You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
»The Machine in the Garden« gilt als Gründungstext der Amerikastudien als wissenschaftliche Disziplin. Die Beiträger des Sammelbands unterziehen das dort proklamierte Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Natur und Technik einer Relektüre. Sie untersuchen industrielle, bürokratische und digitale »Gärten« in Film und Literatur und beleuchten deren Funktion vor verschiedenen kulturhistorischen Hintergründen.
Located at the intersections of law and culture, The Politics of Private Propertyprovides a fresh perspective on the functions of private property within U.S. cultural discourse by establishing a long historical arch from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The study challenges the assumption of an unquestioned cultural consensus in the United States on the subject of individual property rights, instead mobilizing property as an analytical category to examine how social and political debates generate competing and contested claims to ownership. The property narratives arising out of political conflicts, the book suggests, serve to naturalize the unequal social and economic structures and legitimize the hegemonic order, which however remains to be shifting and subject to challenges. Analyzing the property narratives at the heart of the U.S. American self-conception, The Politics of Private Property addresses the gap between the ideal of the U.S. as a universal middle-class society, characterized by a wide diffusion of property ownership, and the actual social reality which is defined by unequal dissemination of wealth and race-based structures of exclusion.
Thinking in Search of a Language explores American literary and philosophical traditions, and their intimate connections, by focusing on two defining strands in the intellectual history of the United States. The first half of the book offers a multifaceted interpretation of Emerson's constantly shifting early-modernist thought-“I liked everything by turns and nothing long,” he said memorably-and its legacy in American writing. The second half turns to the modernists themselves and the pluralistic and radical-empiricist ways in which they engaged the world philosophically. Herwig Friedl's broad and deep examination of American thought, which also incorporates the international context and response, illuminates the global significance of the American intellectual tradition. Tying together all of these essays is the persistent question and problem of an adequate language or terminological framework as one kind of interpretive leitmotif. This reflects the fact that Friedl's sensibility is steeped in a cross-pollination of continental and American thought, a combination that recalls-and is as revelatory as-the work of Stanley Cavell.
Traveling Bodies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Traveling as an Embodied Practice explores the central role the body has in and for traveling and thus complements and expands upon existing research in travel studies with new perspectives on and insights in the entanglement of bodies and traveling. The case studies assembled in this volume discuss a variety of traveling practices, experiences, and media with chapters featuring Asian, American, and European historical and contemporary perspectives. Truly interdisciplinary in its approach, the volume identifies and examines diverse literary, historical and cultural texts, contexts, and modes in which traveling and the body intersect, including ‘classic’ travelogues, (new) media (e.g., film, digital travel apps), surf culture, and travel-inspired tattoos. The contributions offer various avenues for further research, not only for scholars working with body theory and travel (writing), but also for anyone interested in the intersections of literature, culture, media, and embodied practices of traveling.
This foundational coursebook offers an accessible and up-to-date introduction to all relevant areas of Teaching English. Definitions and practical examples guide the understanding and reflection of basic and advanced concepts of foreign language learning. The fully revised second edition responds to new developments in language education: (1) Recent policies from the Kultusministerkonferenz and updates of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages with its Companion Volume (2020) pay more attention to language awareness, mediation, and media literacy. (2) New empirical research explores the aims, methods, and impact of professional teacher education, Task-Based Language Teaching, and Content-and-Language-Integrated Learning. (3) The dramatic need for online teaching has met with refined concepts of multimodal media competence and cutting-edge tools for the digital classroom. This essential introduction and the PowerPoint presentations online facilitate multimodal teaching and learning.
Miriam Thaggert illuminates the stories of African American women as passengers and as workers on the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century railroad. As Jim Crow laws became more prevalent and forced Black Americans to "ride Jim Crow" on the rails, the train compartment became a contested space of leisure and work. Riding Jane Crow examines four instances of Black female railroad travel: the travel narratives of Black female intellectuals such as Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell; Black middle-class women who sued to ride in first class "ladies’ cars"; Black women railroad food vendors; and Black maids on Pullman trains. Thaggert argues that the railroad represented a technological advancement that was entwined with African American attempts to secure social progress. Black women's experiences on or near the railroad illustrate how American technological progress has often meant their ejection or displacement; thus, it is the Black woman who most fully measures the success of American freedom and privilege, or "progress," through her travel experiences.
This volume examines the hotel experience of Anglo-American travelers in the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of literary and cultural studies as well as spatiality theory. Focusing on the social and imaginary space of the hotel in fiction, periodicals, diaries, and travel accounts, the essays shed new light on nineteenth-century notions of travel writing. Analyzing the liminal space of the hotel affords a new way of understanding the freedoms and restrictions felt by travelers from different social classes and nations. As an environment that forced travelers to reimagine themselves or their cultural backgrounds, the hotel could provide exhilarating moments of self-discovery or dangerou...
David Foster Wallace is regarded as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book introduces readers to the literary, philosophical and political contexts of Wallace's work. An accessible and useable resource, this volume conceptualizes his work within long-standing critical traditions and with a new awareness of his importance for American literary studies. It shows the range of issues and contexts that inform the work and reading of David Foster Wallace, connecting his writing to diverse ideas, periods and themes. Essays cover topics on gender, sex, violence, race, philosophy, poetry and geography, among many others, guiding new and long-standing readers in understanding the work and influence of this important writer.
Theatre and Internationalization examines how internationalization affects the processes and aesthetics of theatre, and how this art form responds dramatically and thematically to internationalization beyond the stage. With central examples drawn from Australia and Germany from the 1930s to the present day, the book considers theatre and internationalization through a range of theoretical lenses and methodological practices, including archival research, aviation history, theatre historiography, arts policy, organizational theory, language analysis, academic-practitioner insights, and literary-textual studies. While drawing attention to the ways in which theatre and internationalization might...
Israeli Culture and Emergency Routine: Normalizing Stress explores the ways stress associated with a prolonged state of war, traumas, and emergency routine produces Israeli culture. Israeli Culture and Emergency Routine exposes the ways Israeli “emergency routine” leads to perpetual stress and trauma that are overwhelmingly present in the cultural production of Israeli art and literature. The nine chapters engage with a variety of Israeli cultural artifacts, including poetry, prose, film and graphic novels, and cast a wide temporal net, reaching from as early as the 1960s to 2019. In doing so, the collection sheds light upon the ramifications of the constant stress of the Israeli emergency routine on academic and cultural discourses and alerts us to be attentive to the effects of the physical world on the formulation of our world view within our social and political reality.