Download or read book The Trash Phenomenon written by Stacey Michele Olster and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Trash Phenomenon looks at how writers of the late twentieth century not only have integrated the events, artifacts, and theories of popular culture into their works but also have used those works as windows into popular culture's role in the process of nation building. Taking her cue from Donald Barthelme's 1967 portrayal of popular culture as "trash" and Don DeLillo's 1997 description of it as a subversive "people's history," Stacey Olster explores how literature recycles American popular culture so as to change the nationalistic imperative behind its inception. The Trash Phenomenon begins with a look at the mass media's role in the United States' emergence as the twentieth century's dominant power. Olster discusses the works of three authors who collectively span the century bounded by the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Persian Gulf War (1991): Gore Vidal's American Chronicle series, John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, and Larry Beinhart's American Hero. Olster then turns her attention to three non-American writers whose works explore the imperial sway of American popular culture on their nation's value systems: hierarchical class structure in Dennis Potter's England, Peronism in Manuel Puig's Argentina, and Nihonjinron consensus in Haruki Murakami's Japan. Finally, Olster returns to American literature to look at the contemporary media spectacle and the representative figure as potential sources of national consolidation after November 1963. Olster first focuses on autobiographical, historical, and fictional accounts of three spectacles in which the formulae of popular culture are shown to bypass differences of class, gender, and race: the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Scarsdale Diet Doctor murder, and the O. J. Simpson trial. She concludes with some thoughts about the nature of American consolidation after 9/11.
Download or read book When Trash Becomes Art written by Lea Vergine and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The result of painstaking research by Lea Vergine, this volume explores the meaning of the "trash" phenomenon in contemporary art from the early 20th century (Boccioni, Carrà, Depero, Picabia, Schwitters), through the Sixties and Seventies (Burri, Kounellis, Fontana, Vautier, Rotella, César, Arman, Manzoni, Pistoletto, Beuys, Spoerri), and up to the present (Cragg, Parmiggiani, Boltanski, Sherman, Bourgeois, Serrano, Cattelan). It examines the challenge launched by these artists, who use waste as a material for creating art. In an era marked by great concern about the environment, the artistic use of the discarded object expresses the alienation and distress that appear to be eroding the wantonly consumeristic social model represented by the West. Recovering and preserving refuse is a means of trying to hold on to it, of making it survive by saving it from a void, from being nothing, from the dissolution to which it is destined; it is about the desire to leave a mark, a trace, a clue for those who remain, hence touching a dimension that is psychological as well as political.
Download or read book White Trash written by Nancy Isenberg and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Bestseller, with a new preface from the author “This estimable book rides into the summer doldrums like rural electrification. . . . It deals in the truths that matter.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times “This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.”—O, The Oprah Magazine “White Trash will change the way we think about our past and present.” —T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Custer’s Trials In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg, co-author of The Problem of Democracy, takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash. “When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win,” says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters that put Trump in the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg. The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity. We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.
Download or read book Plastic Capitalism written by Amanda Boetzkes and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument for the centrality of the visual culture of waste—as seen in works by international contemporary artists—to the study of our ecological condition. Ecological crisis has driven contemporary artists to engage with waste in its most non-biodegradable forms: plastics, e-waste, toxic waste, garbage hermetically sealed in landfills. In this provocative and original book, Amanda Boetzkes links the increasing visualization of waste in contemporary art to the rise of the global oil economy and the emergence of ecological thinking. Often, when art is analyzed in relation to the political, scientific, or ecological climate, it is considered merely illustrative. Boetzkes argues that art is constitutive of an ecological consciousness, not simply an extension of it. The visual culture of waste is central to the study of the ecological condition. Boetzkes examines a series of works by an international roster of celebrated artists, including Thomas Hirschhorn, Francis Alÿs, Song Dong, Tara Donovan, Agnès Varda, Gabriel Orozco, and Mel Chin, among others, mapping waste art from its modernist origins to the development of a new waste imaginary generated by contemporary artists. Boetzkes argues that these artists do not offer a predictable or facile critique of consumer culture. Bearing this in mind, she explores the ambivalent relationship between waste (both aestheticized and reviled) and a global economic regime that curbs energy expenditure while promoting profitable forms of resource consumption.
Download or read book Realism and reality in Film and Media written by Anne Jerslev and published by Museum Tusculanum Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2002 theme of 'Northern Lights' is dedicated to the representation of reality in film, TV and new media -- a question of new importance in modern film and media, where a new wave of realism has dominated cinema and reality -- TV became a mass phenomena on both TV and the internet. Eleven articles by Danish, British, and American film and media researchers focus on two sub-themes: 'Film and Realism' deals theoretically with film realism and analyses classic films and modern Danish Dogma films; 'Documentary Forms, Reality TV and New Media' treats new forms of non-fiction film, TV and on the internet in a both theoretical and historical perspective.
Download or read book Rubbish written by William L. Rathje and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is from the discards of former civilizations that archaeologists have reconstructed most of what we know about the past, and it is through their examination of today's garbage that William Rathje and Cullen Murphy inform us of our present. Rubbish! is their witty and erudite investigation into all aspects of the phenomenon of garbage. Rathje and Murphy show what the study of garbage tells us about a population's demographics and buying habits. Along the way, they dispel the common myths about our "garbage crisis"—about fast-food packaging and disposable diapers, about biodegradable garbage and the acceleration of the average family's garbage output. They also suggest methods for dealing with the garbage we do have.
Download or read book The Novel Today written by Malcolm Bradbury and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1977 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britain's most important contemporary authors reflect intelligently and imaginatively on the nature and development of the modern novel.
Download or read book The Metafictional Muse written by Larry McCaffery and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: McCaffery interprets the works of three major writers of radically experimental fiction: Robert Coover; Donald Barthelme; and Willam H. Gass. The term "metafiction" here refers to a strain in American writing where the self-concious approach to the art of fiction-making is a commentary on the nature of meaning itself.
Download or read book Language History and Linguistic Modelling written by Raymond Hickey and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 2184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work presents a collection of some 130 contributions covering a wide range of topics of interest to historical, theoretical and applied linguistics alike. A major theme is the development of English which is examined on several levels in the light of recent linguistic theory in various papers. The geographical dimension is also treated extensively with papers on controversial aspects of a variety of studies, as are topical linguistic matters from a more general perspective.
Download or read book Trash Culture written by Richard Keller Simon and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-11-23 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seinfeld as a contemporary adaptation of Etherege's Restoration comedy of manners The Man of Mode? Friends as a reworking of Shakespeare's romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing? Star Wars as an adaptation of Spenser's epic poem, The Faerie Queene? The popular culture that surrounds us in our daily lives bears a striking similarity to some of the great works of literature of the past. In television, movies, magazines, and advertisements we are exposed to many of the same stories as those critics who study the great books of Western literature, but we have simply been encouraged to look at those stories differently. In Trash Culture, Richard K. Simon examines the ways in which the great literature and cultural work of the past has been rewritten for today's consumer society, with supermarket tabloids such as The National Enquirer and celebrity gossip magazines like People serving as contemporary versions of the great dramatic tragedies of the past. Today's advertising repeats the tale of the Golden Age, but inverts the value system of a classic utopia; the shopping mall combines bits and pieces of the great garden styles of Western history, and now adds consumer goods; Playboy magazine revises Castiglione's Renaissance courtesy book, The Book of the Courtier; and Cosmopolitan magazine revises the women's coming-of-age novels of Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Edith Wharton. Trash Culture concludes that the great books are alive and well, but simply hidden from the critics. It argues for the linking of high and low for the study and appreciation of each form of literature, and the importance of teaching popular culture alongside books of the great tradition in order to understand the critical context in which the books appear.
Download or read book Dissident Postmodernists written by Paul Maltby and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critics who hold that postmodernist art is essentially adversarial and apolitical have ignored the historical context of the postmodern focus on the problems of language. Paul Maltby examines a major current of postmodernist fiction that can be read as a dissident response to developments of late capitalism that have transformed the field of language and communication.
Download or read book From Modernism to Postmodernism written by Gerhard Hoffmann and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 750 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This systemic study discusses in its historical, cultural and aesthetic context the postmodern American novel between the years of 1960 and 1980. A general overview of the various definitions of postmodernism in philosophy, cultural theory and aesthetics provides the framework for the inquiry into more specific problems, such as: the broadening of aesthetics, the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, the transformation of the artistic tradition, the interdependence between modernism and postmodernism, and the change in the aesthetics of fiction. Other topics addressed here include: situationalism, montage, the ordinary and the fantastic, the subject and the character, the imagination, comic modes, and the future of the postmodern strategies. The authors whose fiction is treated in some detail under the various aspects thematized are John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Raymond Federman, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Jerzy Kosinski, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Ronald Sukenick, and Kurt Vonnegut.
Download or read book Literature the American Urban Experience written by Michael C. Jaye and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book But is it Garbage written by Steven L. Hamelman and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trash has been blowing across the rock'n'roll landscape since the first amplified guitar riff tore through American mass culture. Throwaway tunes, wasted fans, crappy reviews, junk bins of remaindered albums: much of rock's quintessence is handily conveyed in terms of disposability and impermanence. Steven L. Hamelman sums up these rubbishy affinities as rock's "trash trope." Trash is an obvious physical presence on the rock scene -- think of Woodstock's littered pastures or the many hotel rooms redecorated by the Who. More intriguingly, Hamelman says, trash is the catalyst for a powerful mode of rock composition and criticism. It is, for instance, both cause and effect when performers like the Ramones or Beck at once critique junk culture and revel in it. But Is It Garbage? spills over with challenging insights into how rock's creators, critics, and consumers transform, and are transformed by, trash as a fact and a concept. In the music's preoccupation with its own trashiness readers will perceive a wellspring of rock innovation and inspiration -- one largely overlooked and little understood until now.
Download or read book Fiction and the Figures of Life written by William H. Gass and published by David R. Godine Publisher. This book was released on 1971 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by William H. Gass.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to John Updike written by Stacey Olster and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-06 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Updike is one of the most prolific and important American authors of the contemporary period, with an acclaimed body of work that spans half a century and is inspired by everything from American exceptionalism to American popular culture. This Companion joins together a distinguished international team of contributors to address both the major themes in Updike's writing as well as the sources of controversy that Updike's writing has often provoked. It traces the ways in which historical and cultural changes in the second half of the twentieth century have shaped not just Updike's reassessment of America's heritage, but his reassessment of the literary devices by which that legacy is best portrayed. With a chronology and bibliography of Updike's published writings, this is the only guide students and scholars of Updike will need to understand this extraordinary writer.
Download or read book Rethinking Postmodern Subjectivity written by Zuzanna Ladyga and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is postmodern literary subjectivity? How to talk about it without falling in the trap of negative hyper-essentialism or being seduced by exuberant lit speak? One way out of this dilemma, as this book suggests, is via a redefinition of the concept in the context of Emmanuel Levinas and his radical ethics. By defining subjectivity as an ethically charged act of language, Levinas provides a fresh perspective on the often trivialized aspects of postmodern poetics such as referentiality and affect construction strategies. The foregrounding of the ethical dimension of those poetic elements has far-reaching consequences for how we read postmodern texts and understand postmodernism in general. Thus, to prove the benefits of the Levinasian approach, the author applies it to the work of the canonical American postmodernist, Donald Barthelme, and explains the distinctly ethical character of his apparently surfictional experiments.
