 |
2006 | |
 |
3/year | |
 |
English | |
|
literature, culture, the arts and "American Studies," history, social sciences, and international relations |
|
 |
1991-9336 | |
 |
European Association for American Studies | |
 |
||
The Director of this publication is the President of the European Association for American Studies, Professor Philip John Davies, The Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, London davies@eaas.eu. Editor for literature, culture, the arts and “American Studies”: Marek Paryż (Poland) Associate editors John Dumbrell (Great Britain) Andrew Gross (Germany) Roxana Oltean (Romania) Jean-Yves Pellegrin (France) Editor for history, social sciences and international relations: Jenel Virden Book Reviews Editor: Theodora Tsimpouki (Greece) tsimpouki@enl.uoa.gr Editor for web presence: Cara Rodway (Great Britain) |
||
 |
||
EJAS publishes both solicited and unsolicited articles. The editors also welcome proposals for special issues. All submissions should be addressed to the Senior Editorial team in the first instance: Dr Marek Paryż (m.a.paryz@uw.edu.pl), Dr Jenel Virden (J.Virden@hull.ac.uk) and Dr Cara Rodway (cara.rodway@bl.uk). EJAS publishes articles under the Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license. The full terms and conditions of the license can be viewed athttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/. Articles must be in English. Contributions should be between 5,000 and 10,000 words, unless previous arrangements have been made with the editors. The article should be preceded by a short abstract. Bibliographical references and general presentation should follow the MLA style sheet for literature, culture and the arts, and the Chicago Manual of Style for history, social sciences and international relations. In-text references should be indicated in the typescript, between parentheses, by giving the author’s surname followed by the year of publication and a page reference if necessary. All articles will be made anonymous and handed over to two referees whose reports shall be synthesized by the editorial team and provide the basis for acceptance or rejection. In both cases the author shall be given immediate notice. Reports will be provided to authors upon request. Even when an article is accepted, the editorial board reserves the right to ask for changes, both in form and scope. |
||
 |
||
Marek Paryż (m.a.paryz@uw.edu.pl) Contact person responsible for updating content for ASA: |
||
European Journal of American Studies
|
EJAS is the official, peer-reviewed academic journal of the European Association for American Studies, a federation of 21 national and joint-national associations of specialists of the United States (http://www.eaas.eu) gathering approximately 4,000 scholars from 27 European countries. EJAS aims to foster European views on the society, culture, history, and politics of the United States, and how the US interacts with other countries in these fields. In doing so the journal places itself firmly within the continuing discussion amongst Europeans on the nature, history, importance, impact and problems of US civilization. As part of this task, EJAS wants to contribute to enriching the contents, broadening the scope, and documenting the critical examination of “American Studies” in and outside of the United States. EJAS welcomes contributions from Europe and elsewhere and endeavors to make available reliable information and state-of-the-art research on all topics within its broad field of interest. As a matter of policy, the journal will pay particular attention to objects, phenomena and issues less documented or less often debated in the United States, as well as to innovative cultural modes and the diversity of reception of United States culture abroad. Associated with this outlook, it welcomes submissions that elaborate and renew critical approaches, paradigms and methodologies, and that express varied and pluralist views. While intended for the entire American Studies community, EJAS aims in particular to provide space for the rapid publication of quality scholarship by doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. The journal hopes to constitute a genuine forum for European Americanists of all generations, national origins and disciplinary affiliations. |
EJAS 8.1 2013, Volume 8, Number 1
Black Suns of Melancholy Hart Crane's Treatment of the Sun Motif in the Light of Mircea Eliade's Study of Solar Cults
The aim of the article is to examine Hart Crane's use of solar imagery in the light of Mircea Eliade's study of solar cults. The Crane poem under consideration is his elegy for Harry Crosby, a publisher, fellow poet and friend, who was a sun devotee and one of the most flamboyant figures on the 1920s American literary scene. The work by Eliade on which the article draws is his seminal book Patterns in Comparative Religion. Filtered through the insights provided by the Romanian-born scholar, Crane's elegy, all too often dismissed as a minor poem, takes on new meanings. In the light of Eliade's illuminating analysis of solar symbolism and the role the sun plays in different cultures, the poem emerges as a carefully constructed reflection on the artist's fate. The article demonstrates that Crane's use of seemingly familiar solar imagery may in fact serve to highlight the need for inspiration, the pursuit of perfection and completeness or the yearning for artistic immortality - issues inscribed into a neo romantic view of the artist's condition.
"Narrative Cloggers": Notes on Description and Subversion in Nicholson Baker's Fiction
This paper argues that the proliferating descriptive passages in Nicholson Baker's novels seem to short-circuit narrative progression instead of being mere additives to the narrative, in a textual exploration which blurs the traditional distinction between description and narration.
The essay focuses on three of Baker's novels and comments on the evolution in Baker's work between 1988 and 2003, from the exuberant description of objects in The Mezzanine (1988), to a more intimate rehistoricizing of the object as a trace of the narrator's experience as a family man in Room Temperature (1990), to the repeated encoding of daily life as an ever-renewed mystery in A Box of Matches (2003).
Dwelling on the various strategies at work in Baker's descriptions (such as his frequent experiment with conjunction and disjunction, or his particular use of metaphor and metonymy), this paper also shows how the humorous defamiliarization of the visible contributes to the resistance of the texts. From the emphasis on material objects (and the body) to that on the materiality of signifiers, this leads to a discussion of the metatextual dimension of description.
Stereotypes and Trauma: Germany in John Hawkes's The Cannibal and Walter Abish's How German Is It
This article examines the representation of Germany in John Hawkes's The Cannibal (1949) and Walter Abish's How German Is It (1979). The two texts are brought together because the fictional versions of Germany they represent are constructed via a calculated employment of stereotyped images of the country. Here, I reconsider this use of stereotype, and discuss the relationship of the two novels with the traumatic events that constitute the background radiation to them. I draw out similarities in the novels' textual engagement with trauma, stereotype, and narrative stylistics, but also differences - differences which are, in part, the result of the very different contexts, both literary and historical, in which the texts were written. By drawing on Abish's autobiographical text Double Vision: a Self Portrait (2004) I argue that How German Is It might be profitably read as a "working through" of the author's own traumatic relationship with his past, which allows me to briefly discuss more generally the role of fiction, memory and trauma.
From Huckleberry Finn to The Shawshank Redemption: Race and the American Imagination in the Biracial Escape Film
Menace II Society? Urban Poverty and Underclass Narratives in American Movies
"Menace II Society?" investigates cinematic portrayals of American urban poverty and the urban underclass as part of an ongoing public discourse on the nature of the urban poor, the causes and conditions of their poverty, and the appropriate responses from society. Movies have tended to portray poverty as environmentally caused and sustained, often directing ambitious characters toward criminality with a to-understand-all-is-to-forgive-all logic. During the silent and Depression eras, movies featured the urban poor prominently, but afterwards their role drastically shrunk and did not regain its place until the black underclass films of the 1990s, which, in a softened version of '60s radical critiques, redefined the deserving poor as rejecting the dominant socioeconomic system in favor of an often hedonistic rebellion. Subsequent white underclass movies followed this pattern, but more recently the American Dream has reasserted itself in popular underclass films, sounding a more positive note.
What's the matter with Benjamin O. Flower? Populism, antimonopoly politics and the "paranoid style" at the turn of the century
This article proposes a reconstructive understanding of Populism from the perspective of Boston reform editor Benjamin O. Flower, one of its main publicists. It purposes both to recapture the meaning of "Populism" as it was understood in the 1890s and to trace its fate at the beginning of the 20th century - the ambiguous evolution of Flower, from champion of radical reforms to anti-Catholic crusader at the end of his life, will be used as a case study to examine how and why Populism might overlap with paranoid-style politics. This paper argues that such intellectual trajectories as Flower's should not be dismissed as the expression of populist psychopathology but can be best understood as the byproduct of ideological conflicts within Progressivism. Populism could then be considered as just one moment in the confrontation between the more radical antimonopoly strand of Progressivism and the managerial liberalism fostered by the more technocratic elements among Progressives.
Coming to Accounts: Fraud and Muckraking in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition
This article traces the rhetoric of accounting in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century racial discourse, from its initial use by slave traders, to its reinscription (or re-metaphorization) as "fraud" by abolitionists, and finally to its turn-of-the-century valence in exposing the linguistic double-dealing and metonymic substitution that informed -- and continues to inform -- racist ideology.With its emphasis on bodysnatching, doubling, and displacement of "figures," Charles W. Chesnutt's 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition exposes the fallacious logic, the traces of the trade, which persisted in the figuration of racial relations in post-Reconstruction America. In doing so, Chesnutt's novel participates in, or prefigures, a method of journalistic "muckraking" that was soon to characterize the first decade of the twentieth century.
Other Issues
EJAS 15.2 Summer 2020 , Volume 15, Number 2
EJAS 15.1 2020 Special Issue: Truth or Post-Truth?, Volume 15, Number 1
EJAS 14.4 2019 Special Issue: Spectacle and Spectatorship in American Culture Volume 14, Number 4, Volume 14, Number 4
EJAS 14.3 2019 Special Issue: Harriet Prescott Spofford: The Home, the Nation, and the Wilderness, Volume 14, Number 3
EJAS 14.2 Summer 2019, Volume 14, Number 2
EJAS 14.1 2019 Special Issue: Race Matters: 1968 as Living History in the Black Freedom Struggle, Volume 14, Number 1
EJAS 13.4 2018 Special Issue: Envisioning Justice: Mediating the Question of Rights in American Visual Culture, Volume 13, Number 4
EJAS 13.3 2018 Special Issue: America to Poland: Cultural Transfers and Adaptations, Volume 13, Number 3
EJAS 13.2 Summer 2018, Volume 13, Number 2
EJAS 12.4 2017 Special Issue: Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music, Volume 12, Number 4
EJAS 12.3 2017 Special Issue: Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds , Volume 12, Number 3
EJAS 12.2 2017 Summer Special Issue: Popularizing Politics. The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, Volume 12, Number 2
EJAS 12.2 Summer 2017 , Volume 12, Number 2
EJAS 12.1 Spring 2017 Special Issue: Eleanor Roosevelt and Diplomacy in the Public Interest, Volume 12, Number 1
EJAS 11.3 2016 Special Issue: Re-Queering The Nation: America's Queer Crisis , Volume 11, Number 3
EJAS 11.2 2016, Volume 11, Number 2
EJAS 11.1 2016 Special Issue: Intimate Frictions: History and Literature in the United States from the 19th to the 21st Century, Volume 11, Number 1
EJAS 10.3 2015 Special Issue: The City , Volume 10, Number 3
EJAS 10.2 Summer 2015 Special Issue: (Re)visioning America in the Graphic Novel, Volume 10, Number 2
EJAS 10.2 Summer 2015, Volume 10, Number 2
EJAS 10.1 Winter 2015 Special Issue: Women in the USA , Volume 10, Number 1
EJAS 9.3 2014 Special Issue: Transnational Approaches to North American Regionalism, Volume 9, Number 3
EJAS 9.2 Summer 2014, Volume 9, Number 2
EJAS 9.1 Spring 2014, Volume 9, Number 1
EJAS 7.2 2012 Special Issue: Wars and New Beginnings in American History, Volume 7, Number 2
EJAS 7.1 Spring 2012, Volume 7, Number 1
EJAS 6.3 2011 Special Issue: Postfrontier Writing, Volume 6, Number 3
EJAS 6.2 2011 Special Issue: Oslo Conference, Volume 6, Number 11
EJAS 6.1 Spring 2011, Volume 6, Number 11
EJAS 5.4 2010 Special Issue: Film, Volume 5, Number 4
EJAS 5.3 Summer 2010, Volume 5, Number 3
EJAS 5.2 2010 Special Issue:The North-West Pacific in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Volume 5, Number 2
EJAS 5.1 Spring 2010, Number 5, Volume 1
EJAS 4.3 2009 Special Issue: Immigration, Volume 4, Number 3
EJAS 4.2 Autumn 2009, Volume 4, Number 2
EJAS 4.1 Spring 2009, Volume 4, Number 1
2006,
2007-1,
2007-2,
2008-1,
2008-2,