From Virgin Land To Disney World

Download or read book From Virgin Land to Disney World written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the publication in English in 1930 of Civilization and its Discontents and its thesis that instinct – and, ultimately: nature – had been and must be forever subordinated in order that civilization might thrive and endure, Freud contributed what some contemporaries saw to the central debate of his era – a debate which had long preoccupied both official American pundits and the American populace at large. At the beginning of the new Millennium, evidence abounds that an American debate still rages over the meaning of “nature,” the rightful weight of instinct, and the status of civilization. The Millennium itself has appeared in popular and official discourses as an appropriate marker of an age in which nature is close to the edge of radical extinction and has also become more and more unreliable as a paradigm for representation and debate. At the same time, the contemporary tailoring of nature to postmodern needs and expectations inevitably reveals the conceptual difficulty of any possible, simple opposition between nature and culture as if they were clearly distinguishable domains. If nature, then, can clearly be seen as a discursive concept, it may also be a timeless concept insofar that it has been shaped, created, and used at all times. Every epoch, age and era had “its own nature,” with myth, history and ideology as its dominant shaping forces. From the Frontier to Cyberia, nature has been suffering the “agony of the real,” resurfacing in discursive strategies and demonstrating a powerful impact on American society, culture and self-definition. The essays in this collection “speak critically of the natural” and examine the American debate in the many guises it has assumed over the last century within the context of major critical approaches, psychoanalytical concepts, and postmodern theorizing.

Download or read book The Pocahontas Narrative and Disney's Interpretation written by Rebecca Blum and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2010-02 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Heidelberg, 13 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Ever since the colonization of the American continent, the Native Americans and their culture have concerned and often fascinated the Euro-American population. This is shown clearly by the facts that the Indian captivity narrative became the first truly popular genre of American literature and that by the beginning of the 19th century Indian American characters had become central characters in theatrical plays and on American stages throughout the country. After the invention of motion picture in 1895, North American Indian characters made an entrance into plenty of American movies. Unfortunately, in most cases it was not of great concern to the producers to depict the Native Indians in a realistic way, but rather to appeal to a broad audience, which was best to be achieved by using popular stereotypes, which had been around for 200 years. Up till today, stereotypical conceptions have dominated American motion picture, and only very few movies have tried to depict Native Americans in a more realistic and sensitive way. Keeping this history of American Indian movies in mind, it becomes apparent that Walt Disney's animated movie Pocahontas, released in 1995, stood in a long tradition of movies, of which only in the recent past a few had broken with the traditional stereotypes. The Disney Company, too, was severely criticized for reusing stereotypical conceptions in their depiction of Pocahontas and her tribe and for being historically inaccurate and insensitive to the Native Americans' past. The following paper will first give a brief summary of the historic Pocahontas' life, which is necessary in order to understand how far Disney kept or changed historic facts, and then depict the origins of the Pocahontas myth. Afterwards, the most important aspects of the movie will be described and a

Download or read book Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience written by Jennifer A. Kokai and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-27 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses Disney parks using performance theory. Few to no scholars have done this to date—an enormous oversight given the Disney parks’ similarities to immersive theatre, interpolation of guests, and dramaturgical construction of attractions. Most scholars and critics deny agency to the tourist in their engagement with the Disney theme park experience. The vast body of research and journalism on the Disney “Imagineers”—the designers and storytellers who construct the park experience—leads to the misconception that these exceptional artists puppeteer every aspect of the guest’s experience. Contrary to this assumption, Disney park guests find a range of possible reading strategies when they enter the space. Certainly Disney presents a primary reading, but generations of critical theory have established the variety of reading strategies that interpreters can employ to read against the text. This volume of twelve essays re-centers the park experience around its protagonist: the tourist.

Download or read book Cultural Poetics and Social Movements Initiated by Literature written by Maryann P. DiEdwardo and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-21 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents critiques about African American authors and poets, as well as a composer, who have contributed towards social change, namely Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Terence Blanchard, Ann Petry, and Rita Dove. It also discusses Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American writer, and his novel The Sympathizer.

Download or read book The Myths That Made America written by Heike Paul and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-08-31 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essential introduction to American studies examines the core foundational myths upon which the nation is based and which still determine discussions of US-American identities today. These myths include the myth of »discovery,« the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the melting pot myth, the myth of the West, and the myth of the self-made man. The chapters provide extended analyses of each of these myths, using examples from popular culture, literature, memorial culture, school books, and every-day life. Including visual material as well as study questions, this book will be of interest to any student of American studies and will foster an understanding of the United States of America as an imagined community by analyzing the foundational role of myths in the process of nation building.

Download or read book The Poetics and Politics of the Desert written by Catrin Gersdorf and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes. Drawing on the critical concepts of American studies and on questions and problems raised in recent debates on ecocriticism, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert investigates the spatial rhetoric of America as it developed in view of arid landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Gersdorf argues that the integration of the desert into America catered to the entire spectrum of ideological and political responses to the history and culture of the US, maintaining that the Americanization of this landscape was and continues to be staged within the idiomatic parameters and in reaction to the discursive authority of four spatial metaphors: garden, wilderness, Orient, and heterotopia.

Download or read book International Heritage and Historic Building Conservation written by Zeynep Aygen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The majority of books in English on historic building conservation and heritage preservation training are often restricted to Western architecture and its origins. Consequently, the history of building conservation, the study of contemporary paradigms and case studies in most universities and within wider interest circles, predominantly in the UK, Europe, and USA focus mainly on Europe and sometimes the USA, although the latter is often excluded from European publications. With an increasingly multicultural student body in Euro-American universities and with a rising global interest in heritage preservation, there is an urgent need for publications to cover a larger geographical and social area including not only Asia, Australia, Africa and South America but also previously neglected countries in Europe like the new members of the European Community and the northern neighbour of the USA, Canada. The inclusion of the ‘other’ in built environment education in general and in building conservation in particular is a pre-requisite of cultural interaction and widening participation. International Heritage and Historic Building Conservation assesses successful contemporary conservation paradigms from around the world. The book evaluates conservation case studies from previously excluded areas of the world to create an integrated account of Historic Building Conservation that crosses the boundaries of language and culture and sets an example for further inclusive research. Analyzing the influence of financial constraints, regional conflicts, and cultural differences on the heritage of disadvantaged countries, this leading-edge volume is essential for researchers and students of heritage studies interested in understanding their topics in a wider framework.