“The Yellow Rose of Texas”: A Different Cultural View
2009; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cal.0.0434
ISSN1080-6512
Autores Tópico(s)Rhetoric and Communication Studies
ResumoHistory, literature (poems, novels), folklore (songs, legends), and popular culture intertwine, intersect, and transform each other in a constantly influencing mixture of fact, truth, speculation, and downright lies. Appropriation of one cultural form by another may mean that a perceived historical truth outstrips fact to become legend. For example, did George Washington really cut down the cherry tree, or is that just a good story that epitomizes something Americans would like to believe about that historical figure? Was Abraham Honest Abe Lincoln really as honest as legend perceives him to be, or is that just a facet of his character that historians and regular folk like to emphasize? Where does fact, truth, leave off and fiction begin? And why does fiction seem to reflect a truth larger than fact when it is applied to characters whose actions warrant our approval? In the crisscrossings of these perceptions of reality, claims to an absolute veracity give way to the human instinct and love for a good story, indeed perhaps to the preference for a good story over the starkness of reality. In the imaginative construction of various kinds of texts, whether they are grounded in history, biography, autobiography, folklore, literature, or whether they appear on television, in newspapers, or in other print media, a point can occur where those creations take on lives of their own, where the original intent becomes irrelevant in the face of the re-creation and re-structuring of events and incidents to the will and the realm of the imagination. There is a point where history is no more true than fiction, where a newspaper story, such as that focusing on Tawana Brawley, takes on such a life that it becomes impossible to sort out fact from fiction, legend from life, folklore from biography. A good story. Connections made that are perhaps not as truthful as undisputed facts would make them. The preference for imagination over historical documentation. The preference for the sensational over the mundane. These patterns of cultural formation and creative interchange provide the context in which I would like to explore a story-and the novel about the story-that is sometimes perceived to be true, at other times discounted, but that continues to intrigue Americans more than one hundred and fifty years after the events around which the speculation occurred. Whether true or fictional, documentable or discountable, the events have seeped into
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