The American Dream

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The American Dream

Introduction

Ideology differs from mere propaganda by organizing and coordinating many different social forces and discourses into a system or worldview. In this sense the interdisciplinary field of American studies would appear to be well-suited to the interpretation and criticism of the “American ideology” in different historical periods. With its roots in the 1930s, American studies draws on the leftist critique of American capitalism and its failure to deliver its original democratic promises (Woodward, 2011, 92-103).

Discussion

In the 1920s and 1930s the German Marxists associated with the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, and like-minded contemporaries, such as Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, developed methods of cultural analysis they termed as ideological criticism that linked intellectual analysis with progressive politics. Although their Marxist and antifascist politics were compatible with the aims of American leftists in the 1930s, such as Mike Gold, Granville Hicks, Philip Rahv, and Wallace Phelps, Frankfurt school intellectuals had little impact on American studies until the New Left revival of their ideas and writings in the 1970s and 1980s (Murray,Tew,2009,69-73).

In literary criticism the formalist practices of the New Criticism, a politically conservative and “militantly anti-ideological” method achieved prominence and near orthodoxy in the 1940s and 1950s. In its own right the New Criticism was a method of literary interpretation that had little influence on the interdisciplinary methods of American studies, but in its American versions New Criticism helped legitimate the sharp distinction between cultural idealism and political realism that encouraged intellectuals in other areas to neglect the ideological implications of their objects of study and their own methods. Later, American exceptionalism was recognized as part of an ideology that included the anticommunism of the McCarthy era, the Pan-American foreign policies of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and the politics of the ...
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