This article examines Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel House of Leaves by looking at the ideas of space and spatiality that are presented through the novel’s content, form, and shape. Employing postmodern narrative devices extensively such as metafiction, multiplicity of narratives, intertextuality, and genre-blurring, House of Leaves makes use of the spatial form and extends it...
The crisis caused by the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers has also shown itself in the fields of art and literature. There are ongoing discussions over the role of the artist/writer after 9/11 and how the events could be best represented. Amy Waldman’s novel The Submission 2011 narrates America’s encounter with its Muslim population after 9/11. Although many 9/11 novels most...
Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother 1997 is a memoir in which she recounts her brother Devon’s AIDS-related death. Sapphire, in Push 1996 , tells the story of a 16-year-old illiterate, obese, poor and HIV-positive African-American teenage girl living with her abusive family. Both Devon and Precious transgress the borders of livable bodies, thus appearing as abject. In My Brother, the...
This article is about the Acadians who are the religious and political exiles of the eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century North American colonies in Elizabeth Nell Dubus’s Cajun 1994 . Dubus’s endeavor to reflect the Acadian cultural heritage in a historical standpoint in the context of the political turmoil and social transformations of these centuries unveils the under-represented...
There are two perspectives on the commoditized present: one, a reified now which is based on a perpetual holiday from social reality and another, a radical contemporaneity which embraces the “foreverness” of the present through a commitment to change. The notion of contemporaneity in Adrienne Rich’s poems written from 2005 onwards especially the volume titled TNPWS: Poems: 2007...
In 1925, a small legal case occurred in Dayton, Tennessee, which came to the fore in the United States. In this case, known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, John T. Scopes, a biology teacher in a high school in Dayton, was accused of violating the law by teaching Darwin’s evolution theory. Fundamentalists believed that this theory was a law of hate, while the liberal aspect approached...
Although the Civil Rights Movement led the way for African American equality during the 1960s, activist women struggled to find a permanent place in the movement since key leaders, such as Stokely Carmichael, were openly discriminating against them and marginalizing their concerns. Women of color, radical women, working class women, and lesbians were ignored, and looked to “women...
Chicana feminist author Cherríe Moraga’s life writing Loving in the War Years 1983 draws on the author’s memories, personal and collective experiences, and identity struggles as a Chicana lesbian of mixed ancestry. As the daughter of an Anglo-American father and a Chicana mother, Moraga depicts her adoption of her Chicana lesbian identity and her rejection of oppression based on...
The golden age of Hollywood westerns produced a series of iconic images, from carriage caravans migrating westward to the blossoming romances between young American men and women trying to survive an unfamiliar landscape. The Hollywood western also functioned as a space for reproducing racialized stereotypes of Native Americans, in particular the Noble Savage or the Bloodthirsty...
At the turn of the twentieth century, wage-earning women in progressive America had to succumb to a vicious, precarious system in which they were disadvantaged when compared to their male counterparts. In an attempt to illuminate on the working girl problem in big cities, Dorothy Richardson, a reporter from the New York Herald, took up undercover investigative journalism...
In “Darwin's Unfinished Notes to Emma,” Amy Newman's speaker, Charles Darwin, writes notes to his Victorian wife Emma in an effort to explain the joy in sensuality that he finds in the animal world. Through the poem, the speaker, ostensibly Darwin, often censors himself because he cannot challenge his wife's Victorian values. Thus the poem documents the speaker's struggle with...
The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers presents a unique narrative situation with a narrator who may be called communal, because he identifies himself with the townspeople, narrates what is known by them, and his knowledge of the events and the characters are limited to the geographical limits of the town. As a balladeer he narrates an event that concerns the townspeople...
This article examines Wendy Wasserstein’s commentary on the backlash against to the Second Wave of Feminism through one of her most serious plays, An American Daughter 1997 . It explores how and why men participated in the backlash against feminism, resulting in the downfall of Second Wave feminists. The analysis concludes that men reacted to the Second Wave in a reactionary...
Prof. Dr. Necla Aytür, the pioneer of American Studies in Turkey, died on October 7, 2017. Her loss has been heavily felt by her colleagues and students, as well as by the general reading public.
Watergate continues to overshadow how President Richard Nixon is remembered in American society. Perhaps one reason for this is because not all of the various actors—perpetrators, investigators, and prosecutors of the scandal—have died. Until the last obituary of a Watergate figure is written, it is unlikely the perception of Nixon will significantly change. However, as the dust...
Joan Hoff, currently Research Professor of History at Montana State University, is a recognized expert on the modern American presidency. She has served as president and CEO of the Center for the Study of the President as well as executive director of the Organization of American Historians OAH . Hoff’s 1994 acclaimed work, Nixon Reconsidered, argues that Nixon should primarily...
This paper explores the role of the Nixon administration in the development of civil rights policies for Latinos in the United States in order to examine the complexity of Nixon’s position in the typical leftright orientation of US politics. The Latino civil rights movement in the late 1960s and 1970s insisted that Latinos experienced unique linguistic and cultural disadvantages...
This article focuses on President Richard Nixon’s handling of US-Soviet relations in the first three years of his presidency. Set within a framework of US foreign policy for the 1970s, the article traces the development of Nixon’s approach to the Soviet leaders and their Communist ideology and identifies characteristic rhetorical devices around which the president structured his...
This article establishes Richard Nixon as a vital figure in the development of literary characterization in the United States from the late-twentieth to early-twenty-first centuries. During Nixon’s lifetime, tension between postmodernist and realist modes of representation dominated the U.S. literary landscape. As portrayals of Nixon in literature evolved from those of caricature...
This article examines how the global and domestic perceptions of Richard Nixon have evolved between his time in office and 2016. One of the main themes of this study is how the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation impacted the American political scene. Using scholarly works as well as contemporary media sources as a basis for analysis, I argue that Nixon’s legacy is as...
The Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young, with obvious ironical intent, once offered a lyric that maintains “Even Richard Nixon has got soul.” The significance of Young’s song is its demonstration of how over the years Nixon has been othered. At the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, a collection of “official paintings” of the American presidents are on...
On behalf of the board and the members of the American Studies Association of Turkey I am saddened to announce the passing of Professor Robert Bertholf at his home in Austin, Texas on February 19, 2016. Professor Bertholf began his academic career at Bowdoin College where he earned his BA before moving on to University of Oregon where he received his PhD. From 1968 through 1979...
The “Orient” with its so-called exotic, mystified and mythicized elements has been a crucial staple for the Western imagination. For centuries, Western artists have imitated and re constructed idiosyncratic elements of the East in different ways, such as Turquerie or Arabesque. On the other hand, the predominantly “decorative Orientalism” of the pre-modern period transformed into...
Using Robert Staples’ concept of “the masculine mystique,” this article explores the protagonist, Troy Maxson’s desire to conform the expectations of the masculine mystique in August Wilson’s Fences. Troy emerges from a battered past and as someone who once dreamed of swinging for the fences—playing professional baseball—but is consigned to being a garbage man. His perception of...
This article analyzes HBO’s True Blood as a subversive Gothic allegory for 21st century America. In its polysemic, excessive and hybrid universe, the show allows for different power discourses from American society to be explored. True Blood can be seen as a gothic/fantastic allegory that shows that the current debate surrounding American identity today—which is based on the idea...