Cities, Borders and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film

Cities, Borders and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film PDF Author: Ana M. Manzanas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136824898
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
This book examines the spatial morphologies represented in a wide range of contemporary ethnic American literary and cinematic works. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of space as a living organism, Edward Soja’s writings on the postmetropolis, Marc Augé’s notion of the non-place, Manuel Castells’ space of flows, and Michel de Certeau’s theories of walking as a practice, the volume extends previous theorizations by examining how spatial uses, appropriations, strictures, ruptures, and reconfigurations function in literary texts and films that represent inhabitants of racial-ethnic borderlands and migrational U.S. cities. The authors argue for the necessity of an alternative poetics of place that makes room for those who move beyond the spaces of traditional visibility—displaced and homeless people, undocumented workers, hybrid and/or marginalized populations rendered invisible by the cultural elite, yet often disciplined by agents of surveillance. Building upon Doreen Massey’s conceptualization of liminal space as a sphere in which narratives intersect, clash, or cooperate, this study recasts spatial paradigms to insert an array of emergent geographies of invisibility that the volume traverses via the analysis of works by Chuck Palahniuk, Helena Viramontes, Karen Tei Yamashita, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alejandro Morales, and Li-Young Lee, among others, and films such as Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor, Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Babel.

The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and Culture

The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and Culture PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004408045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and Culture explores hospitality in a range of cultural expressions from a variety of approaches. The authors analyze and discuss forms of hospitality in canonical literature, ethnic literatures, language or movies. These span from the classical to the contemporary and include a focus on language, power, hybridism, and sociology. The common theme in these contributions is that of American identity. By looking at a diversity of representations of American culture, using a multiplicity of approaches, the authors convey the richness of American hospitality as a vital aspect of its culture.

American Borders

American Borders PDF Author: Paula Barba Guerrero
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303130179X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
American Borders: Inclusion and Exclusion in US Culture provides an overview of American culture produced in a range of contexts, from the founding of the nation to the age of globalization and neoliberalism, in order to understand the diverse literary landscapes of the United States from a twenty-first century perspective. The authors confront American exceptionalism, discourses on freedom and democracy, and US foundational narratives by reassessing the literary canon and exploring ethnic literature, culture, and film with a focus on identity and exclusion. Their contributions envision different manifestations of conviviality and estrangement and deconstruct neoliberal slogans, analyzing hospitable inclusion in relation to national history and ideologies. By looking at representations of foreignness and conditional belonging in literature and film from different ethnic traditions, the volume fleshes out a new border dialectic that conveys the heterogeneity of American boundaries beyond the opposition inside/outside.

Hospitality in American Literature and Culture

Hospitality in American Literature and Culture PDF Author: Ana Maria Manzanas Calvo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317236491
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This book examines hospitality in American immigrant literature and culture, situating it at the crossroads of space and border theory, and exploring themes of migration, citizenship, identity formation, and spatiality. Assessing the conditions, duration, and shifting roles of hosts and guests in the US, it visits recent representations of immigrant spatiality, from the space of the body in film to the ways in which immigrants are incorporated into the US in a range of literary examples. Timely and imperative in light of the legacies of colonialism, and the realities of modern-day globalization, this book will be of value to fields including post-colonialism, American Studies, and others.

The City in American Literature and Culture

The City in American Literature and Culture PDF Author: Kevin R. McNamara
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108901549
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
The city's 'Americanness' has been disputed throughout US history. Pronounced dead in the late twentieth century, cities have enjoyed a renaissance in the twenty-first. Engaging the history of urban promise and struggle as represented in literature, film, and visual arts, and drawing on work in the social sciences, The City in American Literature and Culture examines the large and local forces that shape urban space and city life and the street-level activity that remakes culture and identities as it contests injustice and separation. The first two sections examine a range of city spaces and lives; the final section brings the city into conversation with Marxist geography, critical race studies, trauma theory, slow/systemic violence, security theory, posthumanism, and critical regionalism, with a coda on city literature and democracy.

Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture

Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture PDF Author: Ana M. Manzanas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317917960
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture inscribes itself within the spatial turn that permeates the ways we look at literary and cultural productions. The volume seeks to clarify the connections between race, space, class, and identity as it concentrates on different occupations and disoccupations, enclosures and boundaries. Space is scaled up and down, from the body, the ground zero of spatiality, to the texturology of Manhattan; from the striated place of the office in Melville’s "Bartleby, the Scrivener" on Wall Street, to the striated spaces of internment camps and reservations; from the lowest of the low, the (human) clutter that lined the streets of Albany, NY, during the Depression, to the new Towers of Babel that punctuate the contemporary architecture of transparencies. As it strings together these spatial narratives, the volume reveals how, beyond the boundaries that characterize each space, every location has loose ends that are impossible to contain.

Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature

Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature PDF Author: Emma Staniland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134615043
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book explores six texts from across Spanish America in which the coming-of-age story ('Bildungsroman') offers a critique of gendered selfhood as experienced in the region’s socio-cultural contexts. Looking at a range of novels from the late twentieth century, Staniland explores thematic concerns in terms of their role in elucidating a literary journey towards agency: that is, towards the articulation of a socially and personally viable female gendered identity, mindful of both the hegemonic discourses that constrain it, and the possibility of their deconstruction and reconfiguration. Myth, exile and the female body are the three central themes for understanding the personal, social and political aims of the Post-Boom women writers whose work is explored in this volume: Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta, Sylvia Molloy, Cristina Peri Rossi and Zoé Valdés. Their adoption, and adaptation, of an originally eighteenth-century and European literary genre is seen here to reshape the global canon as much as it works to reshape our understanding of gendered identities as socially constructed, culturally contingent, and open-ended.

Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture

Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture PDF Author: Denis Jonnes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317649478
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Demands placed on many young Americans as a result of the Cold War give rise to an increasingly age-segregated society. This separation allowed adolescents and young adults to begin to formulate an identity distinct from previous generations, and was a significant factor in their widespread rejection of contemporary American society. This study traces the emergence of a distinctive post-war family dynamic between parent and adolescent or already adult child. In-depth readings of individual writers such as, Arthur Miller, William Styron, J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor and Sylvia Plath, situate their work in relation to the Cold War and suggest how the figuring of adolescents and young people reflected and contributed to an empowerment of American youth. This book is a superb research tool for any student or academic with an interest in youth culture, cultural studies, American studies, cold war studies, twentieth-century American literature, history of the family, and age studies.

Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature

Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature PDF Author: Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317818202
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory and belonging. In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are in-process and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and inter-subjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interest students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity.

Contact Spaces of American Culture

Contact Spaces of American Culture PDF Author: Petra Eckhard
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643504349
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
What do tent cities, basketball courts, slave ships, and Facebook have in common? They are spaces of American culture where an idea of 'Americanness' emerges through a concrete form of contact on the one hand and through its mediated representation on the other. This collection of essays examines these contact spaces - and their myriad and complex configurations of culture - along a spatial axis, highlighting the interconnectedness of the local and the global in concrete spaces of American culture, both inside and outside the US, and from the world wide web. One line of inquiry studies metaphors of contact, the other one reads media texts as contact spaces and investigates the role of mediation. (Series: American Studies in Austria - Vol. 12)