Bøger i New American Canon serien

"The Global Frontier argues that midcentury American writers were not straitjacketed by the anticommunist Red Scare, but rather pioneered a transnational sensibility. Enabled by air travel and the expansion of the tourist industry, they departed from the West/East binaries criticized by postcolonial writers and academics. American novelists and poets imagined themselves as egalitarian and culturally borderless, an ideology that Strand associates with the frontier. Although we associate the heterosexual white male with the "Ugly American" stereotype, a wide variety of literary travelers sought personal freedom and cultural enrichment outside their nation's borders, including Black, female, and queer writers. However, while minorities as well as straight white males went abroad to achieve autonomy and creativity, they were complicit in imperialism and the formation of global inequality. This book thus takes a critical view of the postwar frontier, a paradigm that displaced the collectivist ethos of the New Deal era. For American writers, the price of incorporation into a transnational professional class was not only forswearing communism, but also rejecting 1930s social commitments and the concept of an interventionist state. Even Richard Wright, who questions the privilege of white flight, himself enjoyed the privilege of the American traveler, leading to a blurring of racial identities. In our day, the explosion of mass air travel, communications, and various subcultures has threatened to discredit the nation-state form altogether. The Global Frontier concludes that a progressive orientation toward state-based reform has never been more important, especially in a new era of ethnocentric nationalisms"--

"Algorithmic data profiling is not merely an important topic in contemporary fiction, it is an increasingly dominant form of storytelling and characterization in our society. These stories are being told inside boardrooms, banks, presidential briefings, police stations, advertising agencies, and technology companies. And so, to the extent that data has taken up storytelling, literature must take up data. After all, profiling coincides with character development; surveillance reflects point of view; and data points track as plot-points in tales of the political-economy. Plotting Profiles engages this energetic reformation of postmodern literature to account for a society and economy of frenetic counting. Indeed, contemporary literature is capable of addressing precisely that which algorithms cannot or do not account for: the affects of profile culture, the ideologies and supposed truth-power of data, the gendered and racialized dynamics of watching and being watched, and the politics of who counts and what gets counted. Each chapter analyzes preeminent and prescient work by contemporary authors such as Jennifer Egan, Claudia Rankine, Mohsin Hamid, and William Gibson to probe how the claims of data surveillance serve to make lives seem legible, intelligible, and sometimes even expendable. This book contributes to literary studies, new media studies, affect studies, surveillance studies, critical race studies, and gender studies because, ultimately, these discourses are inextricably knotted together around the problems of profiling"--

Who writes novels about war? For nearly a century after World War I, the answer was simple: soldiers who had been there. The assumption that a person must have experienced war in the flesh in order to write about it in fiction was taken for granted by writers, reviewers, critics, and even scholars. Contemporary American fiction tells a different story. Less than half of the authors of contemporary war novels are veterans. And that's hardly the only change. Today's war novelists focus on the psychological and moral challenges of soldiers coming home rather than the physical danger of combat overseas. They also imagine the consequences of the wars from non-American perspectives in a way that defies the genre's conventions. To understand why these changes have occurred, David Eisler argues that we must go back nearly fifty years, to the political decision to abolish the draft. The ramifications rippled into the field of cultural production, transforming the foundational characteristics-- authorship, content, and form--of the American war fiction genre.

Presents a passionate collection of the best essays on the visual arts written by contemporary novelists. This vibrant and diverse selection includes essays by award-winning writers such as Zadie Smith, Chris Kraus, Teju Cole, Orhan Pamuk, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Reverse colonization narratives ask Western audiences to imagine what it's like to be the colonized rather than the colonizers. David Higgins argues that although some reverse colonization stories are thoughtful and provocative, reverse colonization fantasy has also led to the prevalence of a very dangerous kind of science fictional thinking.

William Gibson is frequently described as one of the most influential writers of the past few decades, yet his body of work has only been studied partially and without full recognition of its implications for literature and culture beyond science fiction. It is high time for a book that explores the wide-ranging impact of Gibson's fiction.

Explores modern and contemporary American prose literature through the lens of place, showing how authors like William Least Heat-Moon, Willa Cather, Richard Wright, and Leslie Marmon Silko represent and reimagine real places in the world and the human-environment relationships therein.

A lively retrospective appraisal of Dennis Cooper's fifty-year career, Wrong tracks the emergence of Cooper's singular style alongside his participation in a number of American subcultural movements like New York School poetry, punk rock, and radical queercore music and zines.

Offers a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, Alexandra Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience.

Argues that careful attention to a particular strain of twentieth-century lyric poetry yields a counter-history of American global power. The period that Phillis covers - from Ezra Pound's A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930 to Cathy Park Hong's Engine Empire in 2012 - roughly matches the ascent and decline of the American empire.

Bringing together noted scholars in the fields of literary, cultural, gender, and race studies, this volume challenges us to reconsider our understanding of the Cold War, revealing it to be a global phenomenon rather than just a binary conflict between US and Soviet forces.

From baby boomers to millennials, attending a big music festival has basically become a cultural rite of passage in America. In Half a Million Strong, music writer and scholar Gina Arnold explores the history of large music festivals in America and examines their impact on American culture.

After the second World War, ""technology"" came to signify both the anxieties of possible annihilation in a changing world and the exhilaration of accelerating cultural change. This book examines how some of the most well-known writers of the era described the tensions between technical, literary, and media cultures at the dawn of the Digital Age.

We live in a world of talk. Yet Race Sounds argues that we need to listen more - not just hear things, but actively listen - particularly in relation to how we engage race, gender, and class differences. Forging new ideas about the relationship between race and sound, Furlonge explores how black artists imagine listening.

Roots rock, Americana, alt country: what are they and why do they matter? Americans have been trying to answer these questions for as long as the music bearing these labels has existed. In It's Just the Normal Noises, Timothy Gray examines a wide array of writing about roots music from the 1960s to the 2000s.