Ellen McCracken - Böcker

This is a study of more than 50 glossy publications for women in the United States today, including the beauty and fashion titles, the service and home magazines, those aimed at minority readerships, new female workers, and women with special-interests and spending power. The analysis focuses on the strategies by which the commercial structure shapes the cultural content, the magazines' repetitive attempts to secure a consensus about the feminine that is grounded in consumerism and the contradictory semiotic structures at work within and between purchased advertisements, covert advertisements and editorial features.

This volume analyzes the Serial podcast, situating it in the trajectory of other popular crime narratives and contemporary cultural theory. Contributors focus on topics such as the ethics of the use of fiction techniques in investigative journalism, the epistemological overlay of postmodern indeterminacy, and the audience’s prolific activity in social media, examining the competing narrative strategies of the narrators, characters, and the audience. Other topics considered include the multiplication of narratives and the longing for closure, how our minds work as we experience true crime narratives, and what critical race theory can teach us about the program’s strategies.

The Chicano Movement, el movimiento, is known as the largest and most expansive civil rights and empowerment movement by Mexican Americans up to that time. It made Chicanos into major American political actors and laid the foundation for today's Latino political power. Rewriting the Chicano Movement is a collection of powerful new essays on the Chicano Movement that expand and revise our understanding of the movement. These essays capture the commitment, courage, and perseverance of movement activists, both men and women, and their struggles to achieve the promises of American democracy.The essays in this volume broaden traditional views of the Chicano Movement that are too narrow and monolithic. Instead, the contributors to this book highlight the role of women in the movement, the regional and ideological diversification of the movement, and the various cultural fronts in which the movement was active. Rewriting the Chicano Movement stresses that there was no single Chicano Movement but instead a composite of movements committed to the same goal of Chicano self-determination. Scholars, students, and community activists interested in the history of the Chicano Movement can best start by reading this book.Contributors: Holly Barnet-Sanchez, Tim Drescher, JesÚs Jesse Esparza, Patrick Fontes, Mario T. GarcÍa, Tiffany JasmÍn GonzÁlez, Ellen McCracken, Juan Pablo Mercado, Andrea MuÑoz, Michael Anthony Turcios, Omar Valerio-JimÉnez

New Mexico's first Franciscan priest, Fray Angélico Cheavez (1910-1996) is known as a prolific historian, a literary and artistic figure, and an intellectual who played a vital role in Santa Fe's community of writers. The original essays collected here explore his wide-ranging cultural production: fiction, poetry, architectural restoration, journalism, genealogy, translation, and painting and drawing. Several essays discuss his approach to history, his archival research, and the way in which he re-centers ethnic identity in the prevalent Anglo-American master historical narrative. Others examine how he used fiction to bring history alive and combined visual and verbal elements to enhance his narratives. Two essays explore Chávez's profession as a friar. The collection ends with recollections by Thomas E. Chávez, historian and Fray Angélico's nephew.Readers familiar with Chávez's work as well as those learning about it for the first time will find much that surprises and informs in these essays.

Winner of the Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library AssociationAs a teenager, Manuel Chávez (1910-1996) left his native New Mexico for over a decade of study at the St. Francis Seraphic Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and other midwestern institutions. Included in his curriculum was an introduction to literature and the arts that piqued an interest that would follow him the remainder of his life. Upon returning to New Mexico, he was ordained Fray Angélico Chávez and would become one of New Mexico's most important twentieth-century writers. In The Life and Writing of Fray Angélico Chávez, Ellen McCracken provides a literary biography that includes a deep look into the intellectual and cultural contributions of this Renaissance man. McCracken moves chronologically through a substantial body of work that includes fiction, poetry, plays, essays, spiritual tracts, sermons, historical writing, translation, painting, church renovation, and journalism. From the prolific creativity of the years of his first assignment in Peña Blanca to the decades he spent researching Hispano genealogy in New Mexico, McCracken traces Chávez's complex and changing identity as an ethnic American and religious subject who was also an historian, artist, creative writer, and preservationist. The year 2010 will mark the centenary of Fray Angélico Chávez's birth, and this volume will serve as a fitting tribute.

Part of a new phase of post-1960s U.S. Latino literature, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz and Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros both engage in unique networks of paratexts that center on the performance of latinidad.