Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS - E-Journal)
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"The Tiger\u27s Eyes Are Like My Own": Depictions of Japaneseness in Contemporary American Movies
No full textIn our world today, different nations and cultures are interconnected via media technologies like films, television and the Internet. In this context, Sociologist Arjun Appadurai discussed the influence of the media in our global present and suggested a new role for the imagination. Japanese electronic entertainment products and anime cartoons are well known in the U.S. today and Hollywood is shifting away from representing outdated, negative stereotypes in more recent movies like Lost in Translation (2003) and The Last Samurai (2003)
Depicting ‘Natural’ Disasters in U.S.-American History and Culture: San Francisco’s City Hall as an Icon of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire
No full textThe article examines the role that visual representations of San Francisco’s first City Hall played in the aftermath of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. Not only did they offer a projection screen for the collective trauma but they also provided a starting point for recollection and re-enactment. With the City Hall vicinity as an example, it is further shown that what was perceived at the time as nature’s obliteration of the metropolis was rather a man-made disaster. 
“A Lynching in Blackface”: The Representation of History and Fantasies of Black Male Violence in John E. Wideman’s The Lynchers
No full textJohn Edgar Wideman’s novel The Lynchers “(1973) dramatizes African American plans to lynch a white policeman and thus promote the constitution of a black nation. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s intertextual conception of parody as elaborated in A Theory of Parody “(1985), this article examines the inversion of the lynching narrative at the core of The Lynchers“ as a “repetition with a critical difference“ (32). It argues that the novel’s adoption of parody serves three major functions: First, it exposes the specific workings of lynching. Second, it debunks central ingredients of the lynching mythology and third, it expresses a critical position towards the premises and implications of gendered black nationalism. 
The Purloined Chamber: A Lacanian Reading of Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark
No full textThis article focuses on the short chapters in Richard Powers’s novel Plowing the Dark“ that describe obscure rooms which cannot easily be related to the novel’s action. Comparing these rooms to the letter in Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter,“ I propose a Lacanian interpretation of these rooms that will illuminate their character and function
A Spiritual Homecoming: Ireland in Contemporary Movies about Irish Americans
No full textThe article discusses Irish-Americans’ journeys to Ireland in contemporary movies. In the movies Ireland literally enables: the journey affords couples, enlightens characters, and brings families together. Although the narratives at times self-consciously address stereotypes and clichés, Ireland’s beautiful scenery and charming people serve as a retreat from the American city and its postmodern vexations. Conflicts within contemporary US-American society are thus resolved by appropriating Irishness and ethnicity. By recurring to stereotypes about Irishness, the movies present the homeland as an alternative and corrective to the daily strife of modern life in the US. The protagonists’ identity crises are solved through contact with the Irish community or research into family history; and women find their role by embracing Irish traditionalism and finding an Irish husband. The movies thus illustrate the interdependence of discourses on gender, national identity, and ethnicity
Blank Gaze and Vacant Skull—Cinema & Brain(s) & (Dis-)Affection in Recent Mindful and Mind-Related US Cinema
Get PDFScreens and brains are peculiar processual frames and/or framing devices. This essay which is part of a larger project intends to demonstrate the value of neurocinematic frames for both cultural studies and scientific considerations. The fusion of theories of cinema and neuroscience needs a media theory that is informed by the affective turn in the humanities. The delicacy of neurocinematic frames becomes visible once they get torn and ruined by diverse depressed, entropic, and disaffected minds as trains of thought that seem to disperse and combust. These phenomena give the project traction and focus. A certain kind of film theory might challenge traditional scholarly concepts of the mind but leads towards a fertile enunciation of the volatile and fragile (en-)trails of thought itself.It is a film theory that includes autopoietic psychological systems in the sense of Humberto Maturana and others which was formulated first and foremost by Gilles Deleuze in his two monographs on movement-images and time-images (2006, 2009)
Humor and Ambivalence in the Novels of Toni Morrison
Get PDFRarely can one find pure comedy in Toni Morrison’s novels, as humor is usually either part of a double discourse in which traumatic experiences are “confronted“ through a game of perspective, or a means of emphasizing a tragically flavored situation through situating it in a context open to ambivalence. If personal or collective tragedy cannot be eliminated, at least it can be counteracted, just as power relations can be influenced through humor. Apart from being a way of diminishing the tension of trauma or oppression, humor implies freedom of thought and interpretation even when dominant ideologies and discourses aim at enforcing specific institutionalized representations and definitions of self and other. At the same time, in Toni Morrison’s novels “the comic twist“ is represented as a way of displacement and a form of empowerment or healing for African Americans, even when it has to do with self-deprecation or self-irony, as pain becomes laughter and “a litany of humiliation, outrage and anger turned sickle-like back to themselves as humor“ (Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon“)
The BLUR (Blues Lyrics Collected at the University of Regensburg) Corpus: Blues Lyricism and the African American Literary Tradition
No full textThe BLUR corpus, a computerized collection of more than 8,000 transcripts of pre-World War II blues recordings, is a powerful research tool which facilitates investigations into various aspects of the blues. This paper illustrates how an analysis of BLUR might deepen our insights into structural aspects of blues poetry and and its contribution to the African American literary tradition