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7. From Aztlán: Gloria Anzaldúa and Jimmy Santiago Baca -- 8. Remilitarized Poems: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim -- 9. Forget Your Pastoral: Haunani-Kay Trask and Craig Santos Perez -- Coda: Look Through to Somewhere -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index
Dark Forces at Work examines the role of race, class, gender, religion, and the economy as they are portrayed in, and help construct, horror narratives across a range of films and eras. These larger social forces not only create the context for our cinematic horrors, but serve as connective tissue between fantasy and lived reality, as well. While several of the essays focus on “name” horror films such as IT, Get Out, Hellraiser, and Don’t Breathe, the collection also features essays focused on horror films produced in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and on American classic thrillers such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Key social issues addressed include the war on terror, poverty, the housing crisis, and the Time’s Up movement. The volume grounds its analysis in the films, rather than theory, in order to explore the ways in which institutions, identities, and ideologies work within the horror genre.
Just as Africa and the West have traditionally fit into binaries of Darkness/Enlightenment, Savage/Modern, Ugly/Beautiful, and Ritual/Art, among others, much of Western cultural production rests upon the archetypal binary of Trickster/Epic, with trickster aesthetics and commensurate cultural forms characterizing Africa. Challenging this binary and the exceptionalism that underlies anti-hegemonic efforts even today, this book begins with the scholarly foundations that mapped out African trickster continuities in the United States and excavated the aesthetics of traditional African epic performances. Rutledge locates trickster-like capacities within the epic hero archetype (the "epic trickster...
Drawing focus on a crucial period of contemporary British history, this book explores Cold War anxieties over Imperial decline and British identity through analysis of space in popular twentieth-century spy fiction, enabling the cultural impact of decolonisation to be read in a new and revealing light. Visiting the literary representation of space, identity, and power in the work of Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, and John le Carré, it is an excellent resource for any scholars with an interest in spy fiction, British fiction, and popular literature.
Through close readings of works from Henry James to W. E. B. Du Bois, and from Virginia Woolf to Jean Rhys, this book discusses how fictional travelers negotiate and adapt various tropes of travel (such as quest, expatriation, displacement, and exile) as models for their own journeys. Specifically, Peat considers the ethical dimensions of modernist travel from two distinct vantages. The first focuses on the relationship between the secular and the sacred in modernist travel literature, arguing that the recurrent narrative of secular travel is haunted by a desire for spiritual transcendence. The second posits modernist travel fiction as a potentially positive example of transcultural relations, consciously arguing against the received notion that travel during an imperial era is always by nature itself imperialist. Throughout, particular attention is paid to the transnational nature of modernism and the various global flows traced by modernist literature.
"Novel Competition describes the literary and institutional effort to make the American novel matter after 1965. During this era, Hollywood movies, popular music, and other forms of mass-produced culture vied with novels for a specific kind of prestige - often figured as "importance" or "relevance" - that had mostly been attached to novels in previous decades. This trans-media competition, Brier argues, is a crucial but largely unacknowledged event in the literary and economic history of the American novel. In the face of it, the novel lost some of the symbolic specialness it formerly held. That loss, in turn, generated not just a much-discussed rhetoric of crisis but also a host of unexamined, intertwined effects on both literary form and the business of novel production. Drawing on a range of novels and on the archives of publishers, editors, agents, and authors, Novel Competition shows how fiction's declining position in a transformed "popular-prestige" economy reshaped the post-1965 American novel as art form, cultural institution, and commodity"--
In the richly interdisciplinary study, Challenging Addiction in Canadian Literature and Classrooms, Cara Fabre argues that popular culture in its many forms contributes to common assumptions about the causes, and personal and social implications, of addiction. Recent fictional depictions of addiction significantly refute the idea that addiction is caused by poor individual choices or solely by disease through the connections the authors draw between substance use and poverty, colonialism, and gender-based violence. With particular interest in the pervasive myth of the "Drunken Indian", Fabre asserts that these novels reimagine addiction as social suffering rather than individual pathology or...
After the second World War, the term “technology” came to signify both the anxieties of possible annihilation in a rapidly changing world and the exhilaration of accelerating cultural change. Technomodern Poetics examines how some of the most well-known writers of the era described the tensions between technical, literary, and media cultures at the dawn of the Digital Age. Poets and writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, and Frank O’Hara, among others, anthologized in Donald Allen’s iconic The New American Poetry, 1945–1960, provided a canon of work that has proven increasingly relevant to our technological present. Elaborating on the theories of contemporaneo...
This book discusses the significance of late twentieth century and early twenty first century American fiction written in response to the AIDS crisis and interrogates how sexual identity is depicted and constructed textually. Pearl develops Freudian psychoanalytic theory in a complex account of the ways in which grief is expressed and worked out in literature, showing how key texts from the AIDS crisis by authors such as Edmund White, Michael Cunningham, Eve Sedgwick - and also, later, the archives of The ACT UP Oral History Project - lie both within the tradition of gay writing and a postmodernist poetics. The book demonstrates how literary texts both expose and construct personal identity,...
Since ancient times, explorers and adventurers have captured popular imagination with their frightening narratives of travels gone wrong. Usually, these stories heavily feature the exotic or unknown, and can transform any journey into a nightmare. Stories of such horrific happenings have a long and rich history that stretches from folktales to contemporary media narratives.This work presents eighteen essays that explore the ways in which these texts reflect and shape our fear and fascination surrounding travel, posing new questions about the "geographies of evil" and how our notions of "terrible places" and their inhabitants change over time. The volume's five thematic sections offer new insights into how power, privilege, uncanny landscapes, misbegotten quests, hellish commutes and deadly vacations can turn our travels into terror.