William Cloonan
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786941329
- eISBN:
- 9781789629101
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941329.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Frères Ennemis focuses on Franco-American tensions as portrayed in works of literature. An Introduction is followed by nine chapters, each centred on a French or American literary text which shows ...
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Frères Ennemis focuses on Franco-American tensions as portrayed in works of literature. An Introduction is followed by nine chapters, each centred on a French or American literary text which shows the evolution/devolution of the relations between the two nations at a particular point in time. While the heart of the analysis consists of close textual readings, social, cultural and political contexts are introduced to provide a better understanding of the historical reality influencing the individual novels, a reality to which these novels are also responding. Chapters One through Five, covering a period from the mid-1870s to the end of the Cold War, discuss significant aspects of the often fraught relationship in part from the theoretical perspective of Roland Barthes’ theory of modern myth, described in his Mythologies. Barthes’ theory helps situate Franco-American tensions in a paradigmatic structure, which remains supple enough to allow for shifts and reversals within the paradigm. Subsequent chapters explore new French attitudes toward the powerful, potentially dominant influence of American culture on French life. In these sections I argue that recent French fiction displays more openness to the American experience than has existed in the past, and contrast this overture to the new with the relatively static, even indifferent attitude of American writers toward French literature.Less
Frères Ennemis focuses on Franco-American tensions as portrayed in works of literature. An Introduction is followed by nine chapters, each centred on a French or American literary text which shows the evolution/devolution of the relations between the two nations at a particular point in time. While the heart of the analysis consists of close textual readings, social, cultural and political contexts are introduced to provide a better understanding of the historical reality influencing the individual novels, a reality to which these novels are also responding. Chapters One through Five, covering a period from the mid-1870s to the end of the Cold War, discuss significant aspects of the often fraught relationship in part from the theoretical perspective of Roland Barthes’ theory of modern myth, described in his Mythologies. Barthes’ theory helps situate Franco-American tensions in a paradigmatic structure, which remains supple enough to allow for shifts and reversals within the paradigm. Subsequent chapters explore new French attitudes toward the powerful, potentially dominant influence of American culture on French life. In these sections I argue that recent French fiction displays more openness to the American experience than has existed in the past, and contrast this overture to the new with the relatively static, even indifferent attitude of American writers toward French literature.
Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231165358
- eISBN:
- 9780231850384
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231165358.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Terry Gilliam has been making movies for more than forty years, and this book analyzes a selection of his thrilling directorial work, from his early films with Monty Python to The Imaginarium of ...
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Terry Gilliam has been making movies for more than forty years, and this book analyzes a selection of his thrilling directorial work, from his early films with Monty Python to The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnussus (2009). The frenetic genius, auteur, and social critic continues to create indelible images on screen—if, that is, he can get funding for his next project. Featuring eleven chapterse written by an international group of scholars, this collection argues that when Gilliam makes a movie, he goes to war: against Hollywood caution and convention, against American hyper-consumerism and imperial militarism, against narrative vapidity and spoon-fed mediocrity, and against the brutalizing notion and cruel vision of the “American Dream”.Less
Terry Gilliam has been making movies for more than forty years, and this book analyzes a selection of his thrilling directorial work, from his early films with Monty Python to The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnussus (2009). The frenetic genius, auteur, and social critic continues to create indelible images on screen—if, that is, he can get funding for his next project. Featuring eleven chapterse written by an international group of scholars, this collection argues that when Gilliam makes a movie, he goes to war: against Hollywood caution and convention, against American hyper-consumerism and imperial militarism, against narrative vapidity and spoon-fed mediocrity, and against the brutalizing notion and cruel vision of the “American Dream”.
Kate Baldwin
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226185064
- eISBN:
- 9780226185088
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226185088.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The iconic housewife is a “combination of mainstream recognition, wide circulation, and textural impact” which positions her as a site for ideological relay and as a site of ideological excess. The ...
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The iconic housewife is a “combination of mainstream recognition, wide circulation, and textural impact” which positions her as a site for ideological relay and as a site of ideological excess. The iconic housewife follows the four vectors of influence as important for an iconic image: it communicates social knowledge, reproduces attendant ideology, shapes collective memory, and provides figural resources for communicative action. Americans made an effort to showcase the advances made by the United States in domestic technologies, and thus to bring the battle for technological superiority down to earth. The use of the kitchen to advertise the bounty of American consumerism quickly dispensed with the notion that the home was anything but political. The image of social unity, of universal attitudes and emotions generated from the home kitchen, actually depends on and sustains visions of domestic expansion. This chapter introduces an advertisement that helps to explain the ambivalence housed in this promise of consumer choice by the assertion of domesticity's liberating vectors. It points to the ambivalence between maternal plentitude and female absence, or the diversity of market choice held out as interpersonal intimacy.Less
The iconic housewife is a “combination of mainstream recognition, wide circulation, and textural impact” which positions her as a site for ideological relay and as a site of ideological excess. The iconic housewife follows the four vectors of influence as important for an iconic image: it communicates social knowledge, reproduces attendant ideology, shapes collective memory, and provides figural resources for communicative action. Americans made an effort to showcase the advances made by the United States in domestic technologies, and thus to bring the battle for technological superiority down to earth. The use of the kitchen to advertise the bounty of American consumerism quickly dispensed with the notion that the home was anything but political. The image of social unity, of universal attitudes and emotions generated from the home kitchen, actually depends on and sustains visions of domestic expansion. This chapter introduces an advertisement that helps to explain the ambivalence housed in this promise of consumer choice by the assertion of domesticity's liberating vectors. It points to the ambivalence between maternal plentitude and female absence, or the diversity of market choice held out as interpersonal intimacy.
