Inventing the Egghead
The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture
Seiten
2013
University of Pennsylvania Press (Verlag)
978-0-8122-4486-1 (ISBN)
University of Pennsylvania Press (Verlag)
978-0-8122-4486-1 (ISBN)
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Throughout the twentieth century, popular songs, magazine articles, plays, posters, and novels alternated between representing intelligence as empowering and as threatening. In Inventing the Egghead, Aaron Lecklider cracks open this paradox by examining representations of intelligence to reveal brainpower's stalwart appeal and influence.
Throughout the twentieth century, pop songs, magazine articles, plays, posters, and novels in the United States represented intelligence alternately as empowering or threatening. In Inventing the Egghead, cultural historian Aaron Lecklider offers a sharp, entertaining narrative of these sources to reveal how Americans who were not part of the traditional intellectual class negotiated the complicated politics of intelligence within an accelerating mass culture.
Central to the book is the concept of brainpower—a term used by Lecklider to capture the ways in which journalists, writers, artists, and others invoked intelligence to embolden the majority of Americans who did not have access to institutions of higher learning. Expressions of brainpower, Lecklider argues, challenged the deeply embedded assumptions in society that intellectual capacity was the province of an educated elite, and that the working class was unreservedly anti-intellectual. Amid changes in work, leisure, and domestic life, brainpower became a means for social transformation in the modern United States. The concept thus provides an exciting vantage point from which to make fresh assessments of ongoing debates over intelligence and access to quality education.
Expressions of brainpower in the twentieth century engendered an uncomfortable paradox: they diminished the value of intellectuals (the hapless egghead, for example) while establishing claims to intellectual authority among ordinary women and men, including labor activists, women workers, and African Americans. Reading across historical, literary, and visual media, Lecklider mines popular culture as an arena where the brainpower of ordinary people was commonly invoked and frequently contested.
Throughout the twentieth century, pop songs, magazine articles, plays, posters, and novels in the United States represented intelligence alternately as empowering or threatening. In Inventing the Egghead, cultural historian Aaron Lecklider offers a sharp, entertaining narrative of these sources to reveal how Americans who were not part of the traditional intellectual class negotiated the complicated politics of intelligence within an accelerating mass culture.
Central to the book is the concept of brainpower—a term used by Lecklider to capture the ways in which journalists, writers, artists, and others invoked intelligence to embolden the majority of Americans who did not have access to institutions of higher learning. Expressions of brainpower, Lecklider argues, challenged the deeply embedded assumptions in society that intellectual capacity was the province of an educated elite, and that the working class was unreservedly anti-intellectual. Amid changes in work, leisure, and domestic life, brainpower became a means for social transformation in the modern United States. The concept thus provides an exciting vantage point from which to make fresh assessments of ongoing debates over intelligence and access to quality education.
Expressions of brainpower in the twentieth century engendered an uncomfortable paradox: they diminished the value of intellectuals (the hapless egghead, for example) while establishing claims to intellectual authority among ordinary women and men, including labor activists, women workers, and African Americans. Reading across historical, literary, and visual media, Lecklider mines popular culture as an arena where the brainpower of ordinary people was commonly invoked and frequently contested.
Aaron Lecklider teaches American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Introduction: Or, They Think We're Stupid
Chapter 1. "Aren't We Educational Here Too?": Brainpower and the Emergence of Mass Culture
Chapter 2. The Force of Complicated Mathematics: Einstein Enters American Culture
Chapter 3. Knowledge Is Power: Women, Workers' Education, and Brainpower in the 1920s
Chapter 4. "The Negro Genius": Black Intellectual Workers in the Harlem Renaissance
Chapter 5. "We Have Only Words Against": Brainworkers and Books in the 1930s
Chapter 6. Dangerous Minds: Spectacles of Science in the Postwar Atomic City
Chapter 7. Inventing the Egghead: Brainpower in Cold War American Culture
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
| Zusatzinfo | 21 illus. |
|---|---|
| Verlagsort | Pennsylvania |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
| Themenwelt | Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie |
| ISBN-10 | 0-8122-4486-9 / 0812244869 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-8122-4486-1 / 9780812244861 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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