foreign markets and bodies promises to patriotically rejuvenate not only their identities (across race, class, and regional differences) but also the national stock and to provide an alternative to lonely and alienating lifestyles. The ethnographic interviews and web narratives explored here offer some clues as to how personal fantasies naturalize the global marketplace as the moral and patriotic force that propels men abroad.
Joel Porte
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300104462
- eISBN:
- 9780300130577
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300104462.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Ralp Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also ...
More
Ralp Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also be seen as bitter rivals: America's foremost literary statesman, protective of his reputation, and an ambitious and sometimes refractory protege. The truth, this book maintains, is that Emerson and Thoreau were complementary literary geniuses, mutually inspiring and inspired. This book focuses on Emerson and Thoreau as writers. It traces their individual achievements and their points of intersection, arguing that both men, starting from a shared belief in the importance of “self-culture”, produced a body of writing that helped move a decidedly provincial New England readership into the broader arena of international culture.Less
Ralp Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also be seen as bitter rivals: America's foremost literary statesman, protective of his reputation, and an ambitious and sometimes refractory protege. The truth, this book maintains, is that Emerson and Thoreau were complementary literary geniuses, mutually inspiring and inspired. This book focuses on Emerson and Thoreau as writers. It traces their individual achievements and their points of intersection, arguing that both men, starting from a shared belief in the importance of “self-culture”, produced a body of writing that helped move a decidedly provincial New England readership into the broader arena of international culture.
