Landscapes of Postmodernity
Conceives of America as polymorphous and transnational
Description
In Landscapes of Postmodernity, a group of young scholars link key concepts of postmodern thought to our present everyday experience in which we change our identities on a regular basis. While many of the essays look at less conventional modes of aesthetic representation—computer games, graphic novels, telenovelas, queer and animated films—others analyze more canonical works following less conventional approaches. Either way, the cultural and literary cartographies presented in this book allow America to be conceived as polymorphous or transnational, celebrating a new American self that is aware and proud of its non-Anglo-Saxon origins.
Table of Contents
Remapping Postmodern Exchanges: Theory Avant La Lettre, a Travelogue (Michael Rozendal)
I.The Structurality of Poststructure
The Structurality of Poststructure: The Foundations of Postmodernism (Walter W. Höbling & Michael Fuchs
Apocalypse?! Now?! Heart of Darkness as a De(con)structive Survival Guide for Postmodern Times (Michael Phillips)
Writing Ahead of the Times? A Postmodern Reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (Simone Puff)
A Horrific Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Simulacra, Simulations, and Postmodern Horror (Michael Fuchs)
II.Postmodern Chronotopoetics
Postmodern Chronotopoetics: An Introduction (Walter W. Hölbling & Petra Eckhard)
Allegories of Playing: Spatial Practice in Computer Games (Michael Fuchs)
Fascination for Confusion: Discontinuous Narrative in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (Cornelia Klecker)
Uncanny Architextures: Reading Time, Space, and Representation in Paul Auster’s City of Glass (Petra Eckhard)
III.Polymorphous Subjectivities
Polymorphous Subjectivities: An Introduction (Susanne Hamscha)
Losing Nemo, Finding Alternatives: Queer Theory and the Postmodern Subject (Susanne Hamscha)
A Squeeze of the Hand: A Queer Reading of Moby-Dick (Christoph Hartner)
Negotiating Postmodernity and Queer Utopianism in Shortbus (Leopold Lippert)
IV.Transamérica
Transamérica: A Long Journey Through and Beyond the Americas (Gundo Rial y Costas)
Yoknapatawpha Between the Deep South and the West Indies: The Dynamics of Transculturalism in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses (Marcel Vejmelka)
The Chronotopos in the (Postmodern) Novel of the Américas: Towards a Transareal Topology of the Local (Pablo Valdivia Orozco)
Revisiting Spivak: Does the Subaltern Speak In and Through Telenovelas (Gundo Rial y Costas)
V.Afterthoughts
From Copacabana: Varenikes, Kebabs, a Turtle, and a Pigeon (Ana Teresa Jardim Reynaud)
