Boasian Verse explores the understudied poetic output of three major twentieth-century anthropologists: Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Providing a comparative analysis of their anthropological and poetic works, this volume explores the divergent representations of cultural others and the uses of ethnographic studies for cultural critique. This volume aims to illuminate central questions, including: Why did they choose to write poetry about their ethnographic endeavors? Why did they choose to write the way they wrote? Was poetry used to approach the objects of their research in different, perhaps ethically more viable ways? Did poetry allow them to transcend their own primitivist, even evolutionist tendencies, or did it much rather refashion or even amplify those tendencies? This in-depth examination of these ethnographic poems invites both cultural anthropologists and students of literature to reevaluate the Boasian legacy of cultural relativism, primitivism, and residual evolutionism for the twenty-first century. This volume offers a fresh perspective on some of the key texts that have shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century discussions of culture and cultural relativism, and a unique contribution to readers interested in the dynamic area of multimodal anthropologies.

Beckett and media provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between Beckett and media technologies. The book analyses the rich variety of technical objects, semiotic arrangements, communication processes and forms of data processing that Beckett's work so uniquely engages with, as well as those that - in historically changing configurations - determine the continuing performance, the audience reception, and the scholarly study of this work. Beckett and media draws on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, such as media archaeology, in order to discuss Beckett's intermedial oeuvre. As such, the book engages with Beckett as a media artist and examines the way his engagement with media technologies continues to speak to our cultural situation. -- .

In his novel Mao II, Don DeLillo lets his protagonist say, 'Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness.' DeLillo suggests that while the collective imagination of the past was guided by the creative order of narrative fictions, our contemporary fantasies and anxieties are directed by the endless narratives of war and terror relayed by the mass media. To take DeLillo's literary reflections on media, terrorism, and literature seriously means to engage with the ethical implications of his media critique.
This book departs from existing works on DeLillo not only through its focus on the function of literature as public discourse in culture, but also in its decidedly transatlantic perspective. Bringing together prominent DeLillo scholars in Europe and in the US, it is the first critical book on DeLillo to position his work in a transatlantic context.

Exploring life writing from a variety of cultural contexts, Haunted Narratives provides new insights into how individuals and communities across time and space deal with traumatic experiences and haunting memories. From the perspectives of trauma theory, memory studies, gender studies, literary studies, philosophy, and post-colonial studies, the volume stresses the lingering, haunting presence of the past in the present. The contributors focus on the psychological, ethical, and representational difficulties involved in narrative negotiations of traumatic memories. Haunted Narratives focuses on life writing in the broadest sense of the term: biographies and autobiographies that deal with traumatic experiences, autobiographically inspired fictions on loss and trauma, and limit-cases that transcend clear-cut distinctions between the factual and the fictional. In discussing texts as diverse as Toni Morrison's Beloved, Vikram Seth's Two Lives, deportation narratives of Baltic women, Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, Joy Kogawa's Obasan, and Ene Mihkelson's Ahasveeruse uni, the contributors add significantly to current debates on life writing, trauma, and memory; the contested notion of "cultural trauma"; and the transferability of clinical-psychological notions to the study of literature and culture.

In his novel Mao II, Don DeLillo lets his protagonist say, "Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness." DeLillo suggests that while the collective imagination of the past was guided by the creative order of narrative fictions, our contemporary fantasies and anxieties are directed by the endless narratives of war and terror relayed by the mass media. To take DeLillo's literary reflections on media, terrorism, and literature seriously means to engage with the ethical implications of his media critique. This book departs from existing works on DeLillo not only through its focus on the function of literature as public discourse in culture, but also in its decidedly transatlantic perspective. Bringing together prominent DeLillo scholars in Europe and in the US, it is the first critical book on DeLillo to position his work in a transatlantic context.

The art of the early republic abounds in representations of deception: the villains of Gothic novels deceive their victims with visual and acoustic tricks; the ordinary citizens of picaresque novels are hoodwinked by quacks and illiterate but shrewd adventurers; and innocent sentimental heroines fall for their seducers' eloquently voiced half-truths and lies. Yet, as Philipp Schweighauser points out in Beautiful Deceptions, deception happens not only within these novels but also through them. The fictions of Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster, Tabitha Gilman Tenney, and Royall Tyler invent worlds that do not exist. Similarly, Charles Willson Peale's and Raphaelle Peale's trompe l'oeil paintings trick spectators into mistaking them for the real thing, and Patience Wright's wax sculptures deceive (and disturb) viewers. Beautiful Deceptions examines how these and other artists of the era at times acknowledge art's dues to other social realms-religion, morality, politics-but at other times insist on artists' right to deceive their audiences, thus gesturing toward a more modern, autonomous notion of art that was only beginning to emerge in the eighteenth century. Building on Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics as ""the science of sensuous cognition"" and the writings of early European aestheticians including Kant, Schiller, Hume, and Burke, Schweighauser supplements the dominant political readings of deception in early American studies with an aesthetic perspective. Schweighauser argues that deception in and through early American art constitutes a comment on eighteenth-century debates concerning the nature and function of art as much as it responds to shifts in social and political organization.