Sabine Sielke - Böcker

Reading Rape examines how American culture talks about sexual violence and explains why, in the latter twentieth century, rape achieved such significance as a trope of power relations. Through attentive readings of a wide range of literary and cultural representations of sexual assault--from antebellum seduction narratives and "realist" representations of rape in nineteenth-century novels to Deliverance, American Psycho, and contemporary feminist accounts--Sabine Sielke traces the evolution of a specifically American rhetoric of rape. She considers the kinds of cultural work that this rhetoric has performed and finds that rape has been an insistent figure for a range of social, political, and economic issues. Sielke argues that the representation of rape has been a major force in the cultural construction of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and indeed national identity. At the same time, her acute analyses of both canonical and lesser-known texts explore the complex anxieties that motivate such constructions and their function within the wider cultural imagination.Provoked in part by contemporary feminist criticism, Reading Rape also challenges feminist positions on sexual violence by interrogating them as part of the history in which rape has been a convenient and conventional albeit troubling trope for other concerns and conflicts. This book teaches us what we talk about when we talk about rape. And what we're talking about is often something else entirely: power, money, social change, difference, and identity.

This handbook offers scholars an overview of the state of research and students a sense of how American poetry – from its first forms evolving in the 17th-century settler colonies to its current digital modes – has addressed issues and experiences central to human consciousness and to political life over five centuries of cultural practice. At the same time, it aims to show how poetry, philosophy, and theory have always been involved in productive dialogues.

This collection of essays explores the poetics and politics of US-American poetry’s diverse and distinct investments in the imaginary space of ‘the Orient’. Reading American poets – from Emily Dickinson to Frank Bidart, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Kimiko Hahn – the contributions show how tropes of the Orient have fabricated screens onto which we project matters by no means foreign, but very close to home. As we accompany American poets on their journeys East, we are bound to arrive in – culturally specific – territories of the West. Traversing cultural crossroads and rediscovering places as ‘exotic’ as Banyan ashrams and Bostonian living rooms, these expeditions shed new light on crucial moments of American literary and cultural history. And, on the way, they reassess what Edward Said, thirty years ago, conceived of as Orientalism, and how far this concept has travelled in the meantime.

Rather than turning backward and remembering 9/11, this book sets out to reflect on how the events of September 11, 2001, have shifted our perspectives on a whole series of political, economic, social, and cultural processes. Beyond 9/11 raises the question how the intense debates on the 2001 terrorist attacks and their aftermaths have come to shape our present moment and frame what lies ahead. At the same time, this collection acknowledges that the label «9/11» has often bracketed cultural complexities we have only begun to understand. In Beyond 9/11, contributors from the fields of American studies, political science, economics, history, theology, and the arts reappraise the cultural climate and the global impact of the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Once a center of transatlantic cultural exchange and the avant-garde arts, New York City has transformed into a global metropolis. This book traces a shift that took shape as cultural practices and media underwent dramatic changes: it takes us from modernist visions of urban sublimity to postmodernist cityscapes; from Hart Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge to the Flushing Meadows fairgrounds; from Mina Loy’s poetics to Klaus Nomi’s transgressive musical performances and Jem Cohen’s multimedia experiments; from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and the Magnum Photos portfolio to post-9/11 cinema and the photo blogs of the internet age. As we visit these urban spaces and dreamscapes, we enter territories that remain contested, dynamic locales in a city that keeps unfolding its transformative force.