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- Volume 28, Issue 1, 2009
European Journal of American Culture - Volume 28, Issue 1, 2009
Volume 28, Issue 1, 2009
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Look past the violence: automotive destruction in American movies
By Paul NewlandThis article offers a study of the phenomenon of automotive destruction in American movies. It offers a critical reading of the spectacular pile-up sequence in The Blues Brothers 2000 (John Landis, 1998) which takes account of the development of screen car crashes from their earliest days in the silent Keystone, Laurel and Hardy shorts and Harold Lloyd features, through to their ubiquitous presence in contemporary Hollywood movies. Screen car crashes testify to both the iconic status of the automobile and the centrality of violence to American culture. This article suggests that the staged accident and the onscreen destruction of the car (the American technological consumer object ne plus ultra) can be read as a working through of concerns and fears regarding the dialectical experience of modernity technological and scientific progress, sexuality, death and the ephemeral nature of the human body, and the endurance of a US-style capitalist system built on waste.
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From back number aesthetics to new expression: James Gibbons Huneker's New Cosmopolis
By John FaggJames Gibbons Huneker was an influential cultural critic in the decades around 1900. His idiosyncratic style has lead to his work being somewhat overlooked. This article relates Huneker's collection of New York travel sketches, New Cosmopolis (1915), to other examples of literary impressionism, and specifically to the work of J.K. Huysmans, Stephen Crane and Henry James. It then argues that New Cosmopolis moves beyond the aestheticism and detached analysis of the impressionistic literary sketch towards a more subjective, engaged form of city writing. This led Huneker to an urban aesthetic and to an embrace of cosmopolitanism comparable to the ideas celebrated in Paul Rosenfeld's Port of New York (1924). Rosenfeld argues that the writers and artists he profiles, including Randolph Bourne, Alfred Stieglitz and William Carlos Williams, represent a flowering of new expression in America. Huneker's relationship to these modern, progressive figures is, in part, attributable to his tendency towards spontaneous, idiosyncratic and highly subjective statements and his recognition of the visceral sensory experiences provided by New York's tango halls, movie theatres and Coney Island roller coasters.
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An Extraordinary Achievement of the American Way: Hollywood and the Americanization of the making of the atom bomb in Fat Man & Little Boy
More LessThis article examines the Americanization of popular culture on the domestic front. It uses director Roland Joff's film Fat Man & Little Boy (UK release title: The Shadow Makers) as a case study to analyze the Americanization of the story of the creation of the atom bomb in postwar American culture. The study places the picture within its wider cultural historical context and traces the film's ideology not only back to the beginning of the nuclear age but to larger trends regarding science, technology and nationalism in the US history. Special emphasis is given to three main areas of investigation: the film's place in Hollywood's engagement with the saga of the making of the atomic bomb, its evocation of nostalgia and its omission of many international contributions, especially those by foreign-born scientists, to the Manhattan Project.
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The influence of American television programs on university students in Kuwait: a synthesis
Authors: Masoud A Abdulrahim, Ali A.J Al-Kandari and Mohammed HasanenThis study used a synthesis of media gratification and cultivation perspectives to investigate the influence of American television programs on endorsement of equal gender roles and liberal attitudes to life in Kuwait. Analysis of the response of 364 university level students indicated four areas where programs could support the development of perceptions: presentation quality, utility, trans-cultural knowledge and information about American popular culture. Of these four areas, only the perception of utility predicted the development of a liberal outlook on life, while failing to predict approval of equal gender roles. Viewers of large amounts of American television are more likely to endorse equal gender roles and a liberal outlook on life.
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A Backward Glance O'er the (Dis)United States: William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Authentic American Religion
More LessThis article begins with a brief consideration of the resurgence of religious rhetoric as currently used by George W. Bush. It discusses this alongside what Harold Bloom terms an authentic American religion in his article, Reflections in the Evening Land (December 17, 2005). Bloom looks retrospectively at Emersonian self-reliance as the authentic American religion and he urges contemporary American readers to remember this as a truly American religion. An exploration of this apparent correlation between self-reliance and an authentic American religion uncovers the somewhat unnoticed influence of William Blake's poetry on Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays. A close analysis of Emerson's early reading of Blake beside a consideration of Blake's London (1794), The Clod and the Pebble (1794) and Emerson's Self-Reliance (1841) and Society and Solitude (1870) documents the development of Emersonian self-reliance into a more assured term. This is accounted for by Emerson's growing interest and immersion in the poetry of this English poet, William Blake. The article concludes, contentiously, with the declaration that it is only through this transatlantic study of Blake's and Emerson's writing that Bloom's authentic American religion can really be understood.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 42 (2023)
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Volume 41 (2022)
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Volume 40 (2021)
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Volume 39 (2020)
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Volume 38 (2019)
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Volume 37 (2018)
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Volume 36 (2017)
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Volume 35 (2016)
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Volume 34 (2015)
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Volume 33 (2014)
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Volume 32 (2013)
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Volume 31 (2012)
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Volume 30 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 29 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 28 (2009)
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Volume 27 (2008)
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Volume 26 (2007 - 2008)
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Volume 25 (2005 - 2007)
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Volume 24 (2005)
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Volume 23 (2004)
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Volume 22 (2003)
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Volume 21 (2002)
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Volume 20 (2001 - 2002)