Europa kann neu gedacht werden: nicht von den Grenzen und Leitdifferenzen her, sondern von den Übergängen. Die aus vier Kontinenten stammenden Beiträgerinnen und Beiträger befassen sich mit der Frage, inwiefern die Fähigkeit, ästhetische, sprachliche und kulturelle Übergänge angesichts hoher Heterogenität hervorzubringen, Europa am ehesten ausmacht. Von Fatou Diome bis Yoko Tawada, von…
Thirty years after Chomsky and Herman elaborated the Propaganda Model this title aims to introduce a new generation of readers to it. It presents cutting-edge research demonstrating the model’s general validity as well as new attempts – in the light of digital media and 21st century politics – to critically update, expand, and refine it. International researchers thus analyse the continui…
"This book is a collection of essays on Bob Dylan and religion. The eight scientific essays present new perspectives on the subject, aiming to elucidate the role played by religion in Bob Dylan’s artistic output and in the reception history of some of his songs. Few would dispute the fact that religion or religious traditions and the use of religious imagery have always played an important ro…
American Mobilities investigates representations of mobility—social, economic, geographic—in American film and literature during the Depression, WWII, and the early Cold War. With an emphasis on the dual meaning of »domestic«, referring to both the family home and the nation, this study traces the important trope of mobility that runs through the "American" century. Juxtaposing canoni…
How does the US make sense of its elite educational system, given that it seems to be at odds with core American values, such as equality of opportunity or upward mobility? Sophie Spieler explores scholarly and journalistic investigations, self-representational texts, and fictional narratives revolving around the Ivy League and its peers in order to understand elite education and its peculiar p…
"Films are integral to national imagination. Promotional publicity markets “domestic films” not only as entertaining, exciting, or moving, but also as topical and relevant in different ways. Reviewers assess new films with reference to other films and cultural products as well as social and political issues. Through such interpretive framings by contemporaries and later generations, popular…
Bring on the Books for Everybody is an engaging assessment of the robust popular literary culture that has developed in the United States during the past two decades. Jim Collins describes how a once solitary and print-based experience has become an exuberantly social activity, enjoyed as much on the screen as on the page. Fueled by Oprah’s Book Club, Miramax film adaptations, superstore book…
During the Great Depression, people from across the political spectrum sought to ground American identity in the rural know-how of “the folk.” At the same time, certain writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals combined documentary and satire into a hybrid genre that revealed the folk as an anxious product of corporate capitalism, rather than an antidote to commercial culture. In Real Folks, S…