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Poetics of Politics

Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture

Herausgeber: Herrmann, Sebastian M. | Hofmann, Carolin Alice | Kanzler, Katja | Schubert, Stefan | Usbeck, Frank

American Studies – A Monograph Series, Bd. 258

2015

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Abstract

This volume proposes the ‘poetics of politics’ as an analytic angle to interrogate contemporary cultural production in the United States. As recent scholarship has observed, American literature and culture around the turn of the millennium, while still deeply informed by the textual self-consciousness of postmodernism, are marked by a rekindled interest in matters of social concern. This revived interest in politics is frequently read as a ‘grand epochal transition.’ Sidestepping such a logic of periodization, this book points to the interplay between the textual and the political as a dynamic – always locally specific – that affords unique insights into the characteristics of the contemporary moment. The sixteen case studies in this book explore this interplay across a wide range of media, genres, and modes. Together, they make visible a broad cultural concern with negotiating social relevance and textual self-awareness that permeates and structures contemporary US (popular) culture.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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Table of Content V
S.M. HERRMANN, K. KANZLER, S. SCHUBERT - Introduction: The Poetics of Politics 7
Film and Television 29
ANDREW HOBEREK - Thinking Institutionally: "Argo, Zero Dark Thirty", and the Politics of Contemporary Historical Films 29
FELIX BRINKER - On the Formal Politics of Narratively Complex Television Series: Operational Self-Reflexivity and Audience Management in "Fringe" and "Homeland" 41
ELEONORA RAVIZZA - The Politics of Melodrama: Nostalgia, Performance, and Gender Roles in "Revolutionary Road" 63
MICHAEL BUTTER - American Basterds: The Deconstruction of World War II Myths in Steven Soderbergh’s "The Good German" and Quentin Tarantino’s "Inglourious Basterds" 81
DOROTHEA GAIL, RAY CANOY - The Last Days of American Civilization: The Poetics of Righteous Violence in Bob Goldthwait’s Black Comedy "God Bless America" 101
Nonfiction 121
BRUNO ARICH-GERZ - Poetics of Disaster: Filmic Elements and Traces of Fiction Literature in the "9/11 Commission Report": Frames and Functions of a Generic Hybrid 121
SEBASTIAN M. HERRMANN - Foggy Realisms? Fiction, Nonfiction, and Political Affect in Larry Beinhart’s "Fog Facts" and "The Librarian" 133
CAROLIN ALICE HOFMANN - Testifying by Proxy: A Trauma Studies Approach to "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" 153
Literature 175
KATJA KANZLER - Post-Race Ideology and the Poetics of Genre in David Mamet’s "Race" 175
HANS FRESE - The Great American Novel and Beyond: Jonathan Franzenand the Legacy of the Culture Wars 195
ILKA SAAL - “Just as Good as the Real Thing”: "Historiopoiesis" in Third-Generation Narratives on Slavery 215
OLESYA BONDARENKO - “Inherently Political”: Rancièrian Philosophy and Language Writing 235
SABRINA HÜTTNER - Politics of Dissent: Reconsidering ‘the Political’ in Tony Kushner’s "Homebody/Kabul" 249
New Media 271
STEFAN SCHUBERT - Objectivism, Narrative Agency, and the Politics of Choice in the Video Game "BioShock" 271
SOPHIE SPIELER - “Our Everyday Is Better Than Your Best Day”: Spectacle and the Politics of Ambiguity on the "Tumblr" Blog "Rich Kids of Instagram" 291
FRANK USBECK - “The Power of the Story”: ‘Popular Narratology’ in Pentagon Reports on Social Media Use in the Military 313
Notes on Contributors 335