Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS - E-Journal)
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Dropouts on the Frontier: T.C. Boyle’s Drop City
Get PDFThis essay will explore the depiction of the hippie movement in the novel Drop City“ by T.C. Boyle. Drawing on the theoretical background of the 1960s counterculture formulated by Stuart Hall, I will trace how the novel depicts the development of the dropout community from their members’ initial desire to move outside of society to a movement back towards the very system that was rejected beforehand by reading the counterculture against the paradigm of the frontier
New Mexico’s Faustian Bargain with Science: Balancing Pride, Greed and Fear
Get PDFThis article is an account of the emotional heritage of the scientific revolution which dramatically transformed the state of New Mexico into a nuclear Eldorado. The local populations accepted what turned out to be a Faustian bargain in which they sacrificed more or less knowingly their land, traditions and environment for the economic benefits of a new industry based on the offspring of the world\u27s first atomic laboratory in Los Alamos
Previously on the Quality Debate: Serialization and the Continued Practice of Cultural Hierarchization
Get PDFThis essay examines and compares the quality debates surrounding serialized narratives in nineteenth-century periodicals and in contemporary television. It explores the processes of cultural hierarchization, the media, and the spaces of reception, both aspects that form the basis of the quality debate
Gothic Remembering in Stephen King\u27s "It Grows On You"
Get PDFThis essay introduces the notion of gothic remembering as a means to conceptualize hauntings in a small-town setting. It emphasizes the breakdown of a normative construction of communal past by foregrounding the focus of remembering on abject images and semiotic processes of signification that undermine communal strategies of closure in remembering, thus leading to gothic hauntings
The Power of "AH, E/B, Very OOC": Agency in Fanfiction Jargon
Get PDFFannish jargon is extensively used in fanfiction writing, with its terminology pervading the fans’ discourse and stories so as to obstruct comprehension for non-fans. My essay discusses the functions of fanspeak in community-building and in fans’ claim to status as experts, focusing on the agency fanauthors thus create and demonstrate to the original authors of the meta-text
“We don’t want life to look difficult, do we?”: Representations of the Fifties and Self-Reflexive Nostalgia in Mad Men
Get PDFThis article investigates how the TV series Mad Men“ portrays the Fifties through the lens of self-reflexive nostalgia. Focusing on a close reading of its first season, I look at how Mad Men“’s self-awareness towards the function of images and advertising in the creation of the Fifties as a cultural construct is often complicated by its nostalgic and conservative politics
The Welfare Mother and the Fat Poor: Stereotypical Images and the Success Narrative in Sapphire\u27s Push
Get PDFThis article explores how Sapphire\u27s novel Push “(1996) operates and complicates stereotypical images about the poor—Welfare Mother and Fat Poor—for simultaneously propagating and criticizing the success narrative it employs. The article introduces the image of the Fat Poor, discusses Push“ as a success narrative, and analyzes the novel\u27s use of the image of the Fat Poor limiting this narrative
"Lose Yourself": Narrative Instability and Unstable Identities in Black Swan
Get PDFThis article discusses narrative instability as a significant dynamic in recent American cinema and focuses on an investigation of the film Black Swan“ as such a narratively unstable text. After an introduction to narrative instability and its connection to a (post-)postmodern cultural instability in general, I analyze Black Swan“ as a narratively unstable text that dramatizes previous unstable films’ concerns about identity and reality
Present Women/Absent Men in Siri Hustvedt’s The Summer without Men (2011)
Get PDFThis article analyzes how Siri Hustvedt’s protagonist Mia Fredricksen in the novel The Summer without Men “(2011) falls ill from the absence of her husband and men in general and how the presence of women helps her to cope with her illness. Mia’s illness is seen as a postmodern crisis that must be dealt with by means of narrative expression