Exploring the genre of American assassination fiction, this work delves into the conflict between individualism and the pressures of mass society within U.S. culture. It analyzes how these narratives reflect societal tensions and the complexities of personal identity in a collective environment. Through various examples, the book reveals how assassination serves as a metaphor for broader cultural struggles, offering insights into the American psyche and the implications of violence in the quest for individuality.
In eighteen essays that cover a broad range of perspectives and examples, this collection asks what the field of American Studies, with its highly diverse toolbox of theoretical and practical approaches, may bring to the analysis of video games, and
American Studies has only gradually turned its attention to video games in the twenty-first century, even though the medium has grown into a cultural industry that is arguably the most important force in American and global popular culture today. There is an urgent need for a substantial theoretical reflection on how the field and its object of study relate to each other. This anthology, the first of its kind, seeks to address this need by asking a dialectic question: first, how may American Studies apply its highly diverse theoretical and methodological tools to the analysis of video games, and second, how are these theories and methods in turn affected by the games? The eighteen essays offer exemplary approaches to video games from the perspective of American cultural and historical studies as they consider a broad variety of topics: the US-American games industry, Puritan rhetoric, cultural geography, mobility and race, urbanity and space, digital sports, ludic textuality, survival horror and the eighteenth-century novel, gamer culture and neoliberalism, terrorism and agency, algorithm culture, glitches, theme parks, historical guilt, visual art, sonic meaning-making, and nonverbal gameplay.
Topographies of Beginnings from Whitman to the Twenty-First Century
424 pages
15 hours of reading
The book explores the evolution of American poetry from Whitman's era, examining its origins, techniques, and the political and aesthetic purposes it serves. It delves into how poetry grapples with essential questions regarding the future and its potential influences. Through this investigation, it highlights the interplay between artistic expression and societal issues, offering insights into the role of poetry in shaping contemporary thought and culture.
'Pynchon's Postnational Imagination' is the first monograph to critically analyze Thomas Pynchon's novels with regard to issues of nations, nationality, national identity, nationalism, and the very idea of the national: nation-ness. It argues that Pynchon's fiction can best be conceptualized as „postnational“, that is, as working towards dismantling the hegemony of nation-ness as a metanarrative. The study seeks to establish a critical theory of postnationalism that helps conceptualize this complex literary practice. It combines established theories of nation-ness with recent attempts to think beyond the nation, drawing on the ideas of Renan, Gellner and Anderson as well as Habermas, Albrow, Appadurai, and Hardt and Negri in order to offer a viable postnational theory that is as pertinent to literary studies as to other fields. It presents various postnational strategies, most notably that of parageography, to show in detailed critical readings of 'Gravity's Rainbow' (1973) and 'Mason & Dixon' (1997) that Pynchon's novels both exemplify and describe a postnational imagination.
