Aaron Lecklider

Inventing the Egghead (eBook, ePUB)

The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Canongate Books
• Seitenzahl: 296
• Erscheinungstermin: 5. März 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780812207811
• Artikelnr.: 40881889

Autorenporträt

Aaron Lecklider teaches American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Inhaltsangabe

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