Seminar paper from the year 2024 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (English and American Studies), course: Interdisciplinary Perspectives: Music in American Literature, language: English, abstract: This term paper compares two texts — the television series “Twin Peaks” by Mark Frost and David Lynch (released in 1990–1991) taken together as a whole with Lynch’s following prequel “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (1992) and the novel Jazz (1992) by Toni Morrison — through the prism of two theoretical findings of German cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen. First, this is her concept of ‘crossmappings’, formulated and applied as a method of analysis in the book Crossmapping. Essays zur visuellen Kultur (2011). Second, this is her theory regarding the depiction of a dead female body in arts that, seemingly counter-intuitively, is a highly widespread artistic image to which the perceiver responds rather with fascination than with terror. This idea was represented and comprehensively described in the earlier book Over her Dead Body (Bronfen 1992), whose central subject is the connection between death, femininity, and artistic representation.

In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity

Barry Gifford has been writing gritty, American tales for the past forty years. His novels, stories, poetry, and films have helped shape the American neo-noir genre. The New York Times Book Review says that he "can sum up in a few words the cruelty, horror, and crushing banality that shape an entire life.” Andrei Codrescu calls Gifford “a great comic realist,” while Pedro Almodóvar likens him to the surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and Jonathan Lethem describes his style as “William Faulkner by way of B-movie film noir, porn paperbacks, and Sun Records rockabilly.” In The Roy Stories Gifford brings his signature style to a collection of tales following the character of Roy, who has made appearances in a number of Gifford’s previous story collections. Roy lives a mystical kind of life, skinning crocodiles in Southern Florida at age nine in the 1940s and playing in the back alleys of Chicago in the 1950s. This deep-feeling boy observes every detail in his surroundings with a sense of dark humor and an openness that will clutch readers tightly by the heart and lead them on a historical journey.

Yoshinobu Hakutani traces the development of African American modernism, which initially gathered momentum with Richard Wright's literary manifesto "Blueprint for Negro Writing" in 1937. Hakutani dissects and discusses the cross-cultural influences on the then-burgeoning discipline in three stages: American dialogues, European and African cultural visions, and Asian and African American cross-cultural visions. In writing Black Boy, the centerpiece of the Chicago Renaissance, Wright was inspired by Theodore Dreiser. Because the European and African cultural visions that Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison acquired were buttressed by the universal humanism that is common to all cultures, this ideology is shown to transcend the problems of society. Fascinated by Eastern thought and art, Wright, Walker, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel wrote highly accomplished poetry and prose. Like Ezra Pound, Wright was drawn to classic haiku, as reflected in the 4,000 haiku he wrote at the end of his life. As W. B. Yeats's symbolism was influenced by his cross-cultural visions of noh theatre and Irish folklore, so is James Emanuel's jazz haiku energized by his cross-cultural rhythms of Japanese poetry and African American music. The book demonstrates some of the most visible cultural exchanges in modern and postmodern African American literature. Such a study can be extended to other contemporary African American writers whose works also thrive on their cross-cultural visions, such as Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and haiku poet Lenard Moore.

What do contemporary American movies and directors have to say about the relationship between nature and art? How do science fiction films like Steven Spielberg's A.I. and Darren Aronofsky's π represent the apparent oppositions between nature and culture, wild and tame? Steven Dillon's intriguing new volume surveys American cinema from 1990 to 2002 with substantial descriptions of sixty films, emphasizing small-budget independent American film. Directors studied include Steven Soderbergh, Darren Aronofsky, Todd Haynes, Harmony Korine, and Gus Van Sant, as well as more canonical figures like Martin Scorcese, Robert Altman, David Lynch, and Steven Spielberg. The book takes its title and inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, a science fiction ghost story that relentlessly explores the relationship between the powers of nature and art. The author argues that American film has the best chance of aesthetic success when it acknowledges that a film is actually a film. The best American movies tell an endless ghost story, as they perform the agonizing nearness and distance of the cinematic image. This groundbreaking commentary examines the rarely seen bridge between select American film directors and their typically more adventurous European counterparts. Filmmakers such as Lynch and Soderbergh are cross-cut together with Tarkovsky and the great French director, Jean-Luc Godard, in order to test the limits and possibilities of American film. Both enthusiastically cinephilic and fiercely critical, this book puts a decade of U.S. film in its global place, as part of an ongoing conversation on nature and art.

Presents the screenplay of the film about what happens when Pete Dayton is found, dazed and confused, in the Death Row cell which should have held convicted wife-murderer Fred Madison

Musician, composer, producer: Brian Eno is unique in contemporary music. Best known in recent years for producing U2's sensational albums, Eno began his career as a synthesizer player for Roxy Music. He has since released many solo albums, both rock and ambient, written music for film and television soundtracks, and collaborated with David Bowie, David Byrne, Robert Fripp, and classical and experimental composers. His pioneering ambient sound has been enormously influential, and without him today's rock would have a decidedly different sound. Drawing on Eno's own words to examine his influences and ideas, this book—featuring a new afterword and an updated discography and bibliography—will long remain provocative and definitive.

Braithwaite's argument against punitive justice systems and for restorative justice systems establishes that there are good theoretical and empirical grounds for anticipating that well designed restorative justice processes will restore victims, offenders, and communities better than existing criminal justice practices. Counterintuitively, he also shows that a restorative justice system may deter, incapacitate, and rehabilitate more effectively than a punitive system. This is particularly true when the restorative justice system is embedded in a responsive regulatory framework that opts for deterrence only after restoration repeatedly fails, and incapacitation only after escalated deterrence fails. Braithwaite's empirical research demonstrates that active deterrence under the dynamic regulatory pyramid that is a hallmark of the restorative justice system he supports, is far more effective than the passive deterrence that is notable in the stricter "sentencing grid" of current criminal justice systems.

Critical Responses About the Black Family in Toni Morrison's God Help the Child explores the integral role of what Kobi Kambon has called the “conscious African family” in developing commercial success stories such as those of Morrison’s protagonist, Bride. Initially, Bride’s accomplishments are an extension of a superficial “cult of celebrity” which inhabits and undermines the development of meaningful interpersonal relationships until a significant literal and metaphorical journey helps her redefine success by facilitating the building of community and family.