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film |Contemporary American Cinema |narrative structure

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This article is an introduction to the following essays pertaining to contemporary American cinema, summarizing the contents of those essays, as well as providing a brief outline of American cinema.

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race |Harper Lee |To Kill a Mockingbird |Atticus Finch |Scout Finch |southern gender roles

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This article begins by exploring the national climate in which Lee’s novel appeared, at the height of the civil rights movement in the South, which had a crucial impact on its composition and reception. The major film studios were not initially interested in the novel, but independent filmmakers Alan Pakula (producer) and Robert Mulligan (director), influenced by existentialism, felt attracted to stories with strong dramatization over the spectacular. The film is famously characterized by the voice-over narration of the adult Scout, which embodies a paradoxical duality of perspective: the events are seen from the perspective of the young Scout but described in the language of a mature and articulate adult Scout. In the novel, the destabilization of gender norms is the central theme, and the protagonist is clearly Scout going through the pains of growing up female in a South with very strict definitions of gender roles. This dimension is not prominent in the film version, which gave in to the demands of the Hollywood star system and made the girl’s father, played by Gregory Peck, the main character, and made racism the main issue. The article concludes with a necessary reconsideration of Atticus Finch, subjected in recent years to the complaint that both the novel and the film convey the historically inaccurate message that heroic whites, instead of blacks, were the leaders of the anti-racist movements of the twentieth century. Atticus Finch no doubt remains tied to the accommodating values of his class and he never openly questions the structural racism of which he himself is part, but moral horizons of previous eras are often narrow in comparison with our own, and we should avoid the excesses of presentism and maintain the historical perspective that allows us to celebrate the courage and success of fictional white liberals like Atticus and real ones like Harper Lee herself, who could only speak as whites, not as black victims. Despite all its limitations, Mockingbird did contribute to making hearts and minds reconsider race in America, and it remains a socially and historically important film. Thus, we should at least acknowledge its merit in taking a stand during a period when many films avoided controversial racial matters.

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intertextuality |Quentin Tarantino |film adaptation |blaxploitation genre

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Intertextuality has frequently featured in postmodern literature and film. By mixing various genres, intertextuality enables a more flexible crossing of the film’s boundaries and allows filmmakers to experiment with artistic form. The film’s style or scenes resonate through other movies creating intertextual references. Hence, intertextuality is an approach that analyzes how one text is related to already available texts and discourses. Nonetheless, the successful perception of intertextual references requires a certain degree of comprehension ability from the film’s audience. This essay examines the intertextuality of Quentin Tarantino’s film Jackie Brown. The article has the three-fold aims: first, to analyze the movie as an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s crime novel Rum Punch; second, to highlight Jackie Brown’s tribute to the blaxploitation cinema of the 1970s; third, to focus on the film’s intertextual crossings with other movies and film genres.

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Hollywood |stereotypes |Racism |diversity |Latinx cinema |Latinx representation

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The article examines the Latinx presence throughout the history of American cinema and analyses the reasons for the mis- and underrepresentation of Latinos/as in Hollywood productions focusing on major stereotypes and politics of American government towards this ethnic group influencing their cinematic description. The final part discusses the recent works produced by Latinos/as and telling their stories in the twenty-first century to demonstrate that Latinos/as are the integral part of American society who want to be justly represented and have the possibility to speak in their own name.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne |Henry David Thoreau |Ralph Waldo Emerson |ghostliness |selfhood

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This paper focuses on three American Romantic writers: Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, examining the problem of ghostliness or life not fully lived present in their works. The point of departure for the present discussion is Arnold Weinstein\’s analysis of Hawthorne’s short story “Wakefield,” suggesting that the main goal of its protagonist is an attempt to become real to himself. This paper finds similar issues to the ones tackled by Hawthorne in the essays by R.W. Emerson and H.D. Thoreau, and argues that the method applied by Wakefield, which is looking at one’s life from a distance, is also present in the two Transcendentalists’ writings, though often as a danger rather than a wished-for solution of the problem.

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Orientalism |Transcendentalism |Lajos Kossuth |Hungarian Revolution (1848/49) |Young America |European Revolutions (1848/49) |Age of Revolutions |the Wandering Jew

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This article studies US American perceptions of the European Revolutions of 1848/49, especially the different receptions of the Hungarian revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth’s sojourn in the US, through an analysis of a rather unknown novel Zoë; or the Quadroon’s Triumph (1855). Benefiting from different sources, the article examines the impacts of the revolutions of Europe in the US literary, cultural, religious, and political sceneries by pointing to how even non-canonical works reflected upon these influences.

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psychoanalysis |literary studies |Shirley Jackson |Gothic novel |topographic model of the mind

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The literary setting of Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle is eerie, symbolic, and inextricably interconnected with the main characters of the book. The Blackwood family, haunted by its macabre past, is confined to its mansion, which is a manifestation of its dwellers’ troubled minds. The Blackwoods abide in a reciprocal influence with their house, the titular castle. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the discourse on Jackson’s work and to illustrate a symbolic rather than mimetic reading of the novel. The theory of psychoanalysis, and more specifically the concept of the Freudian topographic model of the mind, is used to characterize the novel’s setting and its foreground characters. The paper identifies the three focal characters with Freudian archetypes of id, ego, and superego, and uses the theory to further analyze the relationships between the characters to prove they are each ruled by one of the archetypes. Then, it places the characters within the plane of the Blackwood mansion to demonstrate the house’s psychological agency over its dwellers. This is achieved by comparing the mansion’s floors to the Freudian levels of consciousness. Such an interpretation not only compares the Blackwood family to a single entity, a shared mind, but also includes the house as an integral part of its manifestation.

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sports |NBA |relocation |Seattle |SuperSonics

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The National Basketball Association offers only 150 starting spots to the best basketball players in the world–five on each of the 30 teams it consists of–and, considering such factors as personal preferences, luck and salary cap, it is possible that a bench player on one team would be not so much a starter, but one of the two-three best players on a different one. This article analyzes two basketball players, Detlef Schrempf and Jim McIlvaine, whose career narratives will be discussed have played for the Seattle SuperSonics, a franchise which eventually relocated to the state of Oklahoma and became the Oklahoma City Thunder. By narrowing the focus of this article to one franchise–as the Thunder are the extension of the Sonics–I want to highlight two issues. Firstly, I want to show individual involvement in sports history, how two players can shape the fate of a franchise. The fact that both were reserves before coming to Seattle highlights the importance of every personnel decision in running a team. Secondly, while it can be argued that such players may be found in the history of each of the other 29 NBA teams, Seattle/Oklahoma is significant because of the relocation that took place in 2008, effectively ending high-profile men’s professional basketball in Seattle. Hopefully this article adds a new perspective to the scholarship already devoted to the issue, dealing with the depiction and the repercussions of the move.

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Native American Gothic |Third Space |ecogothic |postcolonial criticism |Stephen Graham Jones

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The intention of the article is to examine Stephen Graham Jones’ most recent novel The Only Good Indians (2020) from combined ecogothic and postcolonial perspectives. The central concept informing the analyses is that of Third Space, as formulated by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, and adapted by the spatial turn critic, Edward W. Soja in Thirdspace. Marking the onto-epistemological condition of in-betweenness, openness and ambivalent cultural identities, Third Space will be employed here to interrogate hybrid interspaces and generic dislocations in Jones’ new novel. As will be argued, Jones rewrites the Gothic slasher with a view of unsettling the inherited paradigms of thought, identity and representation. The writer reclaims the conventions and tropes of the genre, such as supernatural figures and events, the return of the repressed past, delayed revenge, and excessive acts of violence, and fuses them with the Native American settings, temporalities, tropes of spirituality and modes of storytelling. Jones’ novel, as we would like to propose, undermines any claims of a coherent identity and turns the Gothic mode into Third Space, characterized by an excess of ambiguous signification and revealing entangled ontological, ethnic, ecological and cross-cultural locations of horror.

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Britta Muszeika |Sarah Winnemucca |Zitkala Ša |Critical Race Theory

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Paul Auster