This panel will question the evolving concepts of the American citizen, the American community and the role of the United States as part of the larger Americas.
This panel will explore muscular, exceptionalist and life narratives used to rhetoricize American oil culture, "the last frontier," and Hispano-American experience.
Submitted by Joseph Haske on Mon, 12/05/2011 - 7:18pm
Presentation Title:
Ron Cooper's Purple Jesus: In Search for 21st Century Idols
In a world still searching for meaning at the beginning of the 21st Century, Ron Cooper finds new vitality in the many significances of a hideous sculpture in his novel Purple Jesus. Pagan and Christian, Heideggerian and Homeric, Southern-contemporary and transcending space and time, Purple Jesus is a tongue-in-cheek examination of what is left of our humanity in a scattered world, through the eyes of its anti-hero, Purvis.
The Road as Levinasian Theater: Posthumanism and the Escape from Abjection in Text and Film
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is often seen as one of the author’s most spiritual works in opposition to the bloody nihilism of Blood Meridian. However, this opposition precludes a reading of the mystery of McCarthy’s text as a gesture towards a posthumanist morality with an eye towards nature as transcendental and not merely positivistic (material quantity, brute facticity in Heideggerian terms).
The Humanism of the Killing Machine: Palahniuk’s Pygmy and The Bourne Identity Series
My paper will primarily be an analysis of Pygmy, by Chuck Palahniuk, and I will be making a few comparisons with the series of films The Bourne Identity. My main interest is in showing that despite remainders of the Cold War self-other, binary discourse, and despite the emergence of post-September 11th paranoia, American culture has continued on the postmodern path toward the dissolution of a unified self.
