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It has become commonplace to associate art and aesthetic experience with the category of ambiguity. Indeed, when we talk about art, we cannot do without the dynamic force of ambiguity just as the aesthetic itself cannot do without it. The great efforts to disambiguate aesthetic practices and their associated theories and contexts would eliminate art's unique ability to reshape our knowledge of the world, our sensory encounters with it, and our moral or political positions in it. The essays collected in this volume present different perspectives on this central category and develop interdisciplinary connections. Contributors include Frauke Berndt, Joy H. Calico, Stephan Kammer, Lutz Koepnick, Verena Krieger, Richard Langston, Rachel Mader, Lily Tonger-Erk, Gabriel Trop, and Thomas Wortmann.
This essential introduction to American studies examines the core foundational myths upon which the nation is based and which still determine discussions of US-American identities today. These myths include the myth of »discovery,« the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the melting pot myth, the myth of the West, and the myth of the self-made man. The chapters provide extended analyses of each of these myths, using examples from popular culture, literature, memorial culture, school books, and every-day life. Including visual material as well as study questions, this book will be of interest to any student of American studies and will foster an understanding of the United States of America as an imagined community by analyzing the foundational role of myths in the process of nation building.
Avant-garde filmmaker Bill Morrison has been making films that combine archival footage and contemporary music for decades, and he has recently begun to receive substantial recognition: he was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and his 2002 film Decasia was selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. This is the first book-length study of Morrison's work, covering the whole of his career. It gathers specialists throughout film studies to explore Morrison's aesthetics of the archive-his creative play with archival footage and his focus on the materiality of the medium of film.
"And then--the Veil. It drops as drops the night on southern seas--vast, sudden, unanswering. There is Hate behind it, and Cruelty and Tears. As one peers through its intricate, unfathomable pattern of ancient, old, old design, one sees blood and guilt and misunderstanding. And yet it hangs there, this Veil, between Then and Now, between Pale and Colored and Black and White -- between You and Me." W.E.B. DuBois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, 1920 "As the promoters of Jamestown 2007 began to speak of the accomplishment of greater diversity in the nation, and to market the myth of the seamless confluence of Indian, European, and African traditions in the early colony, many reflected ...
"Nineteenth-century writer Karl May wrote novels about a fictionalized American Wild West that count among the most popular books of German literature to this day. His stories left an imprint on German culture, resulting in a variety of Wild West festivals featuring Native Americans and frontier settlers. These Karl May festivals are hosted widely throughout German-speaking countries today. This book, based on years of fieldwork observing and studying the festivals, plays, events, and groups that comprise this subculture, addresses a larger, timely issue: cultural transfer and appropriations. Are Germans dressing up in American Indian costumes paying tribute or offending the cultures they are representing? Avoiding simplistic answers, A. Dana Weber considers the complexity of cultural enactments as they relate both to the distinctly German phenomenon as well as to larger questions of cultural representations in American and European live performance traditions."
What is a medium? If Nietzsche was right in claiming that “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts,” that media help us "think," and if different media allow for different ways of thinking, then the "body" of the respective medium in question, its materiality, shapes and influences the range and direction of how media make us think. Shouldn't we consequently speak of informed matter and of materialized information? Launching Bloomsbury's Thinking Media series, Media Matter introduces readers to the nascent field of media-philosophy. Contributors urge readers to re-adjust their ideas of Media Studies, by both extending the understanding of "medium" in such a way as...
DVD gives students the opportunity to better understand the contemporary art works they are learning about -- but might not ever have had a chance to experience.
Adolescence is a phase of transition, change and upheaval. These processes are often translated into movements through space in literary representations. The narrated space is to be read in its construction and semantics as a complex symbol carrier that is able to connect different dimensions with one another. The study develops, with reference to cultural-scientific spatial theories, a methodical model to analyze current youth novels from a topographical perspective and thus to discuss the interweaving of space, movement and growing up. In the cultural studies and narratological view of (narrative) spaces of adolescence, new trends and developments in youth literature after 2000 manifest th...
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A comprehensive bibliography of books and scholarship on the United States produced in German-speaking countries from 1956-2005.