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- Volume 33, Issue 3, 2014
European Journal of American Culture - Volume 33, Issue 3, 2014
Volume 33, Issue 3, 2014
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From the virgin land to the transnational identities of the twenty-first century: Exceptionalist rhetoric in the field of American studies
More LessAbstractIn the age of globalization, American Exceptionalism remains a ubiquitous subject of debate within academic circles as well as society in general. The intention of this article is to reveal the coherent narrative that accompanies the notion of exceptionalism that stretches from the ‘city upon a hill’ in the seventeenth century to the War on Terror in the early 2000s.
Puritans like John Winthrop, historians like Alexis de Tocqueville and presidents like Woodrow Wilson embraced exceptionalism as a concept, but its most important base of support, other than political leaders and scholars, was America’s working class. The premise of this article is to explore the nature of this very concept, whether we call it an ideology, myth or God-given truth and why it has become such an imperative part of the political, cultural and intellectual life of the United States.
By looking at the work that has been administered in the field of American studies over the last decades, dating back to the mid-twentieth century, I wish to expose the malleability of exceptionalism, a quality that not only allows it to reject any definition but also enables it to turn into a metaconcept that will never lose its appeal, according to Donald E. Pease. I argue that the manifold qualities of this metaconcept, whether we call it a political doctrine or a national fantasy, enable the citizens of the United States to define themselves within the framework of a larger American identity.
I intend to highlight the problems around the United States’ self-proclaimed status as an exceptional nation in a postnational world defined by diasporic and transnational affiliations. By doing so, I will put emphasis on the punitive ideology of exclusion and demonization that surrounds the notion of American Exceptionalism.
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‘And when everyone is super […] no one will be’: The limits of American Exceptionalism in The Incredibles
More LessAbstractThe Incredibles (Bird, 2004) envisions a society in which superheroes are prohibited from using their superhuman abilities. The struggle for recognition of this ‘marginalized’ group has been deemed a simplistic representation of ‘an Ayn Randian or scientologist notion of the special people who must resist social pressures to suppress their superpowers in order to fit in with the drab masses’ (Halberstam 2011: 47).
This fleeting assessment of the Pixar film captures the exceptionalist logic underlying its narrative: A ‘tyranny of the majority’ denies individuals their due recognition, and these individuals find strength and courage by forming a ‘voluntary association’. The Incredibles, thus, mirrors the logic of American Exceptionalism as portrayed by Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America (1835). My article will explore these core themes of exceptionalism and critically assess their intersection with discourses of whiteness and gender in The Incredibles. My article will, furthermore, unearth the establishment of a neo-liberal social order as a fundamental element of the film narrative to examine the links between neo-liberalism, exceptionalism and identity politics. As I will demonstrate, the prevalence of the neo-liberal ideology in The Incredibles eventually dismantles the hegemonic logic of American Exceptionalism.
My article, therefore, explores the lasting significance of American Exceptionalism within contemporary film and demonstrates its conflicting, unstable relations to neo-liberalism. In this sense, The Incredibles offers a rarely acknowledged example of the contradictory nature of the dominant ideologies of American Exceptionalism and neo-liberalism to suggest novel insights into their critique.
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The semiotics of power: Corrupting sign systems in contemporary American Exceptionalism and in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
By Tanguy HarmaAbstractThis article aims to decipher the interplay on the semiotic notions of signifier, signified and referent coined by semiotician Saussure in Donald E. Pease’s 2009 work New American Exceptionalism and in two late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century American novels: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. The analysis of the semiotic arrangement of the selected works will allow a critical insight into the constitution of specific sign systems in contemporary American Exceptionalism that will shed light onto the distortion and corruption of the foundational values of the American nation, as exemplified in the selected novels
In this regard, Ellis and DeLillo will be envisaged as two fiction writers who, through their engagement with postmodern aesthetics, incorporate this semiotic interplay at the level of their own sign systems. Through their various representations of a reality that is flattened out by the two-dimensional culture of the image, I will show how this paradigm is integrated into the texts, as each writer, in his own fashion, underlines the conditions for semiotic manipulation in contemporary culture.
In more detail, I will analyse how a trope of surface reality (Baudrillard) is characterized in these works through a movement that starts with a disconnection between signifier and signified and that proceeds with the symbolic discarding of the sign’s referent (Ellis), resulting in the capacity to corrupt reality through language itself. Ultimately, I will decipher how DeLillo’s Cosmopolis epitomizes the dematerialization and dissolution of referents in cyber-capitalism through the self-referentiality of the sign that the novel purports.
As the selected texts of Ellis and DeLillo integrate and satirize this hiatus, they present their readers with a critique of the deviation of national culture and identity from the foundational spirit of the American project and the promises of American Exceptionalism, ultimately offering an invitation to rethink contemporary American culture from a postmodern perspective.
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Lunar Park: From ashes to ashes
By Monika LoewyAbstractLunar Park opens with a sentence repeated from a previous novel: he states, ‘You do an awfully good impression of yourself’, thus setting the satirical and deceptive tone of the text. In this article, I will focus on two themes implicit in this sentence: that Lunar Park tracks Bret Easton Ellis’s search for his true identity and past and that this is impossible. I suggest that it is this inability to know an author, text or oneself within the context of a nation founded upon illusory ideals and their underlying fragmentation on which this book is centred.
Ellis’s semi-autobiography playfully describes America’s cultural and physical landscape as being ruptured and repressed, emphasizing the way this context has structured his own life. The novel chronicles the author’s fame and family and takes place in a suburban town outside New York City, which is under the threat of terrorist acts in a post-9/11 America. Here, the fictional character Patrick Bateman from Ellis’s previous novel American Psycho begins to haunt Ellis’s home. Since American Psycho is renowned for its critique of the American dream, in Lunar Park, Bateman can be seen as allegorizing a romanticized identity that disavows imperialism, a notion central to American Exceptionalism. It is this, I suggest, that haunts Ellis throughout the Lunar Park.
In this article, I will discuss how Lunar Park embodies Ellis’s movement towards avowal, towards recognizing those fantasies that have structured Americans’ reactions to trauma, specifically 9/11. By fabricating the past, Ellis gestures towards the impossibility of ever remembering it, as based upon his identity and book having been formed through a meaningless world where ‘publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour’ (Ellis 2005: 9). In so doing, I suggest that the text also invites the reader to ‘enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction’ (Baudrillard 2010: 29) in order to break down their own illusions. Lunar Park thus materializes the falling monument it represents, exposing post-9/11 America as catastrophic while revealing its own erasure. This article will trace Ellis’s frustrated search to find and illuminate his identity as an American and author in an idea of the New World.
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Exceptionalist discourse and the colonization of sublime spaces: Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow
More LessAbstractThis article will examine the relationship between the visual language of the sublime, as defined by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, and the rhetoric of American Exceptionalism. In much early discourse, the American continent is represented through the iconography of the sublime: a land of breathtaking sunsets, cascading waterfalls, towering mountains and vast verdant forests. Through such powerful and sublime scenes, the idea of the new world as ‘exceptional’ is evoked. Yet a countermovement to this is that, even as the land is celebrated, it is also being colonized – divided up and plundered for its resources.
The nineteenth-century landscape painter Thomas Cole constructed a number of traditionally ‘sublime’ canvases of stunning natural scenes and has been widely celebrated as one of America’s greatest painters of sublime nature. Yet, Cole was also vehemently opposed to ‘utilitarianism’ and expansion and railed against the damage done to the environment as American civilization expanded westward and consumed the frontier. Cole thus combined sublime landscape with a critique of expansionism by subtly subverting the human elements of his canvases, none more so than in his 1836 painting The Oxbow.
In much twentieth and twenty-first-century cinema, the frontier has been transposed to outer space and the farthest reaches of the galaxy. The forces of the marketplace and the capitalist drive to expand are still clearly evident in this extraterrestrial expansionism. Yet, the iconography of the romantic sublime is still employed by film-makers in order to convey the beauty and otherness of celestial scenes.
My article explores the link between the Cole’s representations of the American continent and two recent science fiction movies, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. I argue that the visual language of the sublime is employed not merely as a celebration of landscape but also as a means to critique and question exceptionalist discourse.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 43 (2024)
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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)