Greil Marcus - Notes on the making of A New Literary History of America

We recently purchases several copies of this new title of interest to American Studies, English and U.S. History teachers. These  notes come from the Harvard University Press Publicity Blog which give insight into the undertaking of writing cultural history:

Part 1 - "Scare quotes are the enemy" - how he worked with writers to avoid contracting the deadly "narrative disease" we know by the name of scare quotes... quotation marks placed around a single word or phrase to indicate that the word or phrase does not signify its literal or conventional meaning.

Part 2 - "Placing Bets"  -"how the process of editing a project conceived so sprawlingly involves a good deal of "placing of bets, and how, once you're committed to taking these sorts of chances, the book can and will begin in some measure to assemble itself"

Part 3 - "Throwing the cards in the air" -how the narrative that emerged was never anyone’s explicit intention ....Slavery and its legacies comprise the great social movement of the nation—...and how the book is, in part, and in a certain way as a whole, the literary history of that movement.

Part 4 - “Playing a hand” - how “at the source of the American Dream itself lies slavery.”

Part 5 - "The speech of our time” - about the evolution of the American voice...the search for a national voice, a form of speech that everyone could understand, and speak.