AMERICAN CULTURE 1945-Present

Perhaps, however, we will be known as a choppy period in which society has been broken into groups and fractions based on things like: race, religion, culture, gender, age, and sexual orientation. People tend to cling to their own group and our sense of national unity is weakening. However, it may also be possible that such social movements as multi-culturalism are forging a New America. In literature, especially, most schools no longer emphasize the traditional canon of works and authors, but are instead teaching the literature of a wide variety of cultures. There are works by Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and so on.

In the years after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire, a dizzying prosperity spread through the United States, whi

Amid this extraordinary opportunity, however, American writers faced new and complex challenges with regard to originality, authenticity, and social worth. The interstate highways that spread across the continent in the late 1960s, the electronic media that by the mid-1950s could bounce television and radio signals from coast to coast, brought on waves of consolidation and conformity in popular and literary culture: the same TV shows, music, food, consumer goods, and housing. With ease and abundance and fast communications came an erosion of regional differences, a merged culture that many artists saw as a threat.

“After second grade the school was closed down. Don’t ask me why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now.” The same idea as in Cathedral is weaved throughout Alice Walker’s piece entitled Everyday Use. In letting a rural black woman with little education tell a story that affirms the value of her heritage, Walker articulates what has since become two central themes in her writing: the importance of the quilt in her work and the creation of African American Southern women as subjects in their own right. “I did something I never had done before: hugged Maggie to me, then dragged her into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s lap.” When Mrs. J

Some topics in this essay:
Hispanic Americans, Raymond Carter, American Literature, Carver’s Cathedral, GI Bill, Maoist China, Alice Walker’s, Miss Wangero’s, World War, American Southern, americans asian, native americans, contemporary period, asian americans, african americans, americans asian americans,