Literature in Context [antikvár]

PrefaceNot so many Fourths of July ago, a television reporter asked an unidentified elderly celebrant of two hundred thirty-odd years of American independence why she loved the Statue of Liberty, which at that moment was serving as majestic backdrop for the "wo-man-on-the-street" interview. Thus prompted and environed, the dear woman managed to get off this peculiarly liberating salvo: she loved the Statue of Liberty because it looked so much like Elvis Presley. How's that for a cognitive broadside, for a verbal volley improbably apt by reason of its very improbability to herald the grand pyro-technical display that would Hght up New York harbor and the Manhattan skyUne later that evening?Only after our surprise begins to wear off sMghdy do we sense how difficult it is to characterize remarks and speakers like these. It is hard, for example, to imagine that the speaker intended to make a satirical point about the interchangeability of our national icons, even though her remark succeeds in doing just this. Thus, paradoxically, while the apparent absence of subversive intent enhances the remark's fresh and sudden quality, it would seem to point to the speaker's ignorance or inanity. And yet, who would level the charge of culmral illiteracy at someone who had just brought Lady Liberty and the King of Rock and RoU together in the same sentence? Similarly, granted that the proposed likeness most resembles a smdy in unlikeness, who would base his estimate of the proposer's mental capacity on the capacity of one face to resemble another?In addition to the remark's initial resistance to analysis, what matters for our purposes as scholars and students of American culmral studies either in the US or a-broadthough I may as well reveal here that our Central European colleagues are the formnate few to whom the astute essays gathered in this volume are chiefly addressedis how typical it is of similarly peculiar and liberating remarks made all the time in America. So regularly do we hear this sort of thing from so-called average folk that even the dimmest armchair critics of American culture must on occasion rouse themselves, take the hint, and ask themselves if average folk capable of such disarming remarks are really as average as the lackluster images and words that reliably flat-minded media-savants submit each news-cycle to a candid world.But back to the stalled effort to say something critically useful about the "Elvis of Liberty" remark (as well as, it would now seem, an embarrassment of similarly rich re-