Lauter, Paul. From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, & American Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
This is a collection of various essays Lauter has written over several years. They are organized in to topical sections. The first section deals with the question of what does American Studies mean. The second asks how does American Studies and Ethnic Studies interact. The the third asks how does modernism influence cannon formation especially as it relates to organizing cultural power. The first section is a collection of key note addresses he has delivered over the years including the key address as a president of the American Studies Association. This section is a set of essays that deal specifically with issues of disciplinary border crossings between American Studies and African American studies. The latter section presents a series of essays that deals with cannon formation in literary studies. Lauter sees the cannon as the borderland between American Studies and literary studies. Further, he sees issues of modernism began in “the early decades of the twentieth century and the 1950s” in the creation of the cannon. [L. McReynolds]