European Journal of American Culture - Volume 43, Issue 1, 2024

The bodies of William Faulkner’s characters are porous; as the novels unravel, bodies seem to be deflating, in an effusion of blood, vomit, sweat, spit, milk and tears. ‘These oozings and flowings and outpourings’, to use André Bleikasten’s expression, highlight the malleability, or maybe the impossibility, of fixed bodies and fixed forms in Faulkner’s novels. Even more so, these horrific discharges of fluids articulate the interdependence of language and bodies. The debasing and involuntary outpourings of fluids dramatize the uncontrollable and irresistible urge, in Faulkner’s fiction, to simply say. Just like the recurring instances of vomiting, Faulknerian characters lose themselves in ‘word vomits’, where language does not seem to depend on human agency to get the words out. It appears that Faulkner’s writing greatly relies on the process of emptying: among his favourite words, ‘outrage’ or ‘abject’ both etymologically represent the desire to find a way out, to come out, to ex-press. Using As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932), two novels which address this topic through the use of a similar imagery, this article analyses the way bodily fluids and language interact in Faulkner’s fiction, in a dialectics of purity and impurity, debasement and elevation.

In the late nineteenth century, baseball became enshrined as America’s national sport. Across American culture, the game became imbued with a series of values and characteristics that seemed redolent of life in the Gilded Age and beyond. This article explores the ways in which this process played out in the pages of popular magazines directed at the children of the nation’s elite. These neglected resources provide us with an extraordinary lens through which to chart both the changing place of the national game within the lives of American children and the changing meaning of baseball within the life of the nation. In poems, stories, illustrations, editorials and even reader’s letters, children were newly acculturated into the sporting life in ways that had profound implications for wider questions of childhood, gender, race, class and national identity.

This article examines the phenomenon of the commercialization of the American Dream through the example of consumerism around the realm of the suburban home, a key element of this concept in the United States, as well as the role of reality television in creating and encouraging inflated standards of consumption. It uses the example of the American television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. The article outlines the history and role of the American Dream, particularly the origins of the term itself, coined by Truslow Adams. The behaviour that Thorsten Veblen calls conspicuous consumption, which is characterized by a tendency to display material status in order to gain social respectability and prestige, is identified. The suburban house as a key element of the American Dream is analysed through the example of the makeovers presented in the programme. Their significant scale and unrealistic nature are often at odds with the real financial capabilities of the participants and are the cause of bankruptcies and financial problems. As the programme belongs to a genre that is supposed to reflect reality, in the light of the cultivation theory, created by George Gerbner, it influences viewers whose world-view is shaped by it and whose role models are imitated. Thus, the presented standards of a comfortable home in line with the American Dream can influence viewers’ consumption behaviour by showing them that the acquisition of possessions is a solution to problems, a reward for an honest life and that there are no financial consequences associated with them. The lavishness of the houses and their luxury reinforce this impression. Finally, the article seeks to answer the question to what extent and why the need of Americans to live up to the vision of living the illusive American Dream – thus creating an image of success and social status – is exaggerated and its standards are taken to an ‘extreme’.

Review of: Gendered Defenders: Marvel’s Heroines in Transmedia Spaces, Bryan J. Carr and Meta G. Carstarphein (eds) (2022)

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 214 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-81421-527-2, h/bk, $119.95