"This fresh and engaging collection of essays is a significant marker in the momentous shift from academic theorizing to a more public, more accessible form of cultural and literary commentary. These younger critics, like their predecessors in earlier generations, have rediscovered the personal voice as a superb vehicle for new ideas about art, culture, and society."--Morris Dickstein, Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate School

Introduction/ Marianna Torgovnick 1 The American Stranger/ Alice Yaeger Kaplan 5 Decades/ Nancy K. Miller  29 The Duplicity of the Southern Story: Reflections on Reynolds Price's The Surface of Earth and Eudora Welty's "The Wide Net"/ Linda Orr 50 Tatami Room/ Cathy N. Davidson 76 Saving Our Lives: Dances with Wolves, Iron John, and the Search for a New Masculinity/ Jane Tompkins 96 Pursuing Authenticity: The Vernacular Moment in Contemporary American Art/ Henry M. Sayre 107 Becoming America's Lens on the World: National Geographic in the Twentieth Century/ Jane Collins and Catherine Lutz 128 Power, History, and Authenticity: The Mowachaht Whalers' Washing Shrine/ Aldona Jonaitis and Richard Inglis 157 The Ecology of Images/ Andrew Ross 185 Academic Writing and the Uses of Bad Publicity/ Gerald Graff 208 Ideology, Energy, and Cultural Criticism/ Mark Edmundson 220 Invoking Culture: The Messy Sid of "Cultural Politics"/ Virgina R. Dominguez 237 The Politics of the "We"/ Marianna Torgovnick 260 Notes on Contributors 279 Index 281