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A timely and engrossing critique of the New Americanists
The Poetics of Insecurity explores how American literary writers forged a cultural imaginary in which insecurity acts as an enlivening force.
Celebrating the 80th birthday of Winfried Fluck, this volume of REAL gathers leading US-American and European literary scholars from English and American Studies to engage some of his classic essays, covering topics that range from the aesthetics of early American literature to the history of our digital present and from the Americanization of literary studies to the search for American democratic culture. Each of the volume's twelve dialogues consists of a republished essay by Fluck and a response by one his interlocutors, written specifically for this occasion. Contributors include field-defining scholars, long-time companions, and colleagues whose intellectual trajectory has been impacted by Fluck's incisive metacriticism and his reception-oriented approach to literary and cultural history. The twelve dialogues reassess debates that have shaped literary studies in the late twentieth century and they inquire into the paradigmatic shifts that are currently reorganizing the field.
This is the first book to offer a systematic account of the concept of opacity in the aesthetic field. Engaging with works by Ernie Gehr, John Akomfrah, Matt Saunders, David Lynch, Trevor Paglen, Zach Blas, and Low, the study considers the cultural, epistemological, and ethical values of images and sounds that are fuzzy, indeterminate, distorted, degraded, or otherwise indistinct. Rethinking Art and Visual Culture shows how opaque forms of art address problems of mediation, knowledge, and information. It also intervenes in current debates about new systems of visibility and surveillance by explaining how indefinite art provides a critique of the positivist drive behind these regimes. A timely contribution to media theory, cinema studies, American studies, and aesthetics, the book presents a novel and extensive analysis of the politics of transparency.
This volume collects new articles that explore the theoretical framework of figurational or relational sociology as represented by Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu with regard to its relevance to American history, culture, and literature. The emphasis is put on Eliasâ (TM)s theory of the â oecivilizing processâ and the question in how far his study of the European process of state formation and the correlative psycho-social changes is relevant to the analysis of the development of the American nation-state and the habitus of Americans. Leading scholars from the field of figurational sociology team up with an international cast of renowned Americanists to shed new light on a variety of is...
This volume collects new articles that explore the theoretical framework of figurational or relational sociology as represented by Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu with regard to its relevance to American history, culture, and literature. The emphasis is put on Elias’s theory of the “civilizing process” and the question in how far his study of the European process of state formation and the correlative psycho-social changes is relevant to the analysis of the development of the American nation-state and the habitus of Americans. Leading scholars from the field of figurational sociology team up with an international cast of renowned Americanists to shed new light on a variety of issues ...
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.
Barbara Buchenau and Virginia Richter’s Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires explores the legacies of different empires across various media, focusing on the spatial, temporal, and critical dimensions of what the editors term the post-empire imaginary.
Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism explores how American Romanticism developed in response to pervasive conflicts over democracy's moral dimensions in the early republic and antebellum eras. By recovering the long-under-examined tradition of political liberalism for literary studies, it traces how US writers reacted to ongoing moral and political conflict by engaging with liberal thinkers and ideas as they endeavored to understand how individuals beholden to a divergent array of moral convictions might nevertheless share a stable and just political world—the very dilemma at the core of political liberalism. This study demonstrates how those philosophical engagements ...