Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2155014
B. Faucette
ABSTRACT The essay examines three films that Hollywood director Delmer Daves made in the mid-1950s—Jubal, 3:10 to Yuma and Cowboy—all of which starred Glenn Ford. The pairing of Ford and Daves, the essay argues, allowed Daves to re-think the Hollywood Westerns of the 1930s and 1940s, especially regarding questions around gender identity and representation of genders, that of the Western man. In doing so, these three films present an anti-nostalgic view of the traditional mode of American Western masculinity as violent, non-verbal and threatening and instead embrace a version of American masculinity that is verbal, compassionate and considerate. Through a close analysis of the films, reviews of them and marketing, the essay demonstrates how Daves used his own family background to construct Westerns that featured more adult themes and addressing the larger societal concerns about the notion of American masculinity and manhood in the 1950s.
本文考察了好莱坞导演德尔默·戴维斯在20世纪50年代中期拍摄的三部电影——《朱巴尔》、《3:10 to Yuma》和《牛仔》，它们都是由格伦·福特主演的。这篇文章认为，福特和戴维斯的搭档让戴维斯重新思考了20世纪30年代和40年代的好莱坞西部片，尤其是关于性别认同和性别表现的问题，即西方男性的问题。在这样做的过程中，这三部电影呈现了一种反怀旧的观点，即美国西部男性气概的传统模式是暴力的，非语言的和威胁的，相反，他们拥抱了一种语言的，富有同情心的和体贴的美国男性气概。通过对电影、评论和市场营销的仔细分析，本文展示了戴维斯如何利用自己的家庭背景来构建西部片，这些西部片以更多的成人主题为特色，并解决了20世纪50年代美国男性气概和男子气概概念的更大社会问题。
{"title":"Re-Thinking the Hollywood Western of the Fifties: Delmer Daves’ Masculinities Trilogy Jubal (1956), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), and Cowboy (1958)","authors":"B. Faucette","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2155014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2155014","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The essay examines three films that Hollywood director Delmer Daves made in the mid-1950s—Jubal, 3:10 to Yuma and Cowboy—all of which starred Glenn Ford. The pairing of Ford and Daves, the essay argues, allowed Daves to re-think the Hollywood Westerns of the 1930s and 1940s, especially regarding questions around gender identity and representation of genders, that of the Western man. In doing so, these three films present an anti-nostalgic view of the traditional mode of American Western masculinity as violent, non-verbal and threatening and instead embrace a version of American masculinity that is verbal, compassionate and considerate. Through a close analysis of the films, reviews of them and marketing, the essay demonstrates how Daves used his own family background to construct Westerns that featured more adult themes and addressing the larger societal concerns about the notion of American masculinity and manhood in the 1950s.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116738898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2143744
J. Wills
Over the last century, western nostalgia has taken on a variety of entertainment forms. From Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows through to Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption video games, the entertainment industry has maintained an emotional attachment to America’s frontier past across a diversity of platforms. Nostalgia has translated into the setting aside of physical spaces across the trans-Mississippi (and beyond) that celebrate a mythic frontier realm. From Yosemite National Park to Dodge City and Deadwood, a range of ‘nostalgic landscapes’ collectively underline the significance of the frontier in American history, to paraphrase Frederick Jackson Turner (Turner 1921, 1), and foster a mass appreciation for nineteenth-century exploration and pioneering. The roster of nostalgic landscapes includes twentieth-century amusement parks, with Knott’s Berry Farm in Southern California one of the earliest examples of an attraction based around frontier values. Knott’s Berry Farm, Orange County, began in the 1920s as a small, family-run farm headed by Walter Knott later linked to boysenberry production. During the Depression era, the Knott family opened a roadside restaurant that proved incredibly popular. In the early 1940s, Walter Knott constructed a Wild West town chiefly as a distraction for customers gathered in long queues outside the restaurant, sometimes waiting three to four hours for their chicken dinners. Knott’s ‘Ghost Town’ represented a paragon exercise in Western nostalgia. Billed as an authentic Wild West experience, the Ghost Town signified a conscious attempt to immortalise what its creator Knott deemed one of America’s proudest historical moments. What started off as a simple distraction soon morphed into a key tourist destination in California. Watching the crowds amass in his new Ghost Town, Knott related, ‘They get so interested that I had to install a loud speaker to call them back to dinner.’ The Knott’s Berry Farm Ghost Town offered a distinctive interactive take on frontier history. Visitors explored a town akin to a Hollywood-style film set, watching performances of live-action drama, playing mechanical amusements, and even listening to wood-carved figures speak to them. The Ghost Town pushed a visceral, entertainmentfocused reading of the West. It blended the feel of older, traditional historic sites like Dodge City with a fresh theme park ambience. Visitors walked amongst gun-toting cowboys, panned for gold, and imagined themselves as virtuous pioneers. The park invited audiences to become active participants in frontier storylines. The first of a wave of Western-themed attractions that opened in the mid-century (and presaging
{"title":"Nostalgia for the Old West in Knott’s Berry Farm, Orange County, California","authors":"J. Wills","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2143744","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2143744","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last century, western nostalgia has taken on a variety of entertainment forms. From Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows through to Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption video games, the entertainment industry has maintained an emotional attachment to America’s frontier past across a diversity of platforms. Nostalgia has translated into the setting aside of physical spaces across the trans-Mississippi (and beyond) that celebrate a mythic frontier realm. From Yosemite National Park to Dodge City and Deadwood, a range of ‘nostalgic landscapes’ collectively underline the significance of the frontier in American history, to paraphrase Frederick Jackson Turner (Turner 1921, 1), and foster a mass appreciation for nineteenth-century exploration and pioneering. The roster of nostalgic landscapes includes twentieth-century amusement parks, with Knott’s Berry Farm in Southern California one of the earliest examples of an attraction based around frontier values. Knott’s Berry Farm, Orange County, began in the 1920s as a small, family-run farm headed by Walter Knott later linked to boysenberry production. During the Depression era, the Knott family opened a roadside restaurant that proved incredibly popular. In the early 1940s, Walter Knott constructed a Wild West town chiefly as a distraction for customers gathered in long queues outside the restaurant, sometimes waiting three to four hours for their chicken dinners. Knott’s ‘Ghost Town’ represented a paragon exercise in Western nostalgia. Billed as an authentic Wild West experience, the Ghost Town signified a conscious attempt to immortalise what its creator Knott deemed one of America’s proudest historical moments. What started off as a simple distraction soon morphed into a key tourist destination in California. Watching the crowds amass in his new Ghost Town, Knott related, ‘They get so interested that I had to install a loud speaker to call them back to dinner.’ The Knott’s Berry Farm Ghost Town offered a distinctive interactive take on frontier history. Visitors explored a town akin to a Hollywood-style film set, watching performances of live-action drama, playing mechanical amusements, and even listening to wood-carved figures speak to them. The Ghost Town pushed a visceral, entertainmentfocused reading of the West. It blended the feel of older, traditional historic sites like Dodge City with a fresh theme park ambience. Visitors walked amongst gun-toting cowboys, panned for gold, and imagined themselves as virtuous pioneers. The park invited audiences to become active participants in frontier storylines. The first of a wave of Western-themed attractions that opened in the mid-century (and presaging","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128326531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2159755
M. McLaughlin
ABSTRACT In the Gilded Age of the 1870s and 1880s, in the decades between the Civil War and the closing of the Western frontier, the pioneering, New York-based outdoor-sports magazine Forest and Stream made an essential contribution to a larger cultural reimagining of America. For its readers, the magazine was an important source of practical advice, but its accounts of outdoor pursuits in wild landscapes across the United States also encouraged fantasies of travel and adventure. By examining Forest and Stream, this article seeks to understand how nostalgia played into those fantasies, shaping an idea of the nation along the way. Rather than treating the West as a region with a discrete cultural history, this article seeks to place it in a larger national context. And accordingly, it suggests that outdoor-recreation magazines can provide a vital perspective on the way nostalgia and adventure fantasy combined in negotiating the relationship between the metropolitan Northeast, the West, and the South in the cultural remaking of the nation at what was a crucial historical juncture.
在19世纪70年代和80年代的镀金时代，也就是南北战争和西部边疆关闭之间的几十年里，总部位于纽约的户外运动杂志《森林与溪流》(Forest and Stream)对美国文化的重新构想做出了重要贡献。对于读者来说，这本杂志是实用建议的重要来源，但它对美国各地野外户外活动的描述也激发了人们对旅行和冒险的幻想。通过对《森林与溪流》的研究，本文试图理解乡愁是如何在这些幻想中发挥作用的，并在此过程中形成了对这个国家的看法。本文没有将西方视为一个具有独立文化历史的地区，而是试图将其置于一个更大的民族背景中。因此，它表明，户外娱乐杂志可以提供一个重要的视角，说明怀旧和冒险幻想是如何结合在一起的，在一个关键的历史节点上，在国家的文化重塑中，东北大都市，西部和南方之间的关系。
{"title":"Forest and Dream: Adventure, Nostalgia, and the Making of a Sporting-Tourist’s America, 1873-1890","authors":"M. McLaughlin","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2159755","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2159755","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the Gilded Age of the 1870s and 1880s, in the decades between the Civil War and the closing of the Western frontier, the pioneering, New York-based outdoor-sports magazine Forest and Stream made an essential contribution to a larger cultural reimagining of America. For its readers, the magazine was an important source of practical advice, but its accounts of outdoor pursuits in wild landscapes across the United States also encouraged fantasies of travel and adventure. By examining Forest and Stream, this article seeks to understand how nostalgia played into those fantasies, shaping an idea of the nation along the way. Rather than treating the West as a region with a discrete cultural history, this article seeks to place it in a larger national context. And accordingly, it suggests that outdoor-recreation magazines can provide a vital perspective on the way nostalgia and adventure fantasy combined in negotiating the relationship between the metropolitan Northeast, the West, and the South in the cultural remaking of the nation at what was a crucial historical juncture.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123760774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2154110
M. McLaughlin, John A. Wills
The essays contained in this special issue of Comparative American Studies range across time and media, from outdoor recreation and magazines in the Gilded Age of the 1870s, to video games, film, and television in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, taking in theme parks and heritage sites along the way. They are a reminder of the pervasiveness of the nineteenth-century historic West as a powerful and enduring symbol in American culture. At the same time, they each offer a distinctive perspective on the relationship between the making of popular nostalgia and the shifting symbolic meaning of the West, illuminating the malleability and vital mutability of Westerly ideas to national cultural identity. Along the way, they question some long-standing assumptions both about nostalgia and about Western exceptionalism, and meanwhile describe the broadening expressions of Western nostalgia, as its themes migrated from the pages of magazines and story books onto cinema screen and into play and interactive media. They offer contrasting visions of the West, too, from nostalgia for the idealised wilderness or the days of the pioneer to celebrations of an altogether different West, shaped by technological modernity in the twentieth century. At each turn, it becomes apparent that the nostalgic dreams of one generation have flowed into those of the next and the next; that the West has long been a dream of a dream. Thus, far more so than simply a wish to return to an actual, particular time and place, Western nostalgia has often expressed a desire for things lost in the modern, standardised world. The conquest and colonisation and settling of the West was after all a geographically dispersed process. It is telling that much Western nostalgia refers back to an approximate time and place, or that specific events become, when viewed through this retrospective lens, mythologised as illustrative of a larger, vague historical moment. The West is the stage for those dreams. Here, it may be significant that Western nostalgia has often been attached to a fleeting moment in national history. Perhaps the Old West continues to exercise such a powerful hold on the American imaginary because it was a time we know, from our own vantage point as nostalgic observers, was destined to pass, an exception in time. It might be imagined as a place apart from the urban, industrial world, with organised society always just outside, about to encroach. Just as we might recall our own feelings of personal loss that we experienced as a child, when a childhood sense of wonder and adventure gave way to the disenchantment of adulthood, as we were reshaped in the standardising and regulating institutions of education and labour, the West, as myth, can speak to us. The Old West can in this way symbolise our own very personal feelings and connect them to a larger, shared national memory and want of a pioneer adventure.
{"title":"Reckoning with Western Nostalgia","authors":"M. McLaughlin, John A. Wills","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2154110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2154110","url":null,"abstract":"The essays contained in this special issue of Comparative American Studies range across time and media, from outdoor recreation and magazines in the Gilded Age of the 1870s, to video games, film, and television in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, taking in theme parks and heritage sites along the way. They are a reminder of the pervasiveness of the nineteenth-century historic West as a powerful and enduring symbol in American culture. At the same time, they each offer a distinctive perspective on the relationship between the making of popular nostalgia and the shifting symbolic meaning of the West, illuminating the malleability and vital mutability of Westerly ideas to national cultural identity. Along the way, they question some long-standing assumptions both about nostalgia and about Western exceptionalism, and meanwhile describe the broadening expressions of Western nostalgia, as its themes migrated from the pages of magazines and story books onto cinema screen and into play and interactive media. They offer contrasting visions of the West, too, from nostalgia for the idealised wilderness or the days of the pioneer to celebrations of an altogether different West, shaped by technological modernity in the twentieth century. At each turn, it becomes apparent that the nostalgic dreams of one generation have flowed into those of the next and the next; that the West has long been a dream of a dream. Thus, far more so than simply a wish to return to an actual, particular time and place, Western nostalgia has often expressed a desire for things lost in the modern, standardised world. The conquest and colonisation and settling of the West was after all a geographically dispersed process. It is telling that much Western nostalgia refers back to an approximate time and place, or that specific events become, when viewed through this retrospective lens, mythologised as illustrative of a larger, vague historical moment. The West is the stage for those dreams. Here, it may be significant that Western nostalgia has often been attached to a fleeting moment in national history. Perhaps the Old West continues to exercise such a powerful hold on the American imaginary because it was a time we know, from our own vantage point as nostalgic observers, was destined to pass, an exception in time. It might be imagined as a place apart from the urban, industrial world, with organised society always just outside, about to encroach. Just as we might recall our own feelings of personal loss that we experienced as a child, when a childhood sense of wonder and adventure gave way to the disenchantment of adulthood, as we were reshaped in the standardising and regulating institutions of education and labour, the West, as myth, can speak to us. The Old West can in this way symbolise our own very personal feelings and connect them to a larger, shared national memory and want of a pioneer adventure.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132627676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2150034
Stefan Schubert, E. Ravizza
ABSTRACT In this article, we examine the first season of HBO’s TV show Westworld (2016-present) to analyse whether and how it imagines the American West nostalgically. From the perspective of (American) literary and cultural studies, we introduce a concept of nostalgia as a cultural style that understands nostalgia as situated on a continuum, as potentially located on a cultural artefact or text’s (audio)visual, narrative, and ideological levels, and as detectable in what we call that text’s ‘nostalgic affordances.’ This conceptualisation then allows us to argue for Westworld’s first season as visually more nostalgic and narratively less so, which culminates in an ideologically ambivalent sentiment towards nostalgia for the West(ern). Overall, our approach moves away from generalised, binary judgements of texts as either nostalgic or not and instead suggests a more complex perspective on the minute details of how exactly an artefact can exhibit (a specific kind of) nostalgia, a framework that can be extended to analyses of other pop-cultural imaginations of the West as well.
{"title":"‘They Don’t Make Anything Like They Used To’: Visual, Narrative, and Ideological Nostalgia for the West(ern) in Westworld (2016)","authors":"Stefan Schubert, E. Ravizza","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2150034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2150034","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article, we examine the first season of HBO’s TV show Westworld (2016-present) to analyse whether and how it imagines the American West nostalgically. From the perspective of (American) literary and cultural studies, we introduce a concept of nostalgia as a cultural style that understands nostalgia as situated on a continuum, as potentially located on a cultural artefact or text’s (audio)visual, narrative, and ideological levels, and as detectable in what we call that text’s ‘nostalgic affordances.’ This conceptualisation then allows us to argue for Westworld’s first season as visually more nostalgic and narratively less so, which culminates in an ideologically ambivalent sentiment towards nostalgia for the West(ern). Overall, our approach moves away from generalised, binary judgements of texts as either nostalgic or not and instead suggests a more complex perspective on the minute details of how exactly an artefact can exhibit (a specific kind of) nostalgia, a framework that can be extended to analyses of other pop-cultural imaginations of the West as well.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130687849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2150033
Mike Docherty
ABSTRACT This article proposes that although Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is, like the 1982 Ridley Scott film to which it is a sequel, most obviously located within the genres of science fiction and neo-noir, it in fact engages extensively with the history of the Western genre. Villeneuve’s film, I argue, is a crypto-Western, recuperating Western conventions within the aesthetic superstructure of other genres. Blade Runner 2049 thus exemplifies how even our most future-facing popular culture can exhibit ghostly traces of nostalgia for popular frontier mythologies. The film engages with the debt that the figure of the fictive detective owes to the dime novel cowboys of earlier literature, locating its central thematic discourses about the nature of (post)humanity in a long American tradition of narrative art that glorifies the ‘rugged individualist’. Meanwhile, in the film’s world, human over-exploitation of the environment has, ironically, made the wilderness conditions of the mythologised Western past possible once more. This does not, however, render Blade Runner 2049 a film incapable of imagining the future. Rather, I suggest, the film’s future is plausible precisely because it reckons with the adhesiveness of the past, and little in the American past looms larger than the real-and-imagined old West.
{"title":"Do Android Detectives Dream of Electric Cowboys? Western Retrofuturity in Blade Runner 2049","authors":"Mike Docherty","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2150033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2150033","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article proposes that although Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is, like the 1982 Ridley Scott film to which it is a sequel, most obviously located within the genres of science fiction and neo-noir, it in fact engages extensively with the history of the Western genre. Villeneuve’s film, I argue, is a crypto-Western, recuperating Western conventions within the aesthetic superstructure of other genres. Blade Runner 2049 thus exemplifies how even our most future-facing popular culture can exhibit ghostly traces of nostalgia for popular frontier mythologies. The film engages with the debt that the figure of the fictive detective owes to the dime novel cowboys of earlier literature, locating its central thematic discourses about the nature of (post)humanity in a long American tradition of narrative art that glorifies the ‘rugged individualist’. Meanwhile, in the film’s world, human over-exploitation of the environment has, ironically, made the wilderness conditions of the mythologised Western past possible once more. This does not, however, render Blade Runner 2049 a film incapable of imagining the future. Rather, I suggest, the film’s future is plausible precisely because it reckons with the adhesiveness of the past, and little in the American past looms larger than the real-and-imagined old West.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125250515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2154109
George S. Jaramillo
ABSTRACT The Grand Coulee Dam light show is an audio-visual spectacle unique to the Bureau of Reclamation and the US Federal Government. Its life began as a display of abstract-coloured lights illuminating the falling waters of the dam’s spillways. Its production spans more than 60 years of inspiring people on the history, construction and wonder that is the Grand Coulee Dam, yet the light show or Colorama development and meaning are more than just a collection of light and music. This paper presents a historic entanglement of one of the longest running lightshow displays in the United States. Using performative and assemblage theories, it argues how the light show moves from the ‘technological sublime’ (Nye 1996) towards a multiplicity of agencies of light, water, sound and the concrete of the dam enabling an electric atmosphere. Using historical accounts of the show, imagery and design specifications, the paper explores the interplay of these agencies and the ‘power’ that is exchanged. In a time where industrial heritage is celebrated for its technical acumen and national connection, the light show provides key perspectives into new theoretical avenues of illumination and hydro assemblages.
{"title":"In a Different Light: Performative ‘Power’ Generation of the Historic Light Show at Grand Coulee Dam","authors":"George S. Jaramillo","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2154109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2154109","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Grand Coulee Dam light show is an audio-visual spectacle unique to the Bureau of Reclamation and the US Federal Government. Its life began as a display of abstract-coloured lights illuminating the falling waters of the dam’s spillways. Its production spans more than 60 years of inspiring people on the history, construction and wonder that is the Grand Coulee Dam, yet the light show or Colorama development and meaning are more than just a collection of light and music. This paper presents a historic entanglement of one of the longest running lightshow displays in the United States. Using performative and assemblage theories, it argues how the light show moves from the ‘technological sublime’ (Nye 1996) towards a multiplicity of agencies of light, water, sound and the concrete of the dam enabling an electric atmosphere. Using historical accounts of the show, imagery and design specifications, the paper explores the interplay of these agencies and the ‘power’ that is exchanged. In a time where industrial heritage is celebrated for its technical acumen and national connection, the light show provides key perspectives into new theoretical avenues of illumination and hydro assemblages.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"69 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133818419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2150493
J. Lawler
ABSTRACT As far back as Theodore Roosevelt or Owen Wister and his novel of western grit and masculinity, The Virginian, the American West has been charged with an evocative sense: as virtue, as place, as image. In this paper, I argue that the image, as place and virtue, is exhibited in video games through a built environment that contains the ideas and meaning of the ‘Old West’ and the imagined past, in what I refer to as aged icons. The nostalgia of the American West has been built into the American psyche and is represented in film, T.V., novels, toys, amusement parks, and generalised game play. While digital games are a relative newcomer and their imagery is derivative, their immersive nature allows players the opportunity to explore and live within a world that revels in its own disintegration. The built environment and its contents in the digital play space are shown as having aged themselves – they are falling apart, dilapidated, or contain the death and destruction of a lost era. The aged icon references the buildings and objects within those structures as reinforcing and authenticating a distant and figural past that comports with a broader cultural memory of the ‘Old West.’
{"title":"The Historical Environment as Aged Icon in the Gamed West","authors":"J. Lawler","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2150493","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2150493","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT As far back as Theodore Roosevelt or Owen Wister and his novel of western grit and masculinity, The Virginian, the American West has been charged with an evocative sense: as virtue, as place, as image. In this paper, I argue that the image, as place and virtue, is exhibited in video games through a built environment that contains the ideas and meaning of the ‘Old West’ and the imagined past, in what I refer to as aged icons. The nostalgia of the American West has been built into the American psyche and is represented in film, T.V., novels, toys, amusement parks, and generalised game play. While digital games are a relative newcomer and their imagery is derivative, their immersive nature allows players the opportunity to explore and live within a world that revels in its own disintegration. The built environment and its contents in the digital play space are shown as having aged themselves – they are falling apart, dilapidated, or contain the death and destruction of a lost era. The aged icon references the buildings and objects within those structures as reinforcing and authenticating a distant and figural past that comports with a broader cultural memory of the ‘Old West.’","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134350776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-23DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2112889
R. Maxey
ABSTRACT This essay considers the literary legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892) by arguing that the ‘papered wall’ continues to signify confinement and trauma in the Paris of James Baldwin's novel Giovanni’s Room (1956) and the Boston of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story ‘A Temporary Matter’ (1999). In the first essay to analyse these three texts together, I contend that such comparative reading generates new critical and interpretative insights that further our understanding of these writers’ work. In each text, wallpaper becomes a crucial motif suggesting the absence of a permanent home and the traumatic aftereffects of an unnamed, male baby’s birth. But whereas Gilman focuses upon occluded female experience, Baldwin and Lahiri recuperate a father’s sorrow in the wake of a stillbirth. That Giovanni’s heterosexual relationship and the child it produces cannot survive reveals Baldwin’s striking, mid-century critique of America, France, and Italy as sites of heterosexism and gay oppression. While Baldwin masculinises postpartum grief and anticipates later debates about queer futurity, Lahiri exposes the fragility of an outwardly successful Bengali American couple, whose slippery foothold in late-20th-century America is powerfully exposed through the death of their son.
{"title":"The Legacy of Gilman’s Wallpaper in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘A Temporary Matter’","authors":"R. Maxey","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2112889","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2112889","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay considers the literary legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892) by arguing that the ‘papered wall’ continues to signify confinement and trauma in the Paris of James Baldwin's novel Giovanni’s Room (1956) and the Boston of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story ‘A Temporary Matter’ (1999). In the first essay to analyse these three texts together, I contend that such comparative reading generates new critical and interpretative insights that further our understanding of these writers’ work. In each text, wallpaper becomes a crucial motif suggesting the absence of a permanent home and the traumatic aftereffects of an unnamed, male baby’s birth. But whereas Gilman focuses upon occluded female experience, Baldwin and Lahiri recuperate a father’s sorrow in the wake of a stillbirth. That Giovanni’s heterosexual relationship and the child it produces cannot survive reveals Baldwin’s striking, mid-century critique of America, France, and Italy as sites of heterosexism and gay oppression. While Baldwin masculinises postpartum grief and anticipates later debates about queer futurity, Lahiri exposes the fragility of an outwardly successful Bengali American couple, whose slippery foothold in late-20th-century America is powerfully exposed through the death of their son.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114393129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2128246
Soham Deb Barman
ABSTRACT In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Pacific West Coast of the USA gradually turned into a hotbed of Indian anti-colonial activity. California, in particular, became a point of convergence for Bengali radicals/intellectuals and Punjabi migrant workers. The Ghadar would gradually emerge in 1913 out of the interactions between these two elements. My paper is animated by the understanding that zooming in on Indian anti-colonial activity can be a very productive way of situating California in a transnational historical framework. In my paper, I focus on the interface between the Ghadar movement and the IWW in California. Existing studies have focused on superficial similarities between the two radical movements as a way of explaining their mutual compatibility. Departing from such approaches, I will try to show that similar understandings of time, force, and rupture rendered the Ghadar and IWW compatible at a very fundamental level.
{"title":"Of Martyrs and “Social Dynamites”: The Ghadar and IWW in California","authors":"Soham Deb Barman","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2128246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2128246","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Pacific West Coast of the USA gradually turned into a hotbed of Indian anti-colonial activity. California, in particular, became a point of convergence for Bengali radicals/intellectuals and Punjabi migrant workers. The Ghadar would gradually emerge in 1913 out of the interactions between these two elements. My paper is animated by the understanding that zooming in on Indian anti-colonial activity can be a very productive way of situating California in a transnational historical framework. In my paper, I focus on the interface between the Ghadar movement and the IWW in California. Existing studies have focused on superficial similarities between the two radical movements as a way of explaining their mutual compatibility. Departing from such approaches, I will try to show that similar understandings of time, force, and rupture rendered the Ghadar and IWW compatible at a very fundamental level.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125360102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：