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Despite the ubiquity of automobility, the reality of automotive death is hidden from everyday view. There are accident blackspots all over the roads that we use and go past every day but the people that have died there or been injured are not marked, unless by homemade shrines and personal memorialization. Nowhere on the planet is this practice as densely actioned as in the United States. Road Scars is a highly visual scholarly monograph about how roadside car crash shrines place the collective trauma of living in a car culture in the everyday landscapes of automobility. Roadside shrines—or road trauma shrines—are vernacular memorial assemblages built by private individuals at sites wher...
A philosophical exploration of aesthetic experience during bereavement. In Aesthetics of Grief and Mourning, philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins reflects on the ways that aesthetics aids people experiencing loss. Some practices related to bereavement, such as funerals, are scripted, but many others are recursive, improvisational, mundane—telling stories, listening to music, and reflecting on art or literature. Higgins shows how these grounding, aesthetic practices can ease the disorienting effects of loss, shedding new light on the importance of aesthetics for personal and communal flourishing.
What is the relationship between the road movie, American experimental filmmaking and the body?
To many Americans, the 1970s seem a "lost" period, a pale and undistinguished decade compared with the 1960s and the 1980s, just as the presidents of the time -- Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter -- were far less colourful and distinctive than Kennedy, Nixon or Ronald Reagan. In addition, the 1970s were marked by economic recession and a national identity crisis in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Watergate and the energy crisis. Not even the 1976 Bicentennial celebration was able to break this feeling of collective lethargy and disillusion. Issue 26 of Aarhus University Press's arts and humanities journal "The Dolphin" demonstrates that while the 1970s were indeed rather grey in many respects, they were also a time of reassessment and dynamism in many fields of popular American culture. This point is illustrated by examples from different contexts: Western movies, the National Park Service, self-help psychology, grass-roots activism and popular music.
Article abstracts and citations of reviews and dissertations covering the United States and Canada.
Drawing on a wide array of sources, the author of "Dream Catchers" identifies 1975 to 1986 as the watershed years when Americans rejected the radicalism of the 1960s and adopted a more pessimistic interpretation of human behavior.