From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, and American Studies

Paul Lauter, an central figure in American Studies, offers a wide-ranging collection of essays that demonstrate and reflect on this important and often highly politicized discipline. While American Studies was formerly seen as a wholly subsidiary academic programme that loosely combined the study of American history, literature, and art, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park reveals the evolution of an independent, highly interdisciplinary programme with distinctive subjects, methods, and goals that are much different than the traditional academic departments that nurtured it. With anecdote peppered discussions ranging from specific literary texts and movies to the future of higher education and the efficacy of unions, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park aims to entertain even as it offers a 21st century account of how and why Americanists at home and abroad now do what they do. Drawing on his 45 years of teaching and research as well as his experience as a political activist and a cultural radical, Lauter shows how a multifaceted increase in the United States’ global dominion has infused a particular political urgency into American Studies. With its military and economic influence, its cultural and linguistic reach, the United States is - for better or for worse - too formidable and potent not to be understood clearly and critically.