This study of collective American memory exposes the historical phenomenon of self-directed American imperialism, still frequently ignored or denied in the United States. Over the course of the 250 years of its history, this has taken the form of African American slavery, thwarted black motherhood, same-race slavery (both white and African American) as well as the extermination of indigenous American peoples. On the literary level, the study helps to broaden, or even modify, the present perspective on the oeuvres of four major American writers, i. e., William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Cormac McCarthy, by pointing to the intertwining of their themes, motifs, and techniques of writing to form an intricate pattern of the intertextualized collective memory of the American nation.

A diverse and multinational volume, this book showcases the passages of Joseph Conrad's narratives across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, focusing on the transtextual and transcultural elements of his fiction. Featuring contributions from distinguished and emergent Conrad scholars, it unpacks the transformative meanings which Conrad's narratives have achieved in crossing national, cultural and disciplinary boundaries. Featuring studies on the reception of Conrad in modern China, an exploration of Conrad's relationship with India, a comparative study of the hybrid art of Conrad and Salman Rushdie, and the responses of Conrad's narratives to alternative media forms, this volume brings out transtextual relations among Conrad's works and various media forms, world narratives, philosophies, and emergent modes of critical inquiry. Gathering essays by contributors from Canada, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Norway, Poland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this volume constitutes an inclusive, transnational networking of emergent border-crossing scholarship.

A fascinating exploration of our evolving national psyche, this book chronicles major traumas in recent American history - from the Depression and Pearl Harbor, to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., to Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Columbine - how we responded to them as a nation, and what our responses mean. Reflecting on American popular culture as well as the media, this edition includes a new chapter on 9/11 and other acts of terror within the United States, as well as coverage of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. New student-friendly features, including discussion questions and "Symbolic Events" boxes in each chapter, give the book added value as a classroom supplement.

Chronicles the major traumas of the 20th century in America -- the Depression, Pearl Harbor, McCarthyism, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Vietnam, Watergate, Three Mile Island, the Challenger explosion -- how we responded to them as a nation, and what our responses mean.

A collection of essays by prominent scholars from many disciplines on the construction of public memories The study of public memory has grown rapidly across numerous disciplines in recent years, among them American studies, history, philosophy, sociology, architecture, and communications. As scholars probe acts of collective remembrance, they have shed light on the cultural processes of memory. Essays contained in this volume address issues such as the scope of public memory, the ways we forget, the relationship between politics and memory, and the material practices of memory. Stephen Browne’s contribution studies the alternative to memory erasure, silence, and forgetting as posited by Hannah Arendt in her classic Eichmann in Jerusalem. Rosa Eberly writes about the Texas tower shootings of 1966, memories of which have been minimized by local officials. Charles Morris examines public reactions to Larry Kramer’s declaration that Abraham Lincoln was homosexual, horrifying the guardians of Lincoln’s public memory. And Barbie Zelizer considers the impact on public memory of visual images, specifically still photographs of individuals about to perish (e.g., people falling from the World Trade Center) and the sense of communal loss they manifest. Whether addressing the transitory and mutable nature of collective memories over time or the ways various groups maintain, engender, or resist those memories, this work constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of how public memory has been and might continue to be framed.

For readers of Rebecca Solnit and Jenny Odell, this poetic and inventive blend of history, memoir, and visual essay reflects on how we can resist the erasure of our collective memory in this American century Our sense of our history requires us to recall the details of time, of experiences that help us find our place in the world together and encourage us in the search for our individual identities. When we lose sight of the past, our ability to see ourselves and to understand one another is diminished. In this book, Colette Brooks explores how some of the more forgotten aspects of recent American experiences explain our challenging and often puzzling present. Through intimate and meticulously researched retellings of individual stories of violence, misfortune, chaos, and persistence—from the first mass shooting in America from the tower at the University of Texas, the televised assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, life with nuclear bombs and the Doomsday Clock, obsessive diarists and round-the-clock surveillance, to pandemics and COVID-19—Brooks is able to reframe our country’s narratives with new insight to create a prismatic account of how efforts to reclaim the past can be redemptive, freeing us from the tyranny of the present moment.

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,6 (A), University of Regensburg (Insitute for American Studies), 181 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: 1. 'Narratives of a New Belonging' - Introduction and Aim of the Study In March 1968 Robert Kennedy reported the following about the miserable living conditions on most Native American reservations to a Senate sub-committee: "The first Americans are still the last Americans in terms of income, employment, health and education. I believe this to be a national tragedy for all Americans, for we all are in some way responsible" (qtd. in Breidlid 1998: 6). Opening this thesis with this rhetoric pun on the first and the last on the American continent has been a deliberate decision as Kennedy's status quo report provides for a nice introduction to this thesis' larger subject matter. When his dialogics of the first and the last are not only restricted to U.S. American Indian communities, the overall image evoked can in fact easily be applied to other U.S. ethnic groups as well. Having long settled the desert regions north of nowadays U.S. Mexican border, contemporary Hispanic Americans, for instance, as the descendents of an early mestizo population of Mexican-Indian, European-Spanish and Anglo-American ancestry, share a collective memory which far precedes the U.S. presence in North America. Likewise African Americans can provide for a historical legacy that through the Diaspora of the Middle Passage and the system of plantation slavery easily traces itself back to the very first beginnings of American civilization. When in recent years many other immigrant and minority groups have handed in similar claims, the overall picture of American history evoked is no longer one of a WASP unitarian sense of historiography, but of transcultural diversity and plurality which clearly contradicts the proclaimed assimilatory homogeneity of the American character. Having alre

This volume brings together Ron Eyerman’s most important interventions in the field of cultural trauma and offers an accessible entry point into the origins and development of this theory and a framework of an analysis that has now achieved the status of a research paradigm. This collection of disparate essays, published between 2004 and 2018, coheres around an original introduction that not only provides a historical overview of cultural trauma, but is also an important theoretical contribution to cultural trauma and collective identity in its own right. The Afterword from esteemed sociologist Eric Woods connects the essays and explores their significance for the broader fields of sociology, behavioral science, and trauma studies..

"This volume recollects the International American Studies Conference "Sites of memory in American literatures and cultures," which was held in Regensburg, Germany, May 11-14, 2000"--P. [vii].

A diverse and multinational volume, this book showcases the passages of Joseph Conrad's narratives across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, focusing on the transtextual and transcultural elements of his fiction. Featuring contributions from distinguished and emergent Conrad scholars, it unpacks the transformative meanings which Conrad's narratives have achieved in crossing national, cultural and disciplinary boundaries. Featuring studies on the reception of Conrad in modern China, an exploration of Conrad's relationship with India, a comparative study of the hybrid art of Conrad and Salman Rushdie, and the responses of Conrad's narratives to alternative media forms, this volume brings out transtextual relations among Conrad's works and various media forms, world narratives, philosophies, and emergent modes of critical inquiry. Gathering essays by contributors from Canada, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Norway, Poland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this volume constitutes an inclusive, transnational networking of emergent border-crossing scholarship.