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The Trash Phenomenon - Contemporary Literature, Popular Culture and the Making of the American Century (Paperback, New)
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The Trash Phenomenon - Contemporary Literature, Popular Culture and the Making of the American Century (Paperback, New)
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The Trash Phenomenon looks at how writers of the late twentieth
century not only have integrated the events, artifacts, and
theories of popular culture into their works but also have used
those works as windows into popular culture's role in the process
of nation building. Taking her cue from Donald Barthelme's 1967
portrayal of popular culture in Snow White as ""trash,"" and Don
DeLillo's 1997 description of it as a subversive ""people's
history"" in Underworld, Stacey Olster explores the ways in which
American popular culture can be recycled in literature so as to
change the nationalistic imperative behind its inception. The Trash
Phenomenon begins with a look at the mass media's role in the
United States' emergence as the twentieth century's dominant power.
To this end, Olster discusses the works of three authors that
collectively span the century bounded by the Spanish-American War
(1898) and the Persian Gulf War (1991): Gore Vidal's ""American
Chronicle"" series, John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, and Larry
Beinhart's American Hero. Olster then turns her attention to three
non-American writers whose own cultures have felt the imperial sway
of American popular culture: hierarchical class structure in Dennis
Potter's England, Peronism in Manuel Puig's Argentina, and
Nihonjinron consensus in Haruki Murakami's Japan. Finally, Olster
returns to American literature to look at the contemporary media
spectacle and the representative figure as potential sources of
national consolidation after November 1963. Olster first focuses on
autobiographical, historical, and fictional accounts of three
spectacles in which the formulae of popular culture are shown to
bypass differences of class, gender, and race: the John F. Kennedy
assassination, the Scarsdale Diet Doctor murder, and the O. J.
Simpson trial. She concludes with some thoughts about the nature of
American consolidation after 9/11. The Trash Phenomenon is filled
with fresh and challenging insights into how and why American
popular culture can be recycled in literature so as to change the
nationalistic imperative behind its inception.
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