Civility and Psychology.
1981; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 59; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2162-3163
Autores Tópico(s)Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology
ResumoThere was a time when the major discordance in American political and cul tural life was regional; specifically, a matter of North and South?terms that represented not only two regions, but two ways of thinking about life and living it. The question of slavery dominated the argumentative discourse, needless to say, but even before our Constitution was ratified by the states of Colonial America, the great Virginia eccentric (and statesman and singularly shrewd social observer) John Randolph had prophesied the increasing polarization of a future nation: the pull of a strong central government, so convenient to urban manufacturing centers intent on getting resources and doing business, no matter the cost to this person or that community; as against the tug of a rural aristoc racy, heavily slave-connected as well as dependent on a white yeomanry, but also devoted to ways of leisure and aspects of a cultural tradition (that of ancient Greece and Rome) at variance with the habits and interests of, say, the burghers of England, York, and Pennsylvania. William Taylor's felicitously stated polarity in Cavalier and Yankee1 ?the as a repository of one set of apprehensions and aspirations, the North as a place where a rather different social and economic agenda predominated?was deeply embedded in our na tional life well into this century. Even now, as the New South becomes, in fact, a d?j? vu North (com merce, everywhere commerce we heard a member of Alabama's gentry say, with respect to Birmingham and Atlanta, in 1965), some of the distinctions Mr. Taylor emphasized haven't quite disappeared. The South's literary culture holds onto a distinct regional character?not only in Faulkner, dead less than twenty years, but in such recent or contemporary writers as Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, Reynolds Price, Tennessee Williams, Madison Jones, Alice Walker. These are writers who take no pleasure at all in what they regard as America's (increasingly, too, the South's) industrial ethic and its cultural overtones: a rootless, fast-moving cosmopolitanism. By the same token, Yankee critics have for some time seen the as one large, amusing American heirloom: all those hard-to-fathom, or precious, or nostal gically satisfying, but strange, oh strange stories?a continuing collective melo drama which may please in York or Boston, but surely, as the cute Mr. Truman Capote once put it, tells us of places, other rooms than the ones we know and inhabit. 133
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