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Cartographies Of Empire - The Road Novel And American Hegemony

by Myka Tucker-Abramson

~~30,46€~~ 27,41€ 10% OFF

 The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic youth and American past that never existed. Yet, new road novels appear every year, tackling unexpected questions and spanning new geographies, from Mexico, Brazil, Bulgaria, Palestine, Ukraine, and former-Yugoslavia. Why did the road novel emerge and why does it persist? What does it do and why has it traveled so widely?Myka Tucker-Abramson draws from an archive of more than 140 global road novels from over twenty countries, challenging dominant conceptions of the road novel as primarily concerned with American experiences and subjectivities. Grounding her analysis in materialist theories of genre, world-ecology and commodity frontier frameworks, and post-45 American literary studies, Tucker-Abramson persuasively argues that the road novel is a genre specific to, coterminous with, and revealing of US hegemony''s global trajectory. Shifting our focus from Americanness to the fraught geopolitics of US Empire, from the car to the built environment through which it moves, and from passengers to those left behind, Tucker-Abramson remaps the road novel, elucidating the genre''s unique ability both to reveal the violent and vertiginous processes of capitalist modernization and to obfuscate these harsh truths through seductive narratives of individual success and failure.
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Coalition Literature - Aesthetics On The Move In Midcentury Us Multiethnic Writing

by Francisco E. Robles

~~34,44€~~ 31,00€ 10% OFF

 In a series of incisive readings, Francisco E. Robles provides a literary history of midcentury US multiethnic literature, tracing the shift from coalitional aesthetics to multiculturalism by focusing on how migrancy and labor politics shape literary innovation. Along the way, Robles shows how writers kept the Popular Front''s legacy of coalitional aesthetics alive through literary practices of what he calls speaking with, whereby authors undo their authority as scribes, audiences become participatory interpreters, and texts emerge as places of communal and collaborative work.Beginning with significant, unexpected connections between Zora Neale Hurston and Muriel Rukeyser, and delving deeply into the work of Sanora Babb, Woody Guthrie, Gwendolyn Brooks, poets of the Memphis Sanitation Strike, Carlos Bulosan, Tomás Rivera, and authors included in This Bridge Called My Back, Robles examines texts whose range of experimental strategies deliberately engage figurations of movement, migration, and coalition. The experimentation these works display emerges from the particular methods of speaking with that they contain, whether it''s overcoming exclusion by finding new ways of representing migrants through word and sound, or in the astonishing ways these authors conceive of migrancy as neither static nor statistical but as a modality that necessitates writerly innovation. The result is a genealogy of coalitional aesthetics as a significantly important branch of American midcentury multiethnic writing that sustained and indeed extended the Popular Front and its legacies.
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New Sincerity - American Fiction In The Neoliberal Age

by Adam Kelly

~~34,44€~~ 31,00€ 10% OFF

 The years 1989â€"2008 were an era of neoliberal hegemony in US politics, economy, and culture. Post*45 scholar Adam Kelly argues that American novelists who began their careers during these years responded to the times by developing in their fiction an aesthetics of sincerity.
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Arts Of Logistics - Artistic Production In Supply Chain Capitalism

by Michael Shane Boyle

~~31,79€~~ 28,61€ 10% OFF

 We live in a world where nothing is untouched by supply chains—art included. In this major contribution to the study of contemporary culture and supply chains, Michael Shane Boyle has assembled a global inventory of aesthetics since the 1950s that reveals logistics to be a pervasive means of artistic production. The Arts of Logistics provides a new map of supply chain capitalism, scrutinizing how artists retool technologies designed for circulating commodities. What emerges is a magisterial account of the logistics revolution that foregrounds the role played by art in the long downturn of global capitalism. With chapters on art produced from technologies including ships, barrels, containers, and drones, Boyle narrates the long history of art''s connection to logistics, beginning in the transatlantic slave trade and continuing today in Silicon Valley''s dreams of automation. The global reach of the artists considered reflects the geographies of supply chain capitalism itself. In taking stock of how performance, sculpture, and popular culture are entangled in trade and racialized labor regimes, Boyle profiles influential work by artists such as Christo and Allan Kaprow alongside that of contemporary figures including Cai Guo-Qiang and Selina Thompson. This incisive study demonstrates that art and logistics are linked by the infrastructures and violence that keep supply chains moving.
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New Sincerity - American Fiction In The Neoliberal Age

by Adam Kelly

~~37,84€~~ 34,06€ 10% OFF

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 The years 1989â€"2008 were an era of neoliberal hegemony in US politics, economy, and culture. Post*45 scholar Adam Kelly argues that American novelists who began their careers during these years responded to the times by developing in their fiction an aesthetics of sincerity.
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Who Wrote This? - How Ai And The Lure Of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing

by Naomi S. Baron

35,14€ + 10% CARD

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 Funny, informed, and conversational, Who Wrote This? urges us as individuals and as communities to make conscious choices about the extent to which we collaborate with AI. The technology is here to stay. Baron shows us how to work with AI and how to spot where it risks diminishing the valuable cognitive and social benefits of being literate.
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Writing Our Extinction - Anthropocene Fiction And Vertical Science

by Patrick Whitmarsh

26,49€ + 10% CARD

 In this new work, Patrick Whitmarsh analyzes postwar narrative fictions that describe, depict, or express the earth from above (the aerial) and below (the subterranean), revealing the ways that literature has engaged this history of vertical science and linked it to increasing environmental precarity, up to and including the extinction of humankind.
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American Graphic - Disgust And Data In Contemporary Literature

by Rebecca B. Clark

39,75€ + 10% CARD

 What do we really mean when we call something "graphic"? In American Graphic, Rebecca Clark examines the "graphic" as a term tellingly at odds with itself. On the one hand, it seems to evoke the grotesque; on the other hand, it promises the geometrically streamlined in the form of graphs, diagrams, and user interfaces. Clark''s innovation is to ask what happens when the same moment in a work of literature is graphic in both ways at once. Her answer suggests the graphic turn in contemporary literature is intimately implicated in the fraught dynamics of identification. As Clark reveals, this double graphic indexes the unseemliness of a lust—in our current culture of information—for cool epistemological mastery over the bodies of others.Clark analyzes the contemporary graphic along three specific axes: the ethnographic, the pornographic, and the infographic. In each chapter, Clark''s explication of the double graphic reads a canonical author against literary, visual and/or performance works by Black and/or female creators. Pairing works by Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon with pieces by Mat Johnson, Kara Walker, Fran Ross, Narcissister, and Teju Cole, Clark tests the effects and affects of the double graphic across racialized and gendered axes of differences. American Graphic forces us to face how closely and uncomfortably yoked together disgust and data have become in our increasingly graph-ick world.
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Genres Of Privacy In Postwar America

by Palmer Rampell

34,44€ + 10% CARD

 With this incisive work, Palmer Rampell reveals the surprising role genre fiction played in redefining the category of the private person in the postwar period. Especially after the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to privacy in 1965, legal scholars, judges, and the public scrambled to understand the scope of that right. Before and after the Court''s ruling, authors of genre fiction and film reformulated their aliens, androids, and monsters to engage in debates about personal privacy as it pertained to issues like abortion, police surveillance, and euthanasia. Triangulating novels and films with original archival discoveries and historical and legal research, Rampell provides new readings of Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy B. Hughes, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Chester Himes, Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, and others. The book pairs the right of privacy for heterosexual sex with queer and proto-feminist crime fiction; racialized police surveillance at midcentury with Black crime fiction; Roe v. Wade (1973) with 1960s and 1970s science fiction; the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (1974) with horror; and the right to die with westerns. While we are accustomed to defenses of fiction for its capacity to represent fully rendered private life, Rampell suggests that we might value a certain strand of genre fiction for its capacity to theorize the meaning of the protean concept of privacy.
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The Work Of Art In The Age Of Deindustrialization

by Jasper Bernes

35,14€ + 10% CARD

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 A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last 50 years in light of the massive changes in people's working lives.
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Crisis Style - The Aesthetics Of Repair

by Michael Dango

46,38€ + 10% CARD

 In this expansive and provocative new work, Michael Dango theorizes how aesthetic style manages crisis—and why taking crisis seriously means taking aesthetics seriously. Detoxing, filtering, bingeing, and ghosting: these are four actions that have come to define how people deal with the stress of living in a world that seems in permanent crisis. As Dango argues, they can also be used to describe contemporary art and literature. Employing what he calls "promiscuous archives," Dango traverses media and re-shuffles literary and art historical genealogies to make his case. The book discusses social media filters alongside the minimalism of Donald Judd and La Monte Young and the television shows The West Wing and True Detective. It reflects on the modernist cuisine of Ferran Adrià and the fashion design of Issey Miyake. And, it dissects writing by Barbara Browning, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Carver, Mark Danielewski, Jennifer Egan, Tao Lin, David Mitchell, Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Robison, and Zadie Smith. Unpacking how the styles of these works detox, filter, binge, or ghost their worlds, Crisis Style is at once a taxonomy of contemporary cultural production and a theorization of action in a world always in need of repair. Ultimately, Dango presents a compelling argument for why we need aesthetic theory to understand what we''re doing in our world today.
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Reading The Obscene - Transgressive Editors And The Class Politics Of Us Literature

by Jordan Carroll

46,38€ + 10% CARD

 With Reading the Obscene, Jordan Carroll reveals new insights about the editors who fought the most famous anti-censorship battles of the twentieth century. While many critics have interpreted obscenity as a form of populist protest, Reading the Obscene shows that the editors who worked to dismantle censorship often catered to elite audiences composed primarily of white men in the professional-managerial class. As Carroll argues, transgressive editors, such as H. L. Mencken at the Smart Set and the American Mercury, William Gaines and Al Feldstein at EC Comics, Hugh Hefner at Playboy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books, and Barney Rosset at Grove Press, taught their readers to approach even the most scandalizing texts with the same cold calculation and professional reserve they employed in their occupations. Along the way, these editors kicked off a middle-class sexual revolution in which white-collar professionals imagined they could control sexuality through management science. Obscenity is often presented as self-shattering and subversive, but with this provocative work Carroll calls into question some of the most sensational claims about obscenity, suggesting that when transgression becomes a sign of class distinction, we must abandon the idea that obscenity always overturns hierarchies and disrupts social order. Winner of the 2022 MLA Prize for Independent Scholars, sponsored by the Modern Language Association
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Incremental Realism - Postwar American Fiction, Happiness, And Welfare-State Liberalism

by Mary Esteve

34,44€ + 10% CARD

 The postwar US political imagination coalesced around a quintessential midcentury American trope: happiness. In Incremental Realism, Mary Esteve offers a bold, revisionist literary and cultural history of efforts undertaken by literary realists, public intellectuals, and policy activists to advance the value of public institutions and the claims of socioeconomic justice. Esteve specifically focuses on era-defining authors of realist fiction, including Philip Roth, Gwendolyn Brooks, Patricia Highsmith, Paula Fox, Peter Taylor, and Mary McCarthy, who mobilized the trope of happiness to reinforce the crucial value of public institutions, such as the public library, and the importance of pursuing socioeconomic justice, as envisioned by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and welfare-state liberals. In addition to embracing specific symbols of happiness, these writers also developed narrative modes—what Esteve calls "incremental realism"—that made justifiable the claims of disadvantaged Americans on the nation-state and promoted a small-canvas aesthetics of moderation. With this powerful demonstration of the way postwar literary fiction linked the era''s familiar trope of happiness to political arguments about socioeconomic fairness and individual flourishing, Esteve enlarges our sense of the postwar liberal imagination and its attentiveness to better, possible worlds.
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Novel And The New Ethics

by Dorothy J. Hale

34,44€ + 10% CARD

 For a generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists, the question "Why write?" has been answered with a renewed will to believe in the ethical value of literature. Dissatisfied with postmodernist parody and pastiche, a broad array of novelist-critics—including J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Franzen—champion the novel as the literary genre most qualified to illuminate individual ethical action and decision-making within complex and diverse social worlds. Key to this contemporary vision of the novel''s ethical power is the task of knowing and being responsible to people different from oneself, and so thoroughly have contemporary novelists devoted themselves to the ethics of otherness, that this ethics frequently sets the terms for plot, characterization, and theme. In The Novel and the New Ethics, literary critic Dorothy J. Hale investigates how the contemporary emphasis on literature''s social relevance sparks a new ethical description of the novel''s social value that is in fact rooted in the modernist notion of narrative form. This "new" ethics of the contemporary moment has its origin in the "new" idea of novelistic form that Henry James inaugurated and which was consolidated through the modernist narrative experiments and was developed over the course of the twentieth century. In Hale''s reading, the art of the novel becomes defined with increasing explicitness as an aesthetics of alterity made visible as a formalist ethics. In fact, it is this commitment to otherness as a narrative act which has conferred on the genre an artistic intensity and richness that extends to the novel''s every word.
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Unesco And The Fate Of The Literary

by Sarah Brouillette

39,75€ + 10% CARD

 A case study of one of the most important global institutions of cultural policy formation, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary demonstrates the relationship between such policymaking and transformations in the economy. Focusing on UNESCO''s use of books, Sarah Brouillette identifies three phases in the agency''s history and explores the literary and cultural programming of each. In the immediate postwar period, healthy economies made possible the funding of an infrastructure in support of a liberal cosmopolitanism and the spread of capitalist democracy. In the decolonizing 1960s and ''70s, illiteracy and lack of access to literature were lamented as a "book hunger" in the developing world, and reading was touted as a universal humanizing value to argue for a more balanced communications industry and copyright regime. Most recently, literature has become instrumental in city and nation branding that drive tourism and the heritage industry. Today, the agency largely treats high literature as a commercially self-sustaining product for wealthy aging publics, and fundamental policy reform to address the uneven relations that characterize global intellectual property creation is off the table. UNESCO''s literary programming is in this way highly suggestive. A trajectory that might appear to be one of triumphant success—literary tourism and festival programming can be quite lucrative for some people—is also, under a different light, a story of decline.
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Vicious Circuits - Korea’S Imf Cinema And The End Of The American Century

by Joseph Jonghyun Jeon

46,38€ + 10% CARD

 Examining what it terms "Korea's IMF Cinema," the decade of film-making that following that country's worst-ever economic crisis, this book thinks through the transformations of global political economy attending the end of the American century.
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Narrowcast - Poetry And Audio Research

by Lytle Shaw

46,38€ + 10% CARD

 Through case studies of how mid-century American poetry used recording technologies to contest models of time being put forward by dominant media and the State, this book explores how New Left poets mobilized recording as a new form of sonic field research even while they were being subject to tape-based surveillance by the CIA and the FBI.
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Maximum Feasible Participation - American Literature And The War On Poverty

by Stephen Schryer

99,38€ + 10% CARD

 This book traces the literary legacy of the War on Poverty, showing how American writers developed an anti-formalist art that dovetailed with President Lyndon Johnson's call for more client involvement in Great Society welfare programs.
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Remainders - American Poetry At Nature''S End

by Margaret Ronda

86,13€ + 10% CARD

 This book presents a genealogy of postwar American poetry that considers new dimensions of ecological crisis in the era now termed the Great Acceleration.
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Work Of Art In The Age Of Deindustrialization

by Jasper Bernes

39,75€ + 10% CARD

 A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last 50 years in light of the massive changes in people's working lives.
ENGLISH

Studios After The Studios - Neoclassical Hollywood (1970-2010)

by J. D. Connor

79,50€ + 10% CARD

 Refuting the conventional scholarly view that Hollywood studios are basically interchangeable, this history of the contemporary American movie industry argues that we can see the individual studios' fingerprints on even the smallest aspects of their films.
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Projections - Comics And The History Of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling

by Jared Gardner

13,65€ + 10% CARD

 A history of the modern sequential comic form from the late nineteenth century through today, focusing on the unique ways in which it tells stories and interacts with readers.
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Making Literature Now

by Amy Hungerford

33,13€ + 10% CARD

 Through fascinating case studies of people working in publishing both large and small-scale, traditional and digital, this book tells the story of how new literary work emerges and finds readers in our era of too many books.
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Hip Figures - A Literary History Of The Democratic Party

by Michael Szalay

46,38€ + 10% CARD

 A definitive account of how and why novels preoccupied with "hip" changed the course of the Democratic Party after the Second World War.
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