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Even a global political watershed, such as the end of the Cold War, seems to have left a fundamental characteristic of cultural relations between the US and the rest of the world unchanged: American popular culture still stirs up emotion. American popular culture's products, artifacts, and practices entangle their consumers in affective encounters characterized by feelings of fascination, excitement, or even wholesale rejection. What is it that continues to make 'American' popular culture 'cool?' Which role does 'cool' play in the consumers' affective encounters with 'America?' This volume of essays offers new insights on the post-Cold War dissemination of American popular culture, exploring the manifold ways in which 'cool' has emerged as an elusive, yet determining, factor of an American culture gone global. (Series: American Studies in Austria - Vol. 13)
Reading the Contemporary Author brings together leading scholars in cultural theory, literary criticism, stylistics, narratology, comparative literature, and autobiography studies to interrogate how we read the contemporary author in public and cultural life, in life writing, and in literature.
Disney films reflect the current values and beliefs of society and have the power to influence their audiences in the perception of what is beautiful, and whether appearance does or does not matter. This book gives an overview of beauty ideals, body images, and appearances in Disneys feature films. Seven main films are chosen for this analysis to allow for a comparison across time: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), Cinderella (1950), The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), and Frozen (2013). The survey determines to what extent Disney films make use of the beauty-goodness stereotype the equation of appearance and...
Through readings of iconic figures such as the cannibal, the child, the alien, and the posthuman, Gabriele Schwab analyzes literary explorations at the boundaries of the human. Treating literature as a dynamic medium that "writes culture"--one that makes the abstract particular and local, and situates us within the world--Schwab pioneers a compelling approach to reading literary texts as "anthropologies of the future" that challenge habitual productions of meaning and knowledge. Schwab's study draws on anthropology, philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis to trace literature's profound impact on the cultural imaginary. Following a new interpretation of Derrida's and Lévi-Strauss's f...
What do planners need to know in order to use narrative approaches responsibly in their practice? This practical field guide makes insights from narrative research accessible to planners through a glossary of key concepts in the field of narrative in planning. What makes narratives coherent, probable, persuasive, even necessary - but also potentially harmful, manipulative and divisive? How can narratives help to build more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive communities? The authors are literary scholars who have extensive experience in planning practice, training planning scholars and practitioners or advising municipalities on how to harness the power of stories in urban development.
As the material anchors of globalization, North America’s global port cities channel flows of commodities, capital, and tourists. This book explores how economic globalization processes have shaped these cities' political institutions, social structures, and urban identities since the mid-1970s. Although the impacts of financialization on global cities have been widely discussed, it is curious that how the global integration of commodity chains actually happens spatially — creating a quantitatively new, global organization of production, distribution, and consumption processes — remains understudied. The book uses New York City, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Montreal as case studies of how once-redundant spaces have been reorganized, and crucially, reinterpreted, so as to accommodate new flows of goods and people — and how, in these processes, social, environmental, and security costs of global production networks have been shifted to the public.
The Roots of Cane proposes a new way to read one of the most significant works of the New Negro Renaissance, Jean Toomer’s Cane. Rather than focusing on the form of the book published by Boni and Liveright, what Toomer would later call a single textual “organism,” John Young traces the many pieces of Cane that were dispersed across multiple modernist magazines from 1922 through 1923. These periodicals ranged from primarily political monthlies to avant-garde arts journals to regional magazines with transnational aspirations. Young interweaves a periodical-studies approach to modernism with book history and critical race theory, resituating Toomer’s uneasy place within Black modernism by asking how original readers would have encountered his work. The different contexts in which those audiences were engaging with Toomer’s portraits of racialized identity in the Jim Crow United States, yield often surprising results.
Kubakrise und Vietnamkrieg, Bürgerrechtsbewegung und "Great Society", Woodstock und Mondlandung - die "Sixties" zählen in der Geschichte der USA zu den ereignisreichsten Jahrzehnten überhaupt. Wie aber kam es zu den politischen, sozialen und kulturellen Umwälzungen dieser Dekade und welche Konflikte sind noch heute virulent? Drücken sie dem "American Way of Life" des 21. Jahrhunderts immer noch ihren Stempel auf? Die Autorinnen und Autoren spüren diesen Fragen nach - genau 50 Jahre, nachdem John F. Kennedy 1963 den Schüssen von Dallas zum Opfer fiel.
In the years leading up to the World Wars, Germany and Austria saw an unprecedented increase in the study and depiction of the criminal. Science, journalism and crime fiction were obsessed with delinquents while ignoring the social causes of crime. As criminologists measured criminals' heads and debated biological predestination, court reporters and crime writers wrote side-splitting or heart-rending stories featuring one of the most popular characters ever created--the hilarious or piteous crook. The author examines the figure of the crook and notions of "Jewish" criminality in a range of antisemitic writing, from Nazi propaganda to court reporting to forgotten classics of crime fiction.
The Anglia Book Series (ANGB) offers a selection of high quality work on all areas and aspects of English philology. It publishes book-length studies and essay collections on English language and linguistics, on English and American literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on the new English literatures, as well as on general and comparative literary studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory.