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Approaches to American Cultural Studies provides an accessible yet comprehensive overview of the diverse range of subjects encompassed within American Studies, familiarising students with the history and shape of American Studies as an academic subject as well as its key theories, methods, and concepts. Written and edited by an international team of authors based primarily in Europe, the book is divided into four thematically-organised sections. The first part delineates the evolution of American Studies over the course of the twentieth century, the second elaborates on how American Studies as a field is positioned within the wider humanities, and the third inspects and deconstructs popular ...
Gender and Cosmopolitanism in Europe combines a feminist critique of contemporary and prominent approaches to cosmopolitanism with an in-depth analysis of historical cosmopolitanism and the manner in which gendered symbolic boundaries of national political communities in two European countries are drawn. Exploring the work of prominent scholars of new cosmopolitanism in Britain and Germany, including Held, Habermas, Beck and Bhabha, it delivers a timely intervention into current debates on globalisation, Europeanisation and social processes of transformation in and beyond specific national societies. A rigorous examination of the emancipatory potential of current debates surrounding cosmopolitanism in Europe, this book will be of interest to sociologist and political scientists working on questions of identity, inclusion, citizenship, globalisation, cosmopolitanism and gender.
The four prose texts discussed in Literary Rooms position themselves in a literary tradition which highlights the manifold purposes the private room may serve: it is a mirror of the inhabitant, a context in which to position the self, a place of and motor for identity quests, a rich metaphor, and a second skin around the inhabitant’s physical body. Even in times of increasing globalization and urbanization, the room continues to root the inhabitant; it serves as a retreat from the world and as a place in which to (re)negotiate questions of belonging, gender, class, and ethnicity. At the same time, the room is inevitably porous and constantly oscillates between inclusion and exclusion. The literary texts examined in this book are each highly fragmented and gesture towards a fragmentation of the contemporary world out of which they have grown as well as towards an abundance of fragmented self-images. Linking the approaches of narratology, globalization, and spatial criticism, Literary Rooms argues that in order to account for the spatial properties of the room, discourses developed during the spatial turn need to be extended and reevaluated.
This timely book offers a multifaceted analysis of EU-Russian relations, drawing on the investigation of competing models of international society. Makarychev argues that the huge variety of interest-based and normative models is best explained through the study of foreign policy and identity discourses. His approach defies simplistic explanations of EU-Russian relations as either destined for cooperation or doomed to constant collisions. Instead, Makarychev unveils multiple alternatives that both the EU and Russia face in their policies toward each other. Assessing the repercussions ongoing EU-Russian discord has on Europe and the world, Makarychev's volume reveals the interconnectedness of the discourses dominating the EU and Russia while also accounting for the deep-seated disconnect between them.
Over the last two decades, the unstable notion of hybridity has been the focus of a number of debates in cultural and literary studies, and has been discussed in connection with such notions as métissage, creolization, syncretism, diaspora, transculturation and in-betweeness. The aim of this volume is to form a critical assessment of the scope, significance and role of the notion in literature and the visual arts from the eighteenth century to the present day. The contributors propose to examine the development and various manifestations of the concept as a principle held in contempt by the partisans of racial purity, a process enthusiastically promoted by adepts of mixing and syncretism, b...
Charting the intersection of aesthetic representation and the material conditions of urban space, The City Since 9/11 posits that the contemporary metropolis provides a significant context for reassessing theoretical concerns related to narrative, identity, home, and personal precarity. In the years since the September 11 attacks, writers and filmmakers have explored urban spaces as contested sites—shaped by the prevailing discourses of neoliberalism, homeland security, and the war on terror, but also haunted by an absence in the landscape that registers loss and prefigures future menace. In works of literature, film, and television, the city emerges as a paradoxical space of permanence an...
A central figure in pop art, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was one of the most significant and influential artists of the later twentieth century. In the 1960s he began to explore the growing interplay between mass culture and the visual arts, and his constant experimentation with new processes for the dissemination of art played a pivotal role in redefining access to culture and art as we know it today. • At the height of his fame, Warhol claimed he was "abandoning" painting, shifting his practice towards a commitment to the theoretically limitless channels ofpublishing, film, fashion, music, and broadcasting. It was this "transmission" of art and radical ideas that embodied his ethical conviction that "art should be for everyone". • Stephanie Straine is Assistant Curator at Tate Liverpool, and specialises in American art of the 1960s. Her lively yet authoritative text provides the perfect introduction to the life and work of a pioneering artist whose legacy extends into the digital age.
This book analyzes the mythological content of five television franchises within the genre of science fiction, fantasy and horror: The X-Files & Millennium, Babylon 5 & Crusade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Angel, Stargate and Star Trek. The central themes are errand into the wilderness, emancipation from larger powers, individual responsibility, prophecy, apocalyptic scenarios, fundamentalism, artificial intelligence, as well as hybridity, gender roles, psychotic narration, and others. The theoretical basis for this work are both a conventional cultural studies perspective as well as memetics, an evolutionary perspective of culture and literature that is utilized in this volume as an approach to studying genre at the example of the five case studies.
Following the suggestion of the historian Peter Parish, these essays probe "the edges" of slavery and the sectional conflict. The authors seek to recover forgotten stories, exceptional cases and contested identities to reveal the forces that shaped America, in the era of "the Long Civil War," c.1830-1877. Offering an unparalleled scope, from the internal politics of southern households to trans-Atlantic propaganda battles, these essays address the fluidity and negotiability of racial and gendered identities, of criminal and transgressive behaviors, of contingent, shifting loyalties and of the hopes of freedom that found expression in refugee camps, court rooms and literary works.
What is the state of American studies in the twenty-first century?