"The predicament of [20th century] culture,
Since its appearance as a major means of "mass communication
Since the late 1960s feminist authors have been writing prolifically in the genre of science fiction SF , often merging and overlapping the other genres of fantasy. In its present practice, SF has become a blanket term covering nearly all the genres of fantasy, including utopian and dystopian fiction, the mystery, and the Gothic tale. As such, it has a special appeal to feminist...
A standard Turkish concept about archaeology, one attested by my students, Note 1 is that Turkey is exceptionally rich in archaeological remains and, as a result, foreigners naturally want to work here. But the world is full of archaeological remains, even North America. The reasons why American and other foreign archaeologists might choose to undertake research in Turkey instead...
I have been teaching American literature at a number of colleges and universities in the Arab world. My students, seniors and graduate students, have so far been Muslim Arabs, mostly from Jordan, and, more recently, from the United Arab Emirates. Most have been majoring in English including American literature , the rest in linguistics. Some take American literature nineteenth...
The heroine of Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine experiences "the tug of opposing forces" as she travels from India to America. This conflict sets up a constant pattern of "Hope and pain. Pain and hope." Jasmine embarks on a symbolic as well as a literal journey that explores both the physical and spiritual dimensions of her experience. Mukherjee contrasts the paradoxical pattern of...
By recognizing certain problematics of Maxine Hong Kingston's cultural translation in The Woman Warrior, I question in this article the context in which Asian American ethnicity is delimited within American domestic politics and sustained in narratives of Americanization. Only by calling this context into question can we realize that Kingston's personal ambivalence towards...
Many postmodern writers who denounce and renounce established cultural and artistic canons, on aesthetic as well as ideological grounds, point out that literature does more than solely reflect repressive societal conditions, and that, in fact, at various stages in the development of modern civilization, works of literature significantly contributed to the creation of such...
While recreating the textures of their own and other black women's lives in their works, contemporary African-American women poets often play the roles of social critics and revisionist historians. As such, they try to keep alive the memory of the black American female experience, to reveal some of its ignored or suppressed aspects, and to address certain problems related to it...
At the core of "The Bear,
Raymond Federman defines his novel Double or Nothing 1971 as a constant movement in language, as one long and incessant improvisation LeClair and McCaffery 130-31 . Federman's statement points to a basic resemblance between a jam session and the act of writing. It underlines a certain aspect of his work, namely its apparently spontaneous, performatory nature. Especially his...
"What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism" Nietzsche 3 . Such was Nietzsche's prophecy in The Will toPower. According to him, nihilism means the highest values devaluating themselves; aim is lacking and "Why?" finds no answer.
The last decade has seen an enormous explosion as well as a rapid institutionalization and professionalization of cultural studies as a distinct academic field in the US. Although cultural studies is far from being a homogenous and uniform enterprise, a number of strands can easily be outlined today as its defining characteristics. As these are examined, it becomes clear that...
How can we understand the 1996 American election? Is it the spectacle described in the media: a horse race between preening candidates, a circus which turns politics into theater? Or are there actually important issues behind the personality contests? Several recent books by political scientists and historians help us to put the forthcoming American election in perspective. I...
One of the great philosophers and educators of the 20th century, the American John Dewey, visited the newly established Republic of Turkey in the summer of 1924. This article deals with that visit, made on the invitation of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, first president and founder of the Turkish Republic. The visit was not intended as an analogy to Plato's visit to Sicily in order to...
Theories of colonialism emphasize materialistic domination and analyze from the point of view of the colonizer. The primary focus is on the powerful forms of political, economic and cultural domination, and sometimes the effects of disease. Yet the views of the colonized deserve greater attention. In North America, Native communities survived 500 years of colonialism. How? Why...
With six Academy Awards Forrest Gump is the most celebrated movie of the recent season. Not only has the film garnered thirteen nominations from the Academy of Motion Pictures, but the Screen Actors Guild, the Foreign Press Association, the Writers Guild of America, and People's Choice, not to mention Harvard University's Hasty Pudding Society, have already honored the movie. For...
The political and economic power of the working classes has only rarely and temporarily risen to a level of direct influence on the traditions that constitute literary practices as a dominant cultural form. It is therefore difficult to talk about a tradition of working-class poetry in a way that does not reduce it to middle-class terms, according to which it would be viewed as a...
In the middle of his epic poem The Cantos, Ezra Pound devotes eighty pages to retelling the life of one of America's founding fathers, its second president, John Quincey Adams. This paper argues that this section of the poem, Cantos LXII to LXXII, known as The Adams Cantos, demonstrates Pound's belief that the American Revolution should be seen as an exemplary 'text
The object and scope of issues such as the way a reader responds to a literary text and the way s/he begins to evaluate it can not be fully grasped unless we understand the subject positions conferred upon the reader by the text itself. That is what Kaja Silverman posits in The Subject of Semiotics by drawing on the connections between semiotics and poststructuralist...
For most of this century, William James's reputation quietly included assumptions about his political and cultural role. For example, Ralph Henry Gabriel believed that his ideas were "reminiscent of the frontier" 336 , and Henry Steele Commager maintained that James's philosophy "reflected qualities in the American character" that were "wonderfully adapted to the average American...
Alice Walker examines in her fiction the black women's search for selfhood through an analysis of the individual's relationship to the community. In Walker's novels, the black women's struggle to claim their selves, in order to change their lives and secure a rightful place within the social network of relationships they themselves constitute, usually absorbs the psychic pain...
One of the significant developments in the US over the past decades has been the revision of the literary canon, that had once been white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant and, needless to add, predominantly male. This meant, not only the incorporation of female authors as well as writers of various ethnic minorities who were or would have been neglected or undermined previously, but also...
This paper examines first what 'Hollywood UK
One of the major events in the American film industry today is the emergence of a new Chinese-American cinema. Its advent heralds a major corrective to Hollywood's stereotypical minority images and allows minority film-makers themselves to decide on their own image. For, Chinese-Americans well know that the way they are shown in the media often determines the way they are treated...