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- Volume 21, Issue 3, 2002
European Journal of American Culture - Volume 21, Issue 3, 2002
Volume 21, Issue 3, 2002
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The secret country: prohibited desire and social change in Jayne Anne Phillips' Bess
More LessThis essay considers the historical and social contexts of incest in Jayne Anne Phillips' short story Bess. The tension between endogamy and exogamy shapes Phillips' narrative; a narrative that moves between memory and the unspoken. The sibling relationship at the centre of the story reflects the effects of increased industrialization in Appalachia in the early decades of the twentieth century.
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A terrible beauty: the nuclear sublime in Philip Ridley's The Reflecting Skin (1991)
More LessThis article explores a filmic treatment of the dynamics of an American nuclear sublime - the awe-inspiring effects of atomic explosions. Critiquing the kind of visual abstraction involved in the nuclear sublime, the film links a nuclear aesthetic to commodity fetishism and empiricist methodology, which, in privileging appearances, are essentially reductivist. The film suggests that this kind of abstraction negates critical faculties, aligns the individual with dominant thought and practice detrimental to the self, and turns the subject into its own enemy.
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Who's afraid of cooking vegetables? Changing conceptions of American vegetarianism 18501990
By Liora GvionThis essay examines the changing attitude toward vegetarianism in America in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century. Vegetarianism in America has never effectively challenged the primacy of meat in American cuisine. Instead it recurrently centres on the ability to dress meatless dishes in the image of meat and on decontextualizing, appropriating and recontextualizing vegetarian dishes into meat-oriented cuisine. The construction of a cuisine whose boundaries encompassed two culinary doctrines proved to be a mechanism that compelled meat-oriented cuisine to respond to vegetarianism and prevented the latter from developing into an independent culinary discourse. Exploring the dimensions of these processes reveals that the boundary between the apparent autonomy of cuisines on the one hand and arenas of power on the other has proved highly permeable: economic and political considerations have affected the popularity and acceptance of the culinary schools shaping American vegetarianism.
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Carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives: Reality and Star Trek's Multiple Histories
More LessThis paper looks at Star Trek's multiple versions of history, and specifically at how the series has created its own sense of history to help legitimate its fictional narrative. It examines how fans have related and interacted with the text and used it to fulfil their own creative desires and needs and how they have helped shape its reputation as America's televised social conscience. Star Trek is often quoted as a way of expressing one's dream. This paper highlights how the fans have contributed to that dream, inspired by the utopian idealism manifested through Star Trek's ideological mediation of future history. The paper will consider how its enduring popularity results from the fact that it takes only a handful of plot narratives as its basis. One of these narratives is the way the referential, retrospective, socially-aware portrayal of historical events interfaces with its own fictional history. Star Trek's representation of a reality through its fictitious future has not only been entrenched as a possible outcome for society; it has become as David Gerrold puts it, a representation of a future we would like to make real. The paper concludes that fan activity and Star Trek's own fictional history combine together to form an expanding alternative reality - one which is distinctly American in outlook - for its devoted fanbase. Ironically, this alternate world that most fans long to be a part of exists because of their own attempts to live within the boundaries of Star Trek. Their activities legitimize the fictional reality portrayed on screen whilst at the same time it is being perpetuated and revitalized. However, as a result of this union between fan and Star Trek there is a divisive difference between what fans believe is part of the fictional universe surrounding the series and what the creators and producers of the show see as authorized within the confines of the episodes aired on screen.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 42 (2023)
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Volume 41 (2022)
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Volume 40 (2021)
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Volume 39 (2020)
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Volume 38 (2019)
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Volume 37 (2018)
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Volume 36 (2017)
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Volume 35 (2016)
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Volume 34 (2015)
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Volume 33 (2014)
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Volume 32 (2013)
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Volume 31 (2012)
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Volume 30 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 29 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 28 (2009)
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Volume 27 (2008)
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Volume 26 (2007 - 2008)
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Volume 25 (2005 - 2007)
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Volume 24 (2005)
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Volume 23 (2004)
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Volume 22 (2003)
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Volume 21 (2002)
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Volume 20 (2001 - 2002)