Jonathan Auerbach
Research Expertise
American
Film Studies and Cultural Studies
Literary Theory
In addition to publishing a variety of articles on nineteenth and twentieth American literature and film, and editing a number of volumes, Jonathan Auerbach is the author of five books: Weapons of Democracy: Propaganda, Progressivism, and American Public Opinion (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming 2015); Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship (Duke UP, 2011); Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations (California, 2007); Male Call: Becoming Jack London (Duke UP, 1996); and The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (Oxford UP, 1989).
He has been a Fulbright scholar in Hungary, Portugal, Cyprus, and Tunisia, and has lectured abroad in Ireland, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Egypt. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on a range of subjects, from silent cinema to the nineteenth-century European novel to Cold War culture, has directed graduate job placement for a number of years, and routinely runs a graduate publications workshop. He was recently named a UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.
Publications
Weapons of Democracy: Propaganda, Progressivism, and American Public Opinion
Following World War I, political commentator Walter Lippmann worried that citizens increasingly held inaccurate and misinformed beliefs because of the way information was produced, circulated, and received in a mass-mediated society.
Following World War I, political commentator Walter Lippmann worried that citizens increasingly held inaccurate and misinformed beliefs because of the way information was produced, circulated, and received in a mass-mediated society. Lippmann dubbed this manipulative opinion-making process "the manufacture of consent." A more familiar term for such large-scale persuasion would be propaganda. In Weapons of Democracy, Jonathan Auerbach explores how Lippmann’s stark critique gave voice to a set of misgivings that had troubled American social reformers since the late nineteenth century.
Progressives, social scientists, and muckrakers initially drew on mass persuasion as part of the effort to mobilize sentiment for their own cherished reforms, including regulating monopolies, protecting consumers, and promoting disinterested, efficient government. "Propaganda" was associated with public education and consciousness raising for the good of the whole. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the need to muster support for American involvement in the Great War produced the Committee on Public Information, which zealously spread the gospel of American democracy abroad and worked to stifle dissent at home. After the war, public relations firms—which treated publicity as an end in itself—proliferated.
Weapons of Democracy traces the fate of American public opinion in theory and practice from 1884 to 1934 and explains how propaganda continues to shape today’s public sphere. The book closely analyzes the work of prominent political leaders, journalists, intellectuals, novelists, and corporate publicists, including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, George Creel, John Dewey, Julia Lathrop, Ivy Lee, and Edward Bernays. Truly interdisciplinary in both scope and method, this book will appeal to students and scholars in American studies, history, political theory, media and communications, and rhetoric and literary studies.
Weapons of Democracy: Propaganda, Progressivism, and American Public Opinion
How and why did public opinion―long cherished as a foundation of democratic government―become an increasing source of concern for American Progressives?
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The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies
Derived from the word "to propagate," the idea and practice of propaganda concerns nothing less than the ways in which human beings communicate, particularly with respect to the creation and widespread dissemination of attitudes, images, and beliefs.
Derived from the word "to propagate," the idea and practice of propaganda concerns nothing less than the ways in which human beings communicate, particularly with respect to the creation and widespread dissemination of attitudes, images, and beliefs. Much larger than its pejorative connotations suggest, propaganda can more neutrally be understood as a central means of organizing and shaping thought and perception, a practice that has been a pervasive feature of the twentieth century and that touches on many fields. It has been seen as both a positive and negative force, although abuses under the Third Reich and during the Cold War have caused the term to stand in, most recently, as a synonym for untruth and brazen manipulation.
Propaganda analysis of the 1950s to 1989 too often took the form of empirical studies about the efficacy of specific methods, with larger questions about the purposes and patterns of mass persuasion remaining unanswered. In the present moment where globalization and transnationality are arguably as important as older nation forms, when media enjoy near ubiquity throughout the globe, when various fundamentalisms are ascendant, and when debates rage about neoliberalism, it is urgent that we have an up-to-date resource that considers propaganda as a force of culture writ large.
The handbook will include twenty-two essays by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, divided into three sections. In addition to dealing with the thorny question of definition, the handbook will take up an expansive set of assumptions and a full range of approaches that move propaganda beyond political campaigns and warfare to examine a wide array of cultural contexts and practices.
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Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship
Dark Borders connects anxieties about citizenship and national belonging in midcentury America to the sense of alienation conveyed by American film noir.
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Body Shots: Early Cinema's Incarnations
This original and compelling book places the body at the center of cinema's first decade of emergence and challenges the idea that for early audiences, the new medium's fascination rested on visual spectacle for its own sake.
Body Shots: Early Cinema's Incarnations
In this original and compelling book, Auerbach argues, it was the human form in motion that most profoundly shaped early cinema.
This original and compelling book places the body at the center of cinema's first decade of emergence and challenges the idea that for early audiences, the new medium's fascination rested on visual spectacle for its own sake. Instead, Auerbach argues, it was the human form in motion that most profoundly shaped early cinema. Auerbach begins his analysis with films that reveal striking anxieties and preoccupations about person on public display -- both exceptional figures, such as 1896 presidential candidate William McKinley, and ordinary people caught by the movie camera in their daily routines.
The Iron Heel, by Jack London
Auerbach edits and provides a new introduction of Jack London's The Iron Heel. Part science fiction, part dystopian fantasy, part radical socialist tract, London offers a grim depiction of warfare between the classes in America and around the globe.
Auerbach edits and provides a new introduction of Jack London's The Iron Heel. Part science fiction, part dystopian fantasy, part radical socialist tract, London offers a grim depiction of warfare between the classes in America and around the globe. Originally published in 1908, The Iron Heel anticipates many features of the past century, including the rise of fascism, the emergence of domestic terrorism, and the growth of centralized government surveillance and authority.
Tiep Can Duong Dai Van Hoa My: Contemporary Approaches to American Culture
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Northland Stories, by Jack London
Written shortly after Jack London's return from the goldfields of the Klondike in 1898, these stories bring to life the harrowing hardships and rugged codes of behavior by which men defined themselves in the lawless wilderness.
Written shortly after Jack London's return from the goldfields of the Klondike in 1898, these stories bring to life the harrowing hardships and rugged codes of behavior by which men defined themselves in the lawless wilderness. Like the characters in the popular dime novels of the time, London's heroes display such manly virtues as courage, loyalty, and steadfastness as they confront the merciless frozen expanses of the north. Yet London breaks free of stereotypical figures and one-dimensional plots to explore deeper psychological and social questions of self-mastery, masculinity, and racial domination. Northland Stories comprises nineteen of Jack London's greatest short works.
Male Call: Becoming Jack London
When Jack London died in 1916 at age forty, he was one of the most famous writers of his time. Eighty years later he remains one of the most widely read American authors in the world.
When Jack London died in 1916 at age forty, he was one of the most famous writers of his time. Eighty years later he remains one of the most widely read American authors in the world. Male Call analyzes the nature of his appeal by closely examining how the struggling young writer soguht to promote himself in his early work as a sympathetic, romantic man of letters whose charismatic masculinity could carry more significance than his words themselves. Auerbach shows that London's personal identity was not a basis of his literary success, but rather a consequence of it. Unlike previous studies of London that are driven by the author's biography, Male Call examines how London carefully invented a trademark "self" in order to gain access to a rapidly expanding popular magazine and book market that craved authenticity, celebrity, power, and personality.
The Romance of Failure
Auerbach's book explores the fictions of three 19th-century writers--Poe, Hawthorne, and James--in which the first-person narrator is both the central actor and the retrospective teller of tale, at once hero and historian.
From the publisher's website:
Auerbach's book explores the fictions of three 19th-century writers--Poe, Hawthorne, and James--in which the first-person narrator is both the central actor and the retrospective teller of tale, at once hero and historian. Auerbach argues that first person is an attractive but dangerous form of self-revelation that foregrounds fundamental problems of literay representation such as how fiction come to be made, and the relation between these plots and the people who make them.
Male Call: Becoming Jack London
When Jack London died in 1916 at age forty, he was one of the most famous writers of his time.
The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James
This book focuses on the intense intimacy between author and first-person narrator in the fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James in order to defend the beleaguered "I" in these works against the depersonalizing tendencies of postructuralism.
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