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“[An] insightful view on how 9/11 is perceived in American society—the day that ‘refuses to enter history,’ the tragedy that ‘has, in effect, not yet passed.’” —Journal of Popular Culture The day the towers fell, indelible images of plummeting rubble, fire, and falling bodies were imprinted in the memories of people around the world. Images that were caught in the media loop after the disaster and coverage of the attack, its aftermath, and the wars that followed reflected a pervasive tendency to treat these tragic events as spectacle. Though the collapse of the World Trade Center was “the most photographed disaster in history,” it failed to yield a single noteworthy image of carnage. Thomas Stubblefield argues that the absence within these spectacular images is the paradox of 9/11 visual culture, which foregrounds the visual experience as it obscures the event in absence, erasure, and invisibility. From the spectral presence of the Tribute in Light to Art Spiegelman’s nearly blank New Yorker cover, from the elimination of the Twin Towers from TV shows and films to the monumental cavities of Michael Arad’s 9/11 memorial, the void became the visual shorthand for the incident. By examining configurations of invisibility and erasure across the media of photography, film, monuments, graphic novels, and digital representation, Stubblefield interprets the post-9/11 presence of absence as the reaffirmation of national identity that implicitly laid the groundwork for the impending invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. “A concise, engaging, and thought-provoking work that asks the reader to reassess their knowledge and relationship to that moment and the resulting milieu of post 9/11 life in America.” —ARLIS/NA Reviews “Extraordinarily brilliant . . . will change how we think about disasters and tragedies. The book is a must-read for both students and practitioners of media studies.” —Repository
Even though much has been said and written about 9/11, the work developed on this subject has mostly explored it as an unparalleled event, a turning point in history. This book wishes to look instead at how disruptive events promote a network of associations and how people resort to comparison as a means to make sense of the unknown, i.e. to comprehend what seems incomprehensible. In order to effectively discuss the complexity of 9/11, this book articulates different fields of knowledge and perspectives such as visual culture, media studies, performance studies, critical theory, memory studies and literary studies to shed some light on 9/11 and analyze how the event has impacted on American social and cultural fabric and how the American society has come to terms with such a devastating event. A more in-depth study of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close draws attention to the cultural construction of catastrophe and the plethora of cultural products 9/11 has inspired. It demonstrates how the event has been integrated into American culture and exemplifies what makes up the 9/11 imaginary.
On September 11 more people clicked "on documentary news photographs than on pornography for the first (and only) time in the history of the Internet," reports writer David Levi Strauss. The archive of images associated with the tragic events of 9/11 merits careful analysis. Artist Damien Hirst has suggested that the attacks were designed to be viewed - "The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually." Starting from the tremendous fascination with images of 9/11, Karen Engle asks what, in the context of a national trauma, makes an image appropriate or scandalous, exploring how diverse visual media have been mobilized in political projects of identification and personal narratives of empathy. Focusing on themes of memory, mourning, and history, Engle examines sculptural, photographic, and new media responses to the 9/11 attacks in both contemporary and historical contexts, considers the public's reaction to these visual productions, and suggests that earlier presentations of America at war play a pivotal role in the representations of 9/11 in both official and popular media. Seeing Ghosts is a groundbreaking theoretical study of how we remember, how we mourn, and how images of a particular event influence our imagination of the future.
Explores how games actively influence the ways people interpret and relate to American life. In 1975, design engineer Dave Nutting completed work on a new arcade machine. A version of Taito's Western Gun, a recent Japanese arcade machine, Nutting's Gun Fight depicted a classic showdown between gunfighters. Rich in Western folklore, the game seemed perfect for the American market; players easily adapted to the new technology, becoming pistol-wielding pixel cowboys. One of the first successful early arcade titles, Gun Fight helped introduce an entire nation to video-gaming and sold more than 8,000 units. In Gamer Nation, John Wills examines how video games co-opt national landscapes, livelihoods, and legends. Arguing that video games toy with Americans' mass cultural and historical understanding, Wills show how games reprogram the American experience as a simulated reality. Blockbuster games such as Civilization, Call of Duty, and Red Dead Redemption repackage the past, refashioning history into novel and immersive digital states of America. Controversial titles such as Custer's Revenge and 08.46 recode past tragedies. Meanwhile, online worlds such as Second Life cater to a desire to inhabit alternate versions of America, while Paperboy and The Sims transform the mundane tasks of everyday suburbia into fun and addictive challenges. Working with a range of popular and influential games, from Pong, Civilization, and The Oregon Trail to Grand Theft Auto, Silent Hill, and Fortnite, Wills critically explores these gamic depictions of America. Touching on organized crime, nuclear fallout, environmental degradation, and the War on Terror, Wills uncovers a world where players casually massacre Native Americans and Cold War soldiers alike, a world where neo-colonialism, naive patriotism, disassociated violence, and racial conflict abound, and a world where the boundaries of fantasy and reality are increasingly blurred. Ultimately, Gamer Nation reveals not only how video games are a key aspect of contemporary American culture, but also how games affect how people relate to America itself.
As if John Berger's Ways of Seeing was re-written for the 21st century, Alexis L. Boylan crafts a guide for navigating the complexities of visual culture in this concise introduction. The visual surrounds us, some of it invited, most of it not. In this visual environment, everything we see--art, color, the moon, a skyscraper, a stop sign, a political poster, rising sea levels, a photograph of Kim Kardashian West--somehow becomes legible, normalized, accessible. How does this happen? How do we live and move in our visual environments? This volume offers a guide for navigating the complexities of visual culture, outlining strategies for thinking about what it means to look and see--and what is at stake in doing so.
The country’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its interventions around the world, and its global military presence make war, the military, and militarism defining features of contemporary American life. The armed services and the wars they fight shape all aspects of life—from the formation of racial and gendered identities to debates over environmental and immigration policy. Warfare and the military are ubiquitous in popular culture. At War offers short, accessible essays addressing the central issues in the new military history—ranging from diplomacy and the history of imperialism to the environmental issues that war raises and the ways that war shapes and is shaped by discourses of identity, to questions of who serves in the U.S. military and why and how U.S. wars have been represented in the media and in popular culture.
This volume investigates the perception of threat, with particular regard to the roles, functions, and agencies of various types of media. With a focus on the profound impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 on the US-American political, social, and cultural order, the chapters reach from the early days after the attacks up to the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump. An international team of contributors analyze how the perceived threats and their subsequent representations changed during this period and what part different forms of media - media institutions, media technologies, and media formats - played within these transformations. Media theoretical perspectives are thus combined with historical approaches to examine the "re-ordering" of the nation, the state, and society proposed in an increasingly converging, multimodal, and networked media environment. This book’s focus on the interrelation between Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and American Studies makes it an indispensable landmark for fields such as Historical Research, Media Theory, Narratology, and Popular Culture Studies.
9/11 Culture serves as a timely and accessible introduction to the complexities of American culture in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Gives balanced examinations of a broad catalogue of artifacts from film, music, photography, literary fiction, and other popular arts Investigates the ways that 9/11 has exerted a shaping force on a wide range of practices, from the politics of femininity to the poetics of redemption Includes pedagogical material to assist understanding and teaching, including film and discographies, and a useful teachers' preface
American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11 is a ground-breaking collection of essays by some of the foremost scholars writing in the field of contemporary American film. Through a dynamic critical analysis of the defining films of the turbulent post-9/11 decade, the volume explores and interrogates the impact of 9/11 and the 'War on Terror' on American cinema and culture. In a vibrant discussion of films like American Sniper (2014), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Spectre (2015), The Hateful Eight (2015), Lincoln (2012), The Mist (2007), Children of Men (2006), Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), noted authors Geoff King, Guy Westwell, John Shelton Lawrence, Ian Scott, Andrew Schopp, James Kendrick, Sean Redmond, Steffen Hantke and many others consider the power of popular film to function as a potent cultural artefact, able to both reflect the defining fears and anxieties of the tumultuous era, but also shape them in compelling and resonant ways.
Contributions by Georgiana Banita, Colin Beineke, Harriet Earle, Ariela Freedman, Liza Futerman, Shawn Gilmore, Sarah Hamblin, Cara Koehler, Lee Konstantinou, Patrick Lawrence, Philip Smith, and Kent Worcester A carefully curated, wide-ranging edited volume tracing Art Spiegelman’s exceptional trajectory from underground rebellion to mainstream success, Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman reveals his key role in the rise of comics as an art form and of the cartoonist as artist. The collection grapples with Spiegelman’s astonishing versatility, from his irreverent underground strips, influential avant-garde magazine RAW, the expressionist style of the comics classic Maus, the illustrations to the Jazz Age poem “The Wild Party,” and his response to the September 11 terrorist attacks to his iconic cover art for the New Yorker, his children’s books, and various cross-media collaborations. The twelve chapters cut across Spiegelman’s career to document continuities and ruptures that the intense focus on Maus has obscured, yielding an array of original readings. Spiegelman’s predilection for collage, improvisation, and the potent protest of silence shows his allegiance to modernist art. His cultural critique and anticapitalist, antimilitary positions shed light on his vocal public persona, while his deft intertextual strategies of mixing media archives, from comics to photography and film, amplify the poignance of his works. Developing new approaches to Spiegelman’s comics—such as the publication history of Maus, the history of immigration and xenophobia, and the cartoonist’s elevation of children’s comics—the collection leaves no doubt that despite the accolades his accessible comics have garnered, we have yet to grasp the full range of Spiegelman’s achievements in the realm of comics and beyond.