“The true meaning of money?” Explaining Banking in Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier – by Jude Davies, Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of Winchester What can a one hundred year old novel tell us about banking and financial systems that remains relevant in the post 2008 depression? Plenty, and much of it troubling and unpalatable, argues Jude Davies in this assessment of Theodore Dreiser’s novel The Financier, published exactly a century ago.
Between Fabulation and Silence: in Search of the Paul Auster Effect By Adriana Neagu, Babes Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. In this article, Adriana Neagu examines the key concepts of fabulation, aliterature, realism, idealism, memory, identity, aesthetic consciousness, textuality, space in the writing of Paul Auster, and considers how it is influenced by ideas as disparate as existentialism and silent movies, as well as by the writings of authors such as Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka.
Paul Auster image © David Shankbone – Wikimedia Commons
White Yet Non-White: Miscegenation in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2007) by Sofia Politidou. This article examines the changes in the concept of miscegenation, from the slavery years to the 1960s and the 2000s, as recorded in Natasha Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize poetry collection Native Guard (2007). Through a close reading of the poems “Pastoral,” “Miscegenation,” “Blond,” “Southern Gothic” and “South” from the third mainly autobiographical section of the collection, it shall be argued that, while in the past, miscegenation was strictly a matter of race for African-Americans, nowadays, it is also a matter of identity and self identification. Trethewey narrates how she experienced discrimination for being a mixed-race person in the early years of her life. She also describes how being a mixed-race person led her to a quest for selfhood. Trethewey believes that American anti-miscegenation laws enhanced her feeling of being different and caused her to doubt her identity as black, white or a person of mixed race.
“Love American Style”: Race, Cuban Identity and Cultural Tyranny in Showtime’s Dexter By Donna Maria Alexander (University College Cork) This article focuses on representation of Cubans in the television series Dexter, paying particular attention to episode 1.5, “Love American Style” with some brief references to other episodes. Assimilation, the American Dream, nationalism and crisis of identity are among the themes and issues that this article investigates. Border theory provides the dominant theoretical framework of the article.
God was with me in a wonderful manner’: the Puritan Origins of the Indian Captivity Narrative By Andrew Panay The origins of the Indian
captivity narrative should be understood in the historical contexts of its production in the New World as a narrative that is at once descriptive of the personal experiences of frontier captives of the seventeenth century, and is symbolic too of the Puritan errand of separation, settlement and eventual conquest of the land.
Alice Neel Portraits of Women in 1970’s America by Loretta Cremmins. This article examines five portraits by the American artist Alice Neel painted between 1970 and 1980. Role of women in society and revealing inner feelings and insecurities. and what it ws like to live in a particular place and time (NYC in the 70’s)
Mythology as Depicted in Being There by Linda Cardinal Schneider. Sociological and mystical mythology as depicted in the novel Being There by Jerzy Kosinski, and the subsequent film adaptation Being There by Hal Ashby, reaches its transcendence in the book The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. This paper weaves the underlying mythologies of a hero’s journey and his resulting transcendence into a fable about society while questioning the roles, rules, schemes, and manipulations of the social order.
American Studies Resource Centre 