5/13/2023 0 Comments Our town thornton wilder book![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the major federal funding body for culture in the US, launched a new set of “creative placemaking” grants. Taking inspiration from Antoine Hennion’s sociology of music, this essay ventures into the archive to trace an unfamiliar origin story for Our Town, involving a turn-of-the-century writers’ colony, a Progressive-Era historical pageant, and Wilder’s self-understanding as both confirmed bachelor and “community man.” Through the trajectory of a single play, civic mediation emerges as a pervasive strategy and ethos of American cultural practice, connecting diverse media through time and space. These productions recognize what terms like middlebrow obscure: Our Town is a civic mediator, a performance that installs art at the center of community life and community at the center of art. In 2011, the play lent its name to a major funding program launched by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2017, it appeared in the center of a popular podcast and was revived by a British theater company in the wake of a terrorist attack. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) has found unusual currency of late. ![]()
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