Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11

Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11 PDF Author: Christina Cavedon
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900430598X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11, Christina Cavedon frames her examination of 9/11 fiction, especially Jay McInerney’s The Good Life and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, with a thorough discussion of what US reactions to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 disclose about American culture. Offering a comparative reading of pre- and post-9/11 literary, public, and academic discourses, she deconstructs the still commonly held belief that cultural repercussions of the attacks primarily testify to a cultural trauma in the wake of the collectively witnessed media event. She innovatively re-interprets discourses to be symptomatic of a malaise which had afflicted American culture already prior to 9/11 and can best be approached with melancholia as an analytical concept.

Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11

Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11 PDF Author: Christina Cavedon
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900430598X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11, Christina Cavedon frames her examination of 9/11 fiction, especially Jay McInerney’s The Good Life and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, with a thorough discussion of what US reactions to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 disclose about American culture. Offering a comparative reading of pre- and post-9/11 literary, public, and academic discourses, she deconstructs the still commonly held belief that cultural repercussions of the attacks primarily testify to a cultural trauma in the wake of the collectively witnessed media event. She innovatively re-interprets discourses to be symptomatic of a malaise which had afflicted American culture already prior to 9/11 and can best be approached with melancholia as an analytical concept.

Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies

Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies PDF Author: Julia Straub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110376733
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 632

Get Book Here

Book Description
Transatlantic literary studies have provided important new perspectives on North American, British and Irish literature. They have led to a revision of literary history and the idea of a national literature. They have changed the perception of the Anglo-American literary market and its many processes of transatlantic production, distribution, reception and criticism. Rather than dwelling on comparisons or engaging with the notion of ‘influence,’ transatlantic literary studies seek to understand North American, British and Irish literature as linked with each other by virtue of multi-layered historical and cultural ties and pay special attention to the many refractions and mutual interferences that have characterized these traditions since colonial times. This handbook brings together articles that summarize some of the crucial transatlantic concepts, debates and topics. The contributions contained in this volume examine periods in literary and cultural history, literary movements, individual authors as well as genres from a transatlantic perspective, combining theoretical insight with textual analysis.

American Television’s Live Coverage of the 9/11 Attacks

American Television’s Live Coverage of the 9/11 Attacks PDF Author: Paul Arras
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1666932647
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book analyzes the narratives and news coverage of 9/11 across ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News, arguing that television coverage shaped the cultural meaning, collective memory, and language of 9/11 in ways that continue to resonate throughout American culture.

The quiet contemporary American novel

The quiet contemporary American novel PDF Author: Rachel Sykes
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526108895
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the concept of ‘quiet’ – an aesthetic of narrative driven by reflective principles – and argues for the term’s application to the study of contemporary American fiction. In doing so, it makes two critical interventions. Firstly, it maps the neglected history of quiet fictions, arguing that from Hester Prynne to Clarissa Dalloway, from Bartleby to William Stoner, the Western tradition is filled with quiet characters. Secondly, it asks what it means for a novel to be quiet and how we might read for quiet in an American literary tradition that critics so often describe as noisy. Examining recent works by Marilynne Robinson, Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, among others, the book argues that quiet can be a multi-faceted state of existence, one that is communicative and expressive in as many ways as noise but filled with potential for radical discourse by its marginalisation as a mode of expression.

Romancing the Zombie

Romancing the Zombie PDF Author: Ashley Szanter
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147666742X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
The zombie--popular culture's undead darling--shows no signs of stopping. But as it develops to suit changing audience tastes, its characteristics transform. This collection of new essays examines the latest incarnation, the romantic zombie, a re-humanized monster we want to help, heal and connect with rather than destroy. The authors discuss our increasingly sympathetic view of the reanimated dead as more than physical bodies devoid of life and personality. Their essays cover a range of topics, including audience obsession with Apocalyptic love; the problem of a kinder, gentler undead; the millennial reinvention of the "sexy zombie"; and "uncanny valley romance."

Wounded for Life

Wounded for Life PDF Author: Robert D. Hicks
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253070775
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442

Get Book Here

Book Description
Most histories of wounded Civil War veterans construe them as feminized men whose manhood has suffered due to their inability to provide for and raise families or engage in business. Wounded for Life complicates this picture by examining how seven veterans—six soldiers and one physician—coped with their changed bodies in their postwar lives. Through these intimate stories, author Robert D. Hicks looks at the veteran's body as shaped by the trauma of the battlefield and hospital and the construction of a postwar identity in relation to that trauma. Through his research, he reveals the changing social circumstances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as they impacted the traumatized veteran's body. This engaging book is equal parts Civil War history, disability and gender history, and the history of the body that discloses the impact of war on a wounded warrior.

Unspeakable

Unspeakable PDF Author: Peter C. Herman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000008525
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 163

Get Book Here

Book Description
Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11 explores the representation of terrorism in plays, novels, and films across the centuries. Time and time again, writers and filmmakers including William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Gillo Pontecorvo, Don DeLillo, John Updike, and Steven Spielberg refer to terrorist acts as beyond comprehension, “a deed without a name,” but they do not stop there. Instead of creating works that respond to terrorism by providing comforting narratives reassuring audiences and readers of their moral superiority and the perfidy of the terrorists, these writers and filmmakers confront the unspeakable by attempting to see the world from the terrorist’s perspective and by examining the roots of terrorist violence.

Manifold Destiny

Manifold Destiny PDF Author: John Tofik Karam
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826501346
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Get Book Here

Book Description
At the border where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet under the scrutiny of the US and Mercosur (the large South American trade bloc), Arabs have long fulfilled what author John Tofik Karam calls a "manifold destiny." Karam casts Lebanese, Palestinians, and Syrians at this American border as circumstantial protagonists of a hemispheric saga. For the more than six decades since they started settling at the trinational border between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, Arabs have animated the hemisphere. Their transnational economic and social projects reveal a heretofore unacknowledged venue of exceptional rule in which the community accommodates and abides multiple states' varied suspensions of norms and laws. Arabs set up businesses and community centers at the border under authoritarian military governments between the 1950s and 1980s; thereafter, when denied full democratic enfranchisement, they instead underwent increasing surveillance from the 1990s to today. Karam reveals an unfinished history of exceptional rule that Arabs accommodate from an authoritarian past to a counterterrorist present. Karam's riveting account draws on anthropological and historical research from each side of this trinational South American border, as well as from the US—where government bureaucrats still suspect Arabs at the border of would-be-terrorist subversion. Offering a fresh understanding of the hemisphere, Manifold Destiny brings the transnational turn of Middle Eastern studies to bear upon the fields of American studies, Brazilian studies, and Latin American studies.

From Solidarity to Schisms

From Solidarity to Schisms PDF Author: Cara Cilano
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042027029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores the effects the evens to September 11, 2001 and their aftermath have had on fiction and film outside of the United States. This collection illustrates how 9/11 was global without using simple categorizations.

Trauma and Fictions of the "War on Terror"

Trauma and Fictions of the Author: Sarah O'Brien
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000386422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the ways in which transnational fiction in the post-9/11 era can intervene in discourse surrounding the "war on terror" to advocate for marginalised perspectives. Trauma and Fictions of the "War on Terror" conceptualises global political discourse about the "war on terror" as incongruous, with transnational memory frames instituted in Western nations centralising 9/11 as uniquely traumatic, excluding the historical and present-day experiences of Afghans under Western—specifically American—hegemonic violence. Recent developments in trauma studies explain how dominant Western trauma theory participates in this exclusion, failing to account for the ongoing suffering common to non-Western, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. O’Brien explores how Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner), Nadeem Aslam (The Wasted Vigil, The Blind Man’s Garden), and Kamila Shamsie (Burnt Shadows) represent marginalised perspectives in the context of the "war on terror".