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British Association for American Studies

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Reviews

Book Review: Informal Ambassadors: American Women, Transatlantic Marriages, and Anglo-American Relations, 1865-1945 by Dana Cooper

The wave of American heiresses marrying British aristocrats in the late nineteenth century has often added colour to studies of Anglo-American relations and been subject to specialist scholarly enquiry (notably Montgomery’s ‘Gilded Prostitution’ (1989)). Where Montgomery was more concerned with the social and cultural impact of these marriages and their relationship to a changing British aristocracy, Cooper focuses on five of the most prominent of these women as non-traditional diplomatic agents operating at a key period in the development of the Anglo-American special relationship.

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Conference Review: ‘Supposedly Fun Things: A Colloquium on the Writing of David Foster Wallace’

‘Supposedly Fun Things: A Colloquium on the Writing of David Foster Wallace’ Held at Birkbeck, University of London 7 February 2015   A building as twistingly complex as some of Wallace’s sentences provided the venue for Birkbeck, University of London’s ‘Supposedly Fun Things: A Colloquium on the Writing of David Foster Wallace’, an important event in the field of Wallace Studies. The first wave of Wallace scholarship had a vested interest in eulogizing Wallace in order to justify the study of him. Now that his place in the canon seems reasonably assured, there is an opportunity for scholars to conduct more critical and probing analysis, a development that was evident in many of the papers. Appropriately enough, the first panel dealt with aspects of Wallace’s reception and subsequent canonization. Dr. Tony Venezia (Birkbeck/Middlesex University) began by noting that Wallace is unusual, as the first research into his work was undertaken […]

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Book Review: Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal by Jennifer A. Delton

Because Dwight Eisenhower was the only Republican President between 1933 and 1969, it is naturally tempting to argue that his eight-year tenure in the White House (1953-1961) was a more conservative period compared to his Democratic predecessors and successors.

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Conference Review: ‘The War on the Human: Human as Right, Human as Limit and the Task of the Humanities’

The conference touched upon a variety of topics and disciplines, bridging ancient Greek philosophy with deconstruction, experimental poetics with pedagogy, medicine with narratology, textuality with anthropology, the law and institutional policies with literary studies, ethics and politics with metaphysics.

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Film Review: In P.T. Anderson’s Inherent Vice Pynchon’s “Badass” prevails

Pynchon mentions, and praises, the “Badass” in one of his few essays: “when times are hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don’t we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass… who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us?” Ultimately breaking noir convention, Inherent Vice does turn, if only in part, to the Badass detective. Bigfoot’s diligent respect for his deceased police partner’s memory, which further distances him from any thug-cop stereotype, leads him to have a very personal stake in Doc’s case and he ends up working more or less alongside the stoned PI.

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Book Review: Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction by Peter Ferry

Ferry weaves his exploration of masculinity in the works of Paul Auster, Bret Easton Elllis’ American Psycho, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis around the figure of the flâneur.

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Book Review: The American President in Film and Television: Myth, Politics and Representation by Greg Frame

Greg Frame’s work, The American President in Film and Television: Myth, Politics and Representation, is a tour-de-force of analytical investigation into the iconographical development and narrative frameworks of the fictionalised presidential genre.

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Book Review: Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism by Andrew Lawson

“In Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism Andrew Lawson traces the origins of literary realism to a fear of downward mobility that stemmed from the economic uncertainty caused by the growing instability of material wealth and the destabilising effects of the credit and market system. For Lawson, realism is a concrete genre that responded to a very un-concrete, pervasive economic anxiety.”

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Book Review: Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy edited by Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb

“Allard den Dulk provides by far the most impressive essay in the collection, suggesting a Sartrean model of pre-reflection as an ideal philosophical model for Wallace’s characters, an assertion that goes against the dominant critical consensus that Wallace was a proponent of choice.”

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Conference Review: ‘Protest: Resistance and Dissent in America’

Bianca Scoti and Dr Tomas Pollard review a selection of panels and the keynote lectures at the BAAS Postgraduate Conference (15 November, 2014)

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