Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices

Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms.

Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.

'Back into the american continuity of crust and mantle'': da cidade inscrita à cidade em escrita

No contexto norte-americano, falar da noção de cidade implica olhar para além das complexas redes sociais, económicas, políticas e culturais que se interligam em espaços mais ou menos urbanizados. É necessário considerar o facto de que na América a cidade assenta no princípio da Cidade erguida na Colina e esta dimensão mítica e simbólica que inspira os colonos recém-chegados a Nova Inglaterra é perpetuada nas gerações seguintes, refletindo-se igualmente no panorama literário norte-americano.

Italian American women in Helen Barolini's Umbertina

This essay analyzes the story and the culture of Italian American women, in particular how they are treated in the novel "Umbertina" by Helen Barolini. The essay first introduces briefly the causes of the great migration and the conditions of immigrants in the US. Then the focus moves on the analysis of the main themes that belong to the genre of Italian American literature. After having shortly treated the biography of Helen Barolini and a general presentation of her novel Umbertina, the essay goes on with the description of its three Italian American female characters and, in particular, of what it meant to be both immigrants and women, together with all the interior and generational conflicts they had to face in order to accept their new hybrid identity. An analysis of some meaningful metaphorical objects in the novel, such as the tin heart and the bedspread, the metaphor of Persephone and of the threshold conclude the essay. Through the analysis of the story of Umbertina, this essay wants to show how migration can lead to a displacement and the kind of journey people had to undertake in order to overcome the conflicts deriving from their belonging to an in-between culture and to accept their hybrid identity.

Literature after Postmodernism: Reconstructive Fantasies

Postmodernism, deconstruction and subversion have been the buzzwords of the last few decades. But not any longer. Ever since the end of the millennium an increasingly perceptible desire to turn towards other concerns can be noted. Only, what comes after postmodernism? Where are we going now? Irmtraud Huber suggests some answers to these questions, focusing on novels by Michael Chabon, Mark Z. Danielewski, Jonathan Safran Foer and David Mitchell and highlighting the ways in which they go beyond postmodernism and turn from deconstruction to reconstruction. Approaching the question from an unusual direction by exploring the novelists' particular use of the fantastic mode, this book offers both further insights into the present aesthetic shift and a new perspective on the literary fantastic.

Hamlet's Mobility: The Reception of Shakespeare's Tragedy in US-American and Canadian Narrative Fiction

This essay presents a comprehensive study of how Hamlet figures in North American fiction. Gabriele Rippl takes her cue from Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of Shakespeare’s ‘theatrical mobility’ (Greenblatt, Cultural Mobility. Cambridge University Press, 2010). This initial mobility, based on the playwright’s own borrowings, appears to facilitate, or even instigate further migrations. Rippl proceeds to give an overview of adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the USA and Canada, thus providing an insight into the historical and cultural uses to which the play has been put by authors such as John Updike or Margaret Atwood. Phenomena such as the ‘republicanization’ of Shakespeare (James Fenimore Cooper), or his appropriation for a feminist counter-discourse in Canada circumscribe a space for the negotiation of cultural and political identities.