Bøger i American Studies - A Monograph Series serien

Participation is a core value of the U.S.-American concept of the nation. The promise of participation encompasses full and equal access to participate in political, social, cultural, religious, and economic activities. At the same time, exclusion from social participation has been salient in the history of the U.S., and recently even a decline in participation alongside growing polarization can be observed. The notion of participation, however, is more comprehensive than such a narrow political perspective may suggest. Forms of literary production and reception can likewise be understood as social practices of participation. This volume sheds light on how participation has been debated in contemporary Americanist scholarship. The papers included explore the idea of participation beyond its function as a political principle in a democratic nation-state, which will help to understand in more detail the diverse relationships between the literary, the cultural, and the political.

'Corporeal Battlegrounds' explores the depiction and critical potential of the entanglement of work and embodiment in contemporary realist U.S.-American novels. It argues that manifesting the elusive effects of contemporary capitalism in the figure of the laboring body allows for a critique of capitalism. The laboring body thus provides a gateway to understanding how power relations are perpetuated by the work we engage in and to revealing the inherent logic of capitalism.To provide a comprehensive view, each larger section examines one aspect of contemporary capitalism in conversation with a novel: social acceleration, digitalization, financialization, and 24/7 capitalism. These sections question how the novels approach the representability of economic relations and how the depiction of the laboring body functions to open up an area of tension to criticize the link between the laboring body, economic participation, and the perception of failure and success.

'Data Imaginary' is about the co-evolution of the literary and of data around the middle of the long nineteenth century. It argues that, during romanticism, US culture negotiated the outlines of the literary-what literature is, what literary value consists of, and what literature can do-in relation to the outlines of another representational project that was gaining sharper contours and a stronger foothold in public perception at the time: data. As the young nation was searching for a national literature of its own, data and data-driven practices formed an important foil, a conceptual resource to articulate the desire for a new, democratic literature.Revisiting formative decades of US literary self-perception through the conceptual lens of data, this book rethinks the representative project of transcendentalism, the catalog poetry of Walt Whitman, the formal experimentation of abolitionist literature, and the evolution of American (literary) studies.

This volume of original essays presents an overview of Popular Culture Studies as an ever-growing branch of American Studies while also reflecting the critical debates driving the field toward a more nuanced approach to contemporary culture more generally. Thus, many of the essays included take fresh perspectives on Black American culture, feminism, multiculturalism, and queer studies, among others, but they also provide critical updates on the global impact of U.S. American popular culture. If an understanding of U.S. Culture as Popular Culture in its national and international dimensions is one of the aims behind this publication, another is to conceive of cultural formations against the backdrop of shifting media environments. Placed alongside more traditional media such as literature and film, more recent phenomena including reality television, internet memes, and video games add considerable relevance to the critical appreciation of culture in the twenty-first century.

As growing economic and racial inequality continues to shape American society, homelessness remains an urgent issue. Embedded in American history, and more recently exacerbated by the 2008 financial and housing crisis, a new wave of homelessness has emerged as the U.S. has faced surging evictions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The essays in this volume explore homelessness both as the literal state of being unsheltered and as the modern and contemporary condition of being and/or feeling estranged from society. They also reflect on the meaning of home in relation to race, class, gender, migration and mobility in an American and transnational context. Contributions include interdisciplinary research that investigates representations of home and homelessness in modern and contemporary fiction, film, and videogames, as well as philosophical, historical, political and architectural discussions of homelessness.

Siri Hustvedt is one of the few contemporary US-American authors who consistently engages with the questions of seeing and perceiving in her work. However, despite the growing academic interest in her narratives, many aspects related to the depiction of these fundamental practices have been left unaddressed in the criticism. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the concepts of seeing and perceiving as represented in both her fictional and nonfictional writings published to date and argues that Hustvedt's texts reveal the deep entanglement of the senses that inform a meaningful human experience. Drawing on phenomenology and feminist epistemology, this study highlights Hustvedt's interest in embodied cultural habits and implicit forms of knowledge that play a crucial role in the ways people perceive the world and each other. Through the motif of gender masquerade, her narratives explore how the ideas about femininity and masculinity shape people's perceptions and interactions.

What does it mean to live through time and to form affective bonds? This book discusses how concepts of time, age and aging, and kinship produce and impact each other in a neoliberal, late-capitalist 21st century U.S. American context. Located at the nexus of American studies, queer theory, critical age(ing) studies, and studies on belonging, it features case studies from across contemporary U.S. American culture. To explore potential challenges to dominant concepts and narratives, the book turns to diverse forms of temporal, developmental, and relational rupture: the multiple temporalities and erratic aging processes, the queer time modes, and the alternative models of collectivity and affect of bodies across - and as they cross - genders and the (post)human condition. With its queer analyses of examples from transgressive sites of queer contestation as well as mainstream culture, the book also asks: is going mainstream and being anti-hegemonic necessarily and always mutually exclusive?