The Trash Phenomenon : Contemporary Literature, Popular Culture and the Making of the American Century

ISBN-13: 9780820324845 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 304 str.

Stacey Michele Olster

Opis

The Trash Phenomenon looks at how writers of the late twentieth century not only have integrated the events, artifacts, and theories of popular culture into their works but also have used those works as windows into popular culture's role in the process of nation building. Taking her cue from Donald Barthelme's 1967 portrayal of popular culture in Snow White as trash, and Don DeLillo's 1997 description of it as a subversive people's history in Underworld, Stacey Olster explores the ways in which American popular culture can be recycled in literature so as to change the nationalistic imperative behind its inception. The Trash Phenomenon begins with a look at the mass media's role in the United States' emergence as the twentieth century's dominant power. To this end, Olster discusses the works of three authors that collectively span the century bounded by the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Persian Gulf War (1991): Gore Vidal's American Chronicle series, John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, and Larry Beinhart's American Hero. Olster then turns her attention to three non-American writers whose own cultures have felt the imperial sway of American popular culture: hierarchical clas