Welcome to our book review site www.go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Landscapes of Postmodernity
In Landscapes of Postmodernity, a group of young scholars link key concepts of postmodern thought to our present everyday experience in which we change our identities on a regular basis. While many of the essays look at less conventional modes of aesthetic representation - computer games, graphic novels, telenovelas, queer and animated films - others analyze more canonical works following less conventional approaches. Either way, the cultural and literary cartographies presented in this book allow America to be conceived as polymorphous or transnational, celebrating a new American self that is aware and proud of its non-Anglo-Saxon origins.
Rereading the Machine in the Garden
The volume reexamines the trope of the intrusive machine and the regenerative pastoral garden, laid out fifty years ago by Leo Marx in "The Machine in the Garden," one of the founding texts of American Studies. Contributions explore the lasting influence of the trope in American culture and the arts, rereading it as a dialectics where nature is as much technologized as technology is naturalized. They trace this dialectic trope in filmic and literary representations of industrial, bureaucratic, and digital gardens; they explore its function in the aftermath of the civil war, the rural electrification during the New Deal, in landscape art, and in ethnic literatures; and they discuss the historical premises and lasting influence of Leo Marx's seminal study.
The Failed Individual
The freedom of the individual to aim high is a deeply rooted part of the American ethos but we rarely acknowledge its flip side: failure. If people are responsible for their individual successes, is the same true of their failures? The Failed Individual brings together a variety of disciplinary approaches to explore how people fail in the United States and the West at large, whether economically, politically, socially, culturally, or physically. How do we understand individual failure, especially in the context of the zero-sum game of international capitalism? And what new spaces of resistance, or even pleasure, might failure open up for people and society?
Rogue Archives
An examination of how nonprofessional archivists, especially media fans, practice cultural preservation on the Internet and how “digital cultural memory” differs radically from print-era archiving. The task of archiving was once entrusted only to museums, libraries, and other institutions that acted as repositories of culture in material form. But with the rise of digital networked media, a multitude of self-designated archivists—fans, pirates, hackers—have become practitioners of cultural preservation on the Internet. These nonprofessional archivists have democratized cultural memory, building freely accessible online archives of whatever content they consider suitable for digital p...
Performing America Abroad
What happens to 'America' when it does not coincide with the geographical and institutional boundaries of the U.S. nation-state? What does 'America' mean when it is performed abroad and circulates among populations and publics outside U.S. national contexts? 'Performing America Abroad' explores an unlikely American studies archive: contemporary cultural performances in Austria and Germany which refer to the American cultural imaginary, but enact it with a 'transnational difference.' The book discusses the ambivalent cultural politics of these enactments in the context of neoliberal capitalism; specifically, it looks at several cross-racial performances of 'Indianness' on various Austrian stages, it examines queer political demonstrators on Vienna's central Ringstrasse, who celebrate the legacy of the 1969 New York Stonewall riots, and it discusses the 'Americanness' of a series of theatrical adaptations of Arthur Miller's 1949 play 'Death of a Salesman' in Germany and Austria.
Feminist Collections
None
The Fiction of America
The Fiction of America juxtaposes classic literature of the American Renaissance with twentieth-century popular culture--pairing, for instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Finding Nemo, Walt Whitman with Spiderman, and Hester Prynne with Madonna--to investigate how the "Americanness" of American culture constitutes itself in the interplay of the cultural imaginary and performance. Conceptualizing "America" as a transhistorical practice, Susanne Hamscha reveals disruptive, spectral moments in the narrative of "America," which confront American culture with its inherent inconsistencies.
