Reveals Ann Tizia Leitich, American correspondent for Austrian newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s, as an important cultural mediator between the two countries.
After the First World War, Vienna was overrun by jazz, Hollywood movies, and Fordism; its citizens were both fascinated and appalled by the waves of American ideas and products. To make sense of the American phenomenon, readers turned to Ann Tizia Leitich, the New York-based correspondent for Vienna’s prominent daily
Neue Freie Presse and other newspapers. Rob Mc Farland tells the story of Leitich’s escape, occasioned by a personal crisis, from Austria to America in 1921, and of her rise as a journalist, cultural historian, and novelist. By the early 1930s, she had met President Coolidge, Senator Sol Bloom, the writer Upton Sinclair, and the critic H. L. Mencken. Her devotedreaders – including the novelist Stefan Zweig and the Austrian chancellor Ignatz Seipl – sought in her witty, insightful descriptions of the United States some American vitality to invigorate their own moribund culture and economy. Chronicling Leitich’s career as a journalist, cultural historian, and novelist and providing close readings of her writings about America, this book reveals her as an important cultural mediator between Austria and America.
Rob Mc Farland is Associate Professor of German at Brigham Young University.
Mục lục
Introduction:
Amerika in Wien
Ancient People on New Ground: European Culture Meets American Civilization
New Movies and
Neue Menschen: From Red Vienna to ‘
Anatol on the Missouri’
Stefan Zweig’s ‘Giant Wave of Uniformity’: Colonization, Class, and the Polemics of American Mass Culture
Babbitt’s Wives and Lovers: White Socialism, Gender, and the Poetry of the Machine
Hymns to Chicago: Progress, Myth, and the Music of the Metropolis
The Danube Blues: From American Mass Culture to Austrian Culture for the Masses
Epilogue: Delightful Facts and Convenient Fictions; Reconsidering Ann Tizia Leitich’s Austria in the Context of Her American Writings
Chronology
Ann Tizia Leitich: A Selected Bibliography
Index
Giới thiệu về tác giả
Rob Mc Farland is Professor of German Literature, Film and Culture at Brigham Young University.