Selections
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Childish Gambino, This Is America. Released May 5, 2018
Abena Koomson performs "Let America Be America Again," by Langston Hughes. Poets in unexpected places. Published December 4, 2014
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus.” Written 1883
Richard Wright, Chapter V, Black Boy, 107-126. Originally published 1945
G.K. Chesterton, Selections from What I Saw in America: “Some American Cities,” 63-79. First published 1922
Jean Baudrillard, “Utopia Achieved,” America, 75-105. First published 1989
Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” Men in Dark Times, 3-31. Originally published 1968
Hannah Arendt, Selection from “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure,” On Revolution, 217-251. Originally published 1963
Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” Between Past and Future, 227-264. Originally published 1961
Hannah Arendt, “The Alliance between Mob and Capital,” The Origins of Totalitarianism, 147-157. Originally published 1951
Susan Sontag, “What’s Happening in America?” Partisan Review, Winter 1967
Theodor Adorno, Selections from Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life: “Paysage,” 48; “Dwarf fruit,” 49-50; “The Health unto Death,” 58-60; “Diagnosis,” 123-124; “All the world’s not a stage,” 143-145; “Don’t exaggerate,” 233-235. First published in English 1951
Peter Sloterdijk, “The Exception: Anatomy of a Temptation, Americanology 2,” In the World Interior of Capital, 233-248. First published in English 2013
Giorgio Agamben, “A Brief History of the State of Exception,” State of Exception, 11-22. Originally published in English 2005
Jacques Derrida on American Attitude, e-flux conversations. Published 2016
Joyce Carol Oates, “‘Good News!’” It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art, ed., Jonathan Santlofer, 247-262. Published 2018
Marion Mainwaring, John Quincy Adams and Russia: A Sketch of Early Russian-American Relations as Recorded in the Papers of the Adams Family and Some of Their Contemporaries. Published 1965*
*Announcing the OICR Prize for the Redemption of the Most Illustrious Lost, Discarded, or Forgotten Work for Making Sense of Present-Day American Crises & Dilemmas
We recently happened to find mention of an intriguingly-titled monograph on the sixth President of the United States by the late writer, critic, and translator Marion Mainwaring. (The reference appears on the back flap of a discarded copy of The Portrait Game, a little-known book based on a little-known collection in the Bibliothèque nationale de France consisting of drawings of imaginary persons by the Russian writer Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev and subsequent character sketches composed by Turgenev and his friends—sketches translated and edited by Mainwaring, and published in English in 1973, a full 117 years after the group played their first round of “the portrait game” in Paris in 1856.) Mainwaring’s study John Quincy Adams and Russia: A Sketch of Early Russian-American Relations as Recorded in the Papers of the Adams Family and Some of Their Contemporaries (1965) is now virtually impossible to find. The Institute is offering a $250 cash prize to the first person who can locate and deliver a copy of the book to the Institute by the last day of October 2018, in time for OICR’s “Readings for Now” Seminar #4, which will be devoted to a variety of works on “Russian-American Relations,” early and late. We will continue sponsoring this prize into the foreseeable future, with the second iteration completely open to any subject or theme of critical relevance.