The Rhizomatic West

The Rhizomatic West
Author: Neil Campbell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2008-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780803217836

Is the American West in Sergio Leone?s ?spaghetti westerns? the same American West we find in Douglas Coupland?s Generation X? In Jim Jarmusch?s movies? In Calexico?s music? Or is the American West, as this book tells us, a constantly moving, mutating idea within a complex global culture? And what, precisely (or better yet, imprecisely) does it mean? ø Using Gilles Deleuze and Fälix Guattari?s concept of the rhizome, Neil Campbell shows how the West (or west-ness) continually breaks away from a mainstream notion of American ?rootedness? and renews and transforms itself in various cultural forms. A region long traversed by various transient peoples (from tribes and conquerors to immigrants, traders, and trappers), the West reflects a mythic quest for settlement, permanence, and synthesis?even notions of a national or global identity?at odds with its rootless history, culture, and nature. Crossing the concept of ?roots? with ?routes,? this book shows how notions of the West?in representations ranging from literature and film to photography, music, and architectural theory?give expression to ideas about identity, nationhood, and belonging in a world increasingly defined by movement across time and borders. The Rhizomatic West offers a new vision of the American West as a hybrid, performative space, a staging place for myriad intersecting and constantly changing identities.

Post-Westerns

Post-Westerns
Author: Neil Campbell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1496209621

During the post-World War II period, the Western, like America's other great film genres, appeared to collapse as a result of revisionism and the emergence of new forms. Perhaps, however, as theorists like Gilles Deleuze suggest, it remains, simply "maintaining its empty frame." Yet this frame is far from empty, as Post-Westerns shows us: rather than collapse, the Western instead found a new form through which to scrutinize and question the very assumptions on which the genre was based. Employing the ideas of critics such as Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Rancière, Neil Campbell examines the haunted inheritance of the Western in contemporary U.S. culture. His book reveals how close examination of certain postwar films--including Bad Day at Black Rock, The Misfits, Lone Star, Easy Rider, Gas Food Lodging, Down in the Valley, and No Country for Old Men--reconfigures our notions of region and nation, the Western, and indeed the West itself. Campbell suggests that post-Westerns are in fact "ghost-Westerns," haunted by the earlier form's devices and styles in ways that at once acknowledge and call into question the West, both as such and in its persistent ideological framing of the national identity and values.

Kafka

Kafka
Author: Gilles Deleuze
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 1986
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780816615155

In Kafka Deleuze and Guattari free their subject from his (mis)intrepreters. In contrast to traditional readings that see in Kafka's work a case of Oedipalized neurosis or a flight into transcendence, guilt, and subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari make a case for Kafka as a man of joy, a promoter of radical politics who resisted at every turn submission to frozen hierarchies.

The North American West in the Twenty-First Century

The North American West in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Brenden W. Rensink
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2022
Genre: HISTORY
ISBN: 1496230434

This edited volume takes stories from the "modern West" of the late twentieth century and carefully pulls them toward the present--explicitly tracing continuity with and unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Brokeback Book

The Brokeback Book
Author: William R. Handley
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2011-05-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0803226640

An American Western made by a Taiwanese director and filmed in Canada, Brokeback Mountain was a global cultural phenomenon even before it became the highest grossing gay-themed drama in film history.øFew films have inspired as much passion and debate, or produced as many contradictory responses, from online homage to late-night parody. In this wide-ranging and incisive collection, writers, journalists, scholars, and ordinary viewers explore the film and Annie Proulx?s original story as well asøtheir ongoing cultural and political significance. The contributors situate Brokeback Mountain in relation to gay civil rights, the cinematic and literary Western, the Chinese value of forbearance, male melodrama, and urban and rural working lives across generations and genders. ø The Brokeback Book builds on earlier debates by novelist David Leavitt, critic Daniel Mendelsohn, producer James Schamus, and film reviewer Kenneth Turan with new and noteworthy interpretations of the Brokeback phenomenon, the film, and its legacy. Also appearing in print for the first time is Michael Silverblatt?s interview with Annie Proulx about the story she wrote and the film it became.

EPZ Thousand Plateaus

EPZ Thousand Plateaus
Author: Gilles Deleuze
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 716
Release: 2004-09-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780826476944

‘A rare and remarkable book.' Times Literary Supplement Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. He is a key figure in poststructuralism, and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Félix Guattari (1930-1992) was a psychoanalyst at the la Borde Clinic, as well as being a major social theorist and radical activist. A Thousand Plateaus is part of Deleuze and Guattari's landmark philosophical project, Capitalism and Schizophrenia - a project that still sets the terms of contemporary philosophical debate. A Thousand Plateaus provides a compelling analysis of social phenomena and offers fresh alternatives for thinking about philosophy and culture. Its radical perspective provides a toolbox for ‘nomadic thought' and has had a galvanizing influence on today's anti-capitalist movement. Translated by Brian Massumi>

Before the West Was West

Before the West Was West
Author: Amy T. Hamilton
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2014
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0803265328

Before the West Was West examines the extent to which scholars have engaged in-depth with pre-1800 “western” texts and asks what we mean by “western” American literature in the first place and when that designation originated. Calling into question the implicit temporal boundaries of the “American West” in literature, a literature often viewed as having commenced only at the beginning of the 1800s, Before the West Was West explores the concrete, meaningful connections between different texts as well as the development of national ideologies and mythologies. Examining pre-nineteenth-century writings that do not fit conceptions of the Wild West or of cowboys, cattle ranching, and the Pony Express, these thirteen essays demonstrate that no single, unified idea or geography defines the American West. Contributors investigate texts ranging from the Norse Vinland Sagas and Mary Rowlandson’s famous captivity narrative to early Spanish and French exploration narratives, an eighteenth-century English novel, and a play by Aphra Behn. Through its examination of the disparate and multifaceted body of literature that arises from a broad array of cultural backgrounds and influences, Before the West Was West apprehends the literary West in temporal as well as spatial and cultural terms and poses new questions about “westernness” and its literary representation.

Poetics of Relation

Poetics of Relation
Author: Édouard Glissant
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1997
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780472066292

A major work by this prominent Caribbean author and philosopher, available for the first time in English

American Cultural Studies

American Cultural Studies
Author: Neil C. Campbell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2005-08-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1134796927

Drawing on literature, art, film theatre, music and much more, American Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary introduction to American culture for those taking American Studies. This textbook: * introduces the full range and variety of American culture including issues of race, gender and youth * provides a truly interdisciplinary methodology * suggests and discusses a variety of approaches to study * highlights American distinctiveness * draws on literature, art, film, theatre, architecture, music and more * challenges orthodox paradigms of American Studies. This is a fast-expanding subject area, and Campbell and Kean's book will certainly be a staple part of any cultural studies student's reading diet.

Lost in the New West

Lost in the New West
Author: Mark Asquith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-10-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501349546

Lost in the New West investigates a group of writers – John Williams, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx and Thomas McGuane – who have sought to explore the tensions inherent to the Western, where the distinctions between old and new, myth and reality, authenticity and sentimentality are frequently blurred. Collectively these authors demonstrate a deep-seated attachment to the landscape, people and values of the West and offer a critical appraisal of the dialogue between the contemporary West and its legacy. Mark Asquith draws attention to the idealistic young men at the center of such works as Williams's Butcher's Crossing (1960), McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) and Border Trilogy, Proulx's Wyoming stories and McGuane's Deadrock novels. For each writer, these characters struggle to come to terms with the difference between the suspect mythology of the West that shapes their identity and the reality that surrounds them. They are, in short, lost in the new West.