Download or read book The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture written by Heike Schaefer and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay collection explores the cultural functions the printed book performs in the digital age. It examines how the use of and attitude toward the book form have changed in light of the digital transformation of American media culture. Situated at the crossroads of American studies, literary studies, book studies, and media studies, these essays show that a sustained focus on the medial and material formats of literary communication significantly expands our accustomed ways of doing cultural studies. Addressing the changing roles of authors, publishers, and readers while covering multiple bookish formats such as artists’ books, bestselling novels, experimental fiction, and zines, this interdisciplinary volume introduces readers to current transatlantic conversations on the history and future of the printed book.
Download or read book American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century written by Martin Halliwell and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will the twenty-first century be the next American Century? Will American power and ideas dominate the globe in the coming years? Or is the prestige of the United States likely to crumble beneath the pressure of new international challenges? This ground-breaking book explores the changing patterns of American thought and culture at the dawn of the new millennium, when the world's richest nation has never been more powerful or more controversial. It brings together some of the most eminent North American and European thinkers to investigate the crucial issues and challenges facing the United States during the early years of our new century.From the subterranean political shifts beneath the electoral landscape to the latest biomedical advances, from the literary response to 9/11 to the rise of reality television, this book explores the political, social and cultural contours of contemporary American life - but it also places the United States within a global narrative of commerce, cultural exchange, i
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture written by Robert Gregg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a meeting point for world cultures, the USA is characterized by its breadth and diversity. Acknowledging that diversity is the fundamental feature of American culture, this volume is organized around a keen awareness of race, gender, class and space and with over 1,200 alphabetically-arranged entries - spanning 'the American century' from the end of World War II to the present day - the Encyclopedia provides a one-stop source for insightful and stimulating coverage of all aspects of that culture. Entries range from short definitions to longer overview essays and with full cross-referencing, extensive indexing, and a thematic contents list, this volume provides an essential cultural context for both teachers and students of American studies, as well as providing fascinating insights into American culture for the general reader. The suggestions for further reading, which follows most entries, are also invaluable guides to more specialized sources.
Download or read book Race and Urban Space in Contemporary American Culture written by Liam Kennedy and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative book looks at representations of ethnic and racial identities in relation to the development of urban culture in postindustrialised American cities. The concept of 'urban space' organises the detailed illustration of a series of themes which structure chapters on white paranoia and urban decline; memories of urban passage; the racialised underclass; urban crime and justice; and globalisation and citizenship.The book focuses on a range of literary and visual forms including novels, journalism, films (narrative and documentary) and photography to examine the relationship between race and representation in the production of urban space. Texts analysed include writings by Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities), Toni Morrison (Jazz), John Edgar Wildeman (Philadelphia Fire) and Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress). Films covered include Falling Down, Strange Days, Hoop Dreams and Clockers.Provocative and absorbing, this interdisciplinary treatment of urban representations engages contemporary theoretical and sociological debates about race and the city. Issues of space and spatiality in representations of the city are explored and the author shows how expressive forms of literary and visual representation interact with broader productions of urban space.
Download or read book Contemporary American Print Makers written by E. Ashley Rooney and published by Schiffer Pub Limited. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Printmakers today are sustained both by their traditions and by their willingness to embrace new technologies, new mediums, and innovative processes. Over 500 beautiful colour images display the innovative work of 75 talented printmakers and 30 print shops. Traditional printing techniques featured include lithography, intaglio, screen print, and relief, while newer techniques include installation, digital, and fibre, among other forms of new print media. The artists speak for themselves, revealing why they create their art. Consequently, the readers will gain a deeper understanding of their world. These assembled prints reflect the talent of this time and in this place. The artists' mediums, patterns, images, and environments also capture our culture and attempt to foretell our future. This book will be a treasured resource for anyone who appreciates the printmaker's art.
Download or read book Masculinities in Contemporary American Culture written by Thomas Keith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masculinities in Contemporary American Culture offers readers a multidisciplinary, intersectional overview of masculinity studies that includes both theoretical and applied lenses. Keith combines current research with historical perspectives to demonstrate the contexts in which masculine identities have come evolved. With an emphasis on popular culture -- particularly film, TV, video games, and music -- this text invites students to examine their gendered sensibilities and discuss the ways in which different forms of media appeal to toxic masculinity.
Download or read book Veil and Vow written by Aneeka Ayanna Henderson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-01-29 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Veil and Vow, Aneeka Ayanna Henderson places familiar, often politicized questions about the crisis of African American marriage in conversation with a rich cultural archive that includes fiction by Terry McMillan and Sister Souljah, music by Anita Baker, and films such as The Best Man. Seeking to move beyond simple assessments of marriage as "good" or "bad" for African Americans, Henderson critically examines popular and influential late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century texts alongside legislation such as the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and the Welfare Reform Act, which masked true sources of inequality with crisis-laden myths about African American family formation. Using an interdisciplinary approach to highlight the influence of law, politics, and culture on marriage representations and practices, Henderson reveals how their kinship veils and unveils the fiction in political policy as well as the complicated political stakes of fictional and cultural texts. Providing a new opportunity to grapple with old questions, including who can be a citizen, a "wife," and "marriageable," Veil and Vow makes clear just how deeply marriage still matters in African American culture.
Download or read book Contemporary American Literature and Excremental Culture written by Mary C. Foltz and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-08 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary American Literature and Excremental Culture: American Sh*t analyzes post-1960 scatological novels that utilize representations of human waste to address pressing issues, including pollution of waterways, environmental racism, and militarism. Primarily examining postmodern parody, the book shows the value of aesthetic renderings of sanitary engineering for composting ideologies that fuel a ruinous impact on the world. Drawing on late twentieth-century psychoanalytic thinkers Norman O. Brown, Frantz Fanon, and Leo Bersani, American Sh*t shows the continued relevance of psychoanalytic interpretations of contemporary fiction for understanding post-45 authors’ engagement with waste. Ultimately, the monograph reveals how novelists Ishmael Reed, Jonathan Franzen, Gloria Naylor, Don DeLillo, and Samuel R. Delany critique subjects who abnegate their status as waste-producing beings and bring readers back to embrace Winner of the 2019 Northeast Modern Language Association Book Award for Literary Criticism of English Language Literature
Download or read book Modernist America written by Richard Pells and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's global cultural impact is largely seen as one-sided, with critics claiming that it has undermined other countries' languages and traditions. But contrary to popular belief, the cultural relationship between the United States and the world has been reciprocal, says Richard Pells. The United States not only plays a large role in shaping international entertainment and tastes, it is also a consumer of foreign intellectual and artistic influences.Pells reveals how the American artists, novelists, composers, jazz musicians, and filmmakers who were part of the Modernist movement were greatly influenced by outside ideas and techniques. People across the globe found familiarities in American entertainment, resulting in a universal culture that has dominated the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and fulfilled the aim of the Modernist movement--to make the modern world seem more intelligible."Modernist America" brilliantly explains why George Gershwin's music, Cole Porter's lyrics, Jackson Pollock's paintings, Bob Fosse's choreography, Marlon Brando's acting, and Orson Welles's storytelling were so influential, and why these and other artists and entertainers simultaneously represent both an American and a modern global culture.
Download or read book Symbolic Essence and Other Writings on Modern Architecture and American Culture written by William H. Jordy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Symbolic Essence of Modern European Architecture of the Twenties and Its Continuing Influence'), this collection contains critical writings on works by Mies, Corbusier, Kahn, and Venturi, as well as one previously unpublished text. Jordy leads readers to discover important connections of architecture with art, literature, intellectual history, symbolic structures, social purpose and community. He significantly shaped the way we understand the character and meaning of modern architecture and American culture.
Download or read book Bearing the Bad News written by Sanford Pinsker and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critic and poet Pinsker offers 11 essays exploring such topics as the decline of formative reading, unifying themes in American literature, the cultural value of humor (but not vice versa), and the place of the college novel. No bibliography or index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book The Contemporary American Novel in Context written by Andrew Dix and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical introduction to the contemporary American novel focusing on contexts, key texts and criticism.
Download or read book Taking It Like a Man written by David Savran and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998-03-30 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Beat poets' incarnation of the "white Negro" through Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timothy McVeigh, white men in this country have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. In Taking It Like a Man, David Savran explores the social and sexual tensions that have helped to produce this phenomenon. Beginning with the 1940s, when many white, middle-class men moved into a rule-bound, corporate culture, Savran sifts through literary, cinematic, and journalistic examples that construct the white man as victimized, feminized, internally divided, and self-destructive. Savran considers how this widely perceived loss of male power has played itself out on both psychoanalytical and political levels as he draws upon various concepts of masochism--the most counterintuitive of the so-called perversions and the one most insistently associated with femininity. Savran begins with the writings and self-mythologization of Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Although their independent, law-defying lifestyles seemed distinctively and ruggedly masculine, their literary art and personal relations with other men in fact allowed them to take up social and psychic positions associated with women and racial minorities. Arguing that this dissident masculinity has become increasingly central to U.S. culture, Savran analyzes the success of Sam Shepard as both writer and star, as well as the emergence of a new kind of action hero in movies like Rambo and Twister. He contends that with the limited success of the civil rights and women's movements, white masculinity has been reconfigured to reflect the fantasy that the white male has become the victim of the scant progress made by African Americans and women. Taking It Like a Man provocatively applies psychoanalysis to history. The willingness to inflict pain upon the self, for example, serves as a measure of men's attempts to take control of their situations and their ambiguous relationship to women. Discussing S/M and sexual liberation in their historical contexts enables Savran to consider not only the psychological function of masochism but also the broader issues of political and social power as experienced by both men and women.
Download or read book Point of Purchase written by Sharon Zukin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible, smart, and expansive book on shopping's impact on American life is in part historical, stretching back to the mid-19th century, yet also has a contemporary focus, with material on recent trends in shopping from the internet to Zagat's guides. Drawing inspiration from both Pierre Bourdieu's work and Walter Benjamin's seminal essay on the shopping arcades of 19th-century Paris, Zukin explores the forces that have made shopping so central to our lives: the rise of consumer culture, the never-ending quest for better value, and shopping's ability to help us improve our social status and attain new social identities.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture written by Robert Gregg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 1379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a meeting point for world cultures, the USA is characterized by its breadth and diversity. Acknowledging that diversity is the fundamental feature of American culture, this volume is organized around a keen awareness of race, gender, class and space and with over 1,200 alphabetically-arranged entries - spanning 'the American century' from the end of World War II to the present day - the Encyclopedia provides a one-stop source for insightful and stimulating coverage of all aspects of that culture. Entries range from short definitions to longer overview essays and with full cross-referencing, extensive indexing, and a thematic contents list, this volume provides an essential cultural context for both teachers and students of American studies, as well as providing fascinating insights into American culture for the general reader. The suggestions for further reading, which follows most entries, are also invaluable guides to more specialized sources.
Download or read book Berserk Style in American Culture written by K. Farrell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on post-Vietnam America, using perspectives from psychology, anthropology, and physiology, this book demonstrates the need for criticism to unpack the confusions in language and cultural fantasy that drive the nation's fascination with the berserk style.
Download or read book The Fifty Year Sword written by Mark Z. Danielewski and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this story set in East Texas, a local seamstress named Chintana finds herself responsible for five orphans who are not only captivated by a storyteller’s tale of vengeance but by the long black box he sets before them. As midnight approaches, the box is opened, a fateful dare is made, and the children as well as Chintana come face to face with the consequences of a malice retold and now foretold.
