European Journal of American Culture - Volume 21, Issue 2, 2002

Ridley Scott's Gladiator is situated and decoded not just as a representation of the Roman Empire but as a blasted allegorization of the Pax Americana itself in its modes of moral innocence, Euro-civililizational ratification, soft hegemony, and hegemonic technologies of sublime spectacle. This essay thus interrogates global/local attachments to, and critiques of, US-dominated forms of neo-liberal globalization.

Tracing a line in Proustian criticism initiated by Edmund Wilson's essay on Proust in Axle's Castle, this essay looks at the shift in Proust's writing from symbolism to realism, romanticism to modernism. Key to this reading of In Search of Lost Time is a reconsideration of the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in particular Nature which was itself a by-product of Emerson's visit to Paris in the mid-1830s. Examining the role played by Emerson in the development of Proust's earliest works Pleasures and Regrets and the abandoned novel Jean Santeuil this essay continues by noting certain correspondences between Proust's treatment of the theme of memory and the Emersonian idea of transition.

The successful regulation of the first period of the War on Terror by political, economic and military elites has been contingent on a reifying of the contexts in which the current crisis has come about. The first period of the War has been reified and regulated in various ways; by the formation of a post-apocalyptic sensibility in the US; by the dissemination of a new doctrine of austerity and a mini-revival of Keynesian economics; and by a reassertion of older discourses of national innocence and national mission. Combined, these ideologies have helped legitimate both a new authoritarianism on the domestic front of the War, and an aggressive expansion of US imperial power on the global stage. But the extent to which the meanings of the War can be reified and regulated by elite opinion in the longer term may depend on other, established, historical trends; in particular, the coincidence of the War on Terror with the latest phase of the long downturn in US and world capitalism, whose current period suggests a developing crisis in the neo-liberal response to the earlier breakup of Fordism in the 1970s. Reifying September 11: why the Left hasn't lost the War on Terror was written in April 2002.

This article examines Kathy Acker's My Mother: Demonology (1993), her most difficult and demanding novel. It considers the motivation for, and the effects of, the complexity of the narrative by focusing on three significant areas: the figure and work of Colette Peignot (known as Laure), a French activist and writer; the work of her lover Georges Bataille; and manifestations of horror.

David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002, 257pp., ISBN 0-8203-2320-9

Hugh Ruppersburg and Tim Engles (eds.), Critical Essays on Don DeLillo, New York: Hall, 2000, 321pp., ISBN 0-7838-0458-X

Christopher Hewitt, Understanding Terrorism In America: From The Klan to Al Qaeda, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, 192 pp., ISBN 0415277663 (paperback) 14.99

Christopher Sandars, America's Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 354 pp., ISBN 0198296878 (hardback) 45.00

Rodney Broome, Amerike: The Briton Who Gave America Its Name, Stroud: Sutton, 2002, 238 pp., ISBN 075092909X (hardback) 14.99