European Journal of American Culture - Volume 32, Issue 3, 2013

This article traces an unlikely and gruesome subject: how and why images of people getting shot in the head have become so pervasive in contemporary US fiction and film. Adopting a historical-genealogical approach, the analysis explores how the so-called headshot image emerged from two socio-cultural trends. First, the headshot referenced key historical traumas from the 1960s that involved the deaths of Ernest Hemingway, J. F. Kennedy and Nguyễn Văn Lém. Second, it drew upon strong anxieties over the new brain death diagnosis that was established by medical authorities in the late 1960s. The analysis then traces how this image was subsequently elaborated in books such as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969) and Lawrence Sanders’ The First Deadly Sin (1973), as well as films such as Ted Post’s Magnum Force (1973) and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978). Finally, the article demonstrates key uses of the headshot in the recent novels of Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy. In all this, the headshot points to a much deeper undercurrent of narcissism and fragmentation that characterizes post-1960s culture in the United States.

David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) raises significant questions concerning small-town social relations in the United States, the corrupting powers of industrial urbanism and the notion of propinquity. It is a vivid rejoinder to the idealization of the small town and to comfortable notions of community in general. Through a close reading of the spatial strategies employed in Blue Velvet, this article maps Lynch’s conception of the neighbour and the neighbourhood. The analysis encompasses the political rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin, the planning ideas of New Urbanism and critiques of the neighbour articulated by Freud and Žižek, as well as placing Blue Velvet in the context of Lynch’s other work.

Prescription drugs play an increasingly significant part in Americans’ lives. Therefore, undermining the process that safeguards the integrity of that drug armamentarium is particularly scandalous. This article critically considers three novels, The Third Patient, The Delta Factor and Strong Medicine, and attempts to locate them in a broader debate about the relationship between culture and the state. My analysis explores the development and implementation of a regulatory reform philosophy in the United States after 1974 and highlights the demonization of big government and specifically government bureaucrats like FDA officials. At the same time, the novels offer a specific critique of large bureaucracies, even as they acknowledge that such enormous entities provide opportunities for particular types of conspiracy narratives.

This article explores long-standing American Indian opposition to Columbus Day in Denver. In 2007, Glenn Morris, a leading activist from the American Indian Movement of Colorado, stated that the rejection of the racist philosophy behind Columbus Day ‘may be the most important issue facing Indian country today’. Activism aimed at Columbus Day and the parades is a struggle over identity and historical memory, and Denver forms a distinctive, complex and emotive stage. The ideological nature of American Indian opposition to the holiday is examined and discussed as a blend of patriotic counter-narrative and nationalistic counter-memory. The opposition aims to highlight the historical actions of Columbus, but this is ultimately less important than confronting the way in which a conservative, individualistic myth of Columbus infuses itself into American society and psyche; the crux of activism revolves around the legacy of Columbus and the wider issues of decolonization that this raises.

Despite exciting occasional interest from critics of modernist fiction, autobiography and expatriate publishing, the writer-editor Robert McAlmon has remained on the margins of American modernist studies. Paradoxically, however, his fine press publishing house Contact Editions, in partnership with William Bird’s Three Mountains Press, played a central role in negotiating and problematizing mechanisms of canon formation at the onset of the late modernist cultural turn. The hallmarks of late modernism are revealed in prototypical form in selected titles they published – books which deliberately distorted the features of ‘major’ contemporaneous works to critique the failures and exclusions of high modernism. This essay examines the ‘American background’ of such responses through the lens of McAlmon’s editorial and literary career. Taking his contributions to American little magazines of the early 1920s as its point of departure, the essay explores how his publishing partnerships and intellectual transactions shaped his poetics of imitation, ephemera, and hybridity (emphases which modernists often connected to America as a literary subject). To this end, it also explores deluxe editions by William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, and concludes with readings of McAlmon’s Portrait of a Generation (1926a) and North America: Continent of Conjecture (1929a). Together, these works gave a physical shape to and archly satirical accounts of the themes and materials that accumulated in the wake of high modernism.

Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry, Tiffany M. Gill (2010) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ix, 192 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0252076961 (pbk), $25.00