Few popular songs released over the past thirty years start so memorably: that bass riff, ominous, music for Jaws before there was Jaws, so insistent and unforgiving that in GoodFellas (1990), Scorsese has de Niro do nothing but smoke a ‘square’ and look – icily – off screen while the riff sounds its ten-note pattern. And you know what the combination of de Niro's look, those sounds and that smoke mean: somebody is going to get ‘whacked’. Cream's 1968 hit, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, has been part of the shared culture of the world in which it has sounded for thirty years. In both Europe and America, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ (SYL) continues to receive airplay today. At high school and college sporting events across the US, pep bands continue to play it (Dan Farris, Assistant Director of Bands, Illinois State University, personal communication, 5 March 1997). A band played it, too, in a 5 April 1997 episode of the NBC television network series, Profiler.

This essay considers Henry James's American lectures of 1904-1905 in the context of their original performance. James's lecture tour was designed to sell his work to American readers, but his "absolutely economic" considerations were at odds with his increasing desire to intervene directly in American life--to correct, exhort, and excoriate. His final American lecture, "The Question of Our Speech," a scathing (and ironically marketable) critique of American civilization, was informed by James's uneasy negotiation of the public and the private, the commercial and the critical, during his previous lectures in the United States.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract