Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Constance Rourke (American Historian)

Constance Mayfield Rourke (1885–1941) was an American educator, author, and historian of American culture. She is best known for her advocacy of Native American culture and her “living research” sources and methods.

Rourke was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Sorbonne and Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She taught English at Vassar 1910–15. After that, she supported herself mainly as a freelance writer in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She also wrote numerous criticisms for magazines like The Nation and The New Republic.

Rourke pioneered an American character that encompassed both established arts and popular culture. Her best-known work remains American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931.) An unfinished manuscript, posthumously published as Roots of American Culture (1942,) spurred scholarship in the nascent field of American Studies.

Joan Shelley Rubin published the biography Constance Rourke and American Culture (1980.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Constance Rourke

Humor has been a fashioning instrument in America, cleaving its way through the national life, holding tenaciously to the spread elements of that life. Its mode has often been swift and coarse and ruthless, beyond art and beyond established civilization. It has engaged in warfare against the established heritage, against the bonds of pioneer existence. Its objective—the unconscious objective of a disunited people—has seemed to be that of creating fresh bonds, a new unity, the semblance of a society and the rounded completion of an American type.
Constance Rourke
Topics: Humor

An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.
Constance Rourke
Topics: Humor

In comedy, reconcilement with life comes at the point when to the tragic sense only an inalienable difference or dissension with life appears.
Constance Rourke
Topics: Comedy

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