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This collection presents essays by leading European and American scholars addressing new research approaches to US Studies and their transatlantic reverberations. Beginning with philosophical discussions of the serious challenges facing civilization from the perspective of philosophical pragmatism, through a critique of the pervasive and enduring media discourse of terrorism, to reflections on the position of scholarship focusing on the United States in difficult times - our times - this volume considers in depth what is called or miscalled "American Studies". The collection's specific topics range from a fresh look at philosophical pragmatism, through various representations of danger and fear in visual culture, to texts recording new attitudes to the study of the United States. An essay on children confronting the New World, papers on transnational or postnational American studies, and on presidential leadership as therapy signal that the time has come to revise the canon of the study of the United States.
List of contents
Contents: Barbara Tuchanska: Mateusz Oleksy - In Memoriam - Kacper Bartczak: Richard Shusterman's complementary correction of Richard Rorty's model of reading literary texts - Katarzyna Dabrowska: A utopia or a solution? The Deweyan project of participatory democracy and the public sphere - Luis E. Echarte: Neuromythology and the dilemma of 'dangerous truths.' Could pragmatism make scientific and social progress compatible? - Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen: Remarks on the Peirce-Schiller correspondence - Alexander Brand/Stefan Robel: Hegemonic governance? Global media, US hegemony and the transatlantic divide - Subarno Chattarji: Mass-mediated terror: some transnational media representations of the 2005 London bombings - William R. Glass/James R. Keller: Movies and foreign policy: from The Third Man to Zentropa - Lars Lierow: «I urge that you transmit that message to the nations of the Earth»: The Day The Earth Stood Still and postwar international communication - Francesca de Lucia: Representations of ethnicity in a postmodern gangster film: the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing - Anna Mazurkiewicz: Coverage of Polish presidential elections (1989-2005) in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune - Grzegorz Nycz: The role of strategic communications, public diplomacy and international broadcasting in the United States' 'War Against Terror' in the Middle East - Paula S. Fass: Children on the edges of history and historiography: confronting the New World - Alfred Hornung: The emergence of transnational American Studies from Ground Zero - Zbigniew Lewicki: East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet: or will they? - Ulf Schulenberg: Empire, theoretical practice, and postnational American Studies - Sabine Sielke: Memory, mediation, American Studies, or: challenging the division of a world before and after 9/11 - Bohdan Szklarski: Presidential leadership as therapy.
About the author
Elzbieta H. Oleksy is Full Professor of Humanities at the University of Lódz. She chairs the Department of Transatlantic and Media Studies and is Founding Director of Women's Studies Centre. She has recently published on the limits of gendered citizenships and on intimate citizenships and gender.
Wieslaw Oleksy teaches at the Department of Transatlantic and Media Studies at the University of Lódz. He has published several books and articles on American Studies, contrastive linguistics, and speech act theory.
