CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"The Late Oedipal Genre, Thantagonists, and Secondary Televisuality","authors":"Dan Adleman","doi":"10.3138/CRAS-2020-015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/CRAS-2020-015","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores a dominant turn-of-the-millennium televisual genre, the late Oedipal narrative. Late Oedipal narratives such as The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad represent turbulent crises of sovereignty bound up with broader transitions in the spirit of the age. These crises are often connected to a change in the overriding media environment, which the late Oedipal genre tends to represent as a mortal challenge to atavistic, self-destructive “thantagonists” such as Jimmy McNulty, Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen, and Walter White. As such, the late Oedipal genre constitutes a recursive form of television about television as the medium is vacuumed up and remediated by its successor, the Internet. I refer to such palpable rearticulations of televisuality through the universal medium of the Internet as “secondary televisuality.”","PeriodicalId":53953,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42387276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"We Couldn't Do That Even if We Wanted To\": Family and Natality in Veep and House of Cards (US)","authors":"M. Wales","doi":"10.3138/CRAS-2020-014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/CRAS-2020-014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Veep (2012–19) and House of Cards (2013–18), as political fictions and adaptations of UK series, provide an opportunity to consider the political significance and thematic mode of Martin Shuster's \"new television\" within the specific contexts of both American politics and television. In these series' invocations of the family, they challenge the idea that, as the sole remaining grounds for normative justification, family lies outside the vortex of late capitalism. In deploying the motif of natality, they foreground the figure of the pregnant woman complicating the supposed relation between natality, politics, and the political. In so doing, these series suggest that we cannot, through natality incubated in the family, \"conceive of politics differently\" without addressing politics as it is.Résumé:Veep (2012–2019) et House of Cards (2013–2018), en tant que fictions politiques et adaptations de séries britanniques, offrent une occasion de considérer la signification politique et le mode thématique de la « nouvelle télévision » de Martin Shuster dans les contextes spécifiques de la politique américaine et de la télévision. Dans les invocations de la famille dans ces séries, elles remettent en question l'idée que, en tant que seule base restante de justification normative, la famille se trouve à l'extérieur du vortex du capitalisme tardif. En déployant le motif de natalité, elles mettent de l'avant la figure de la femme enceinte, ce qui complique la prétendue relation entre la natalité, la politique et le politique. Ce faisant, ces séries suggèrent que nous ne pouvons pas, par l'entremise de la natalité incubée dans la famille, « concevoir différemment de la politique » sans adresser la politique telle qu'elle est.","PeriodicalId":53953,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"308 - 323"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45774592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"New Television as Neo-Naturalism: The Wire and The Shield","authors":"A. Gibbs","doi":"10.3138/CRAS-2020-009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/CRAS-2020-009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines The Wire (HBO, 2002–8) and The Shield (FX, 2002–8) and the extent to which they employ particular attributes of new television in order to engage with notions of determined behaviour familiar from literary naturalism (and, through them, important contemporary political ideologies). The Wire and The Shield are part of a growing body of neo-naturalist works in contemporary American culture. Like Dexter and Breaking Bad, they portray the actions of their protagonists as heavily determined by outside forces. But while The Shield's deterministic naturalism tends to lend tacit support for more authoritarian social control, The Wire's use of similar architecture is a means to advocate for urgent institutional reform.Résumé:Cet article examine les séries télévisées The Wire (HBO, 2002-2008) et The Shield (FX, 2002-2008) et la manière dont elles utilisent des caractéristiques particulières de la nouvelle télévision pour entamer un dialogue avec des notions de comportement déterminé, lesquelles sont connues du naturalisme littéraire (et, par leur entremise, des idéologies politiques contemporaines importantes). The Wire et The Shield font partie du corpus croissant d'œuvres néonaturalistes dans la culture américaine contemporaine. Tout comme Dexter et Breaking Bad, elles montrent les actions de leurs protagonistes comme étant lourdement déterminées par des forces externes. Mais, tandis que le naturalisme déterministe de The Shield a tendance à soutenir tacitement un plus grand contrôle social autoritaire, l'utilisation d'une architecture similaire dans The Wire sert à défendre une réforme institutionnelle urgente.","PeriodicalId":53953,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"247 - 260"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48609267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fleabag, Modernism, and New Television","authors":"Martin Shuster","doi":"10.3138/CRAS-2020-013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/CRAS-2020-013","url":null,"abstract":"This article reflects on the recent prominence of direct address—characters speaking directly to the camera—within new television. With particular reference to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag (BBC Three, 2016–19), the phenomenon of direct address is in this context situated amid the broader history of pictorial art, especially painting and the problem of theatricality first introduced by Denis Diderot in the eighteenth century and taken up in the last century by Michael Fried. The article concludes by showing how Fleabag’s use of direct address both fits neatly into this art history and moves beyond it, showing especially how Fleabag’s use of direct address substantially comments on modernity, on the status of art (especially new television), and even on the status of religion.","PeriodicalId":53953,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49252132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul: Struggling and Living in Liquid Times","authors":"David P. Pierson","doi":"10.3138/CRAS-2020-010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/CRAS-2020-010","url":null,"abstract":"AMC’s TV series Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul both feature protagonists who can be seen as victims of institutions that do not appreciate their talents and abilities. Walter White in Breaking Bad, who once won a Nobel Prize in chemistry, is an under-appreciated and underpaid high school chemistry teacher who must work a second job to support his family. Jimmy McGill, a con artist–turned–lawyer who will eventually change his identity to Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul discovers that because of his earlier criminal exploits and non-traditional legal education, he will never be fully accepted within Albuquerque’s legal community. These series exemplify several core concepts from Zygmunt Bauman and Martin Shuster’s works, including liquid modernity and late capitalism, the loss of normative authority and deinstitutionalization, the process of individuation and identity formation, and the centrality of family in living and struggling in liquid times.","PeriodicalId":53953,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45176359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Disincorporation to Rematerialization: Breaking Bad and the Life of Cash","authors":"Joseph Conway","doi":"10.3138/CRAS-2020-011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/CRAS-2020-011","url":null,"abstract":"Global capitalism creates a culture of abstraction, described by Fredric Jameson as “a kind of cyberspace in which money capital has reached its ultimate dematerialization, as messages which pass instantaneously from one nodal point to another across the former material world.” The “becoming information” of money has been celebrated by technophiles like David Wolman who contends paper money is now largely the stuff of “crooks and terrorists.” And indeed, the capitalists at the centre of complex televisual crime sagas like Breaking Bad are continually frustrated by the recalcitrant materiality of their paper profits. Martin Shuster suggests that Breaking Bad amounts to a critique of Western science, specifically its tendency to “empty” the material world of meaning by prioritizing “instrumental” reason. I argue that the comical efforts of Walter White (the show’s chemistry-teaching, drug-manufacturing protagonist) and other characters to control the unruly materialism of cash represents this failure of instrumental reason, whether expressed in chemical equations or prices, to achieve fully the “dematerialization,” or what White calls the “disincorporation,” of the world. Ultimately, the unmanageable corporeality of money allegorizes the persistence of non-capitalist, material desires in mass cultural products like Breaking Bad.","PeriodicalId":53953,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"1 1","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42014707","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The (Anti-)Hero with a Thousand Faces: Reconstructing Villainy in The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Better Call Saul","authors":"Siobhan Lyons","doi":"10.3138/CRAS-2020-017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/CRAS-2020-017","url":null,"abstract":"The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Better Call Saul exemplify what Martin Shuster calls “new television.” Following 9/11, the playful irony that had defined shows such as Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Simpsons was gradually replaced with more morally ambiguous characters. Questions about one’s moral standing operated at the forefront of such television, where previous idols of goodness on the right side of the law, such as Agent Dale Cooper (Twin Peaks), Agents Mulder and Scully (The X-Files), and Buffy Summers, gave way to characters whose moral dubiousness and criminal behaviour utterly destabilized long-standing characteristics of television, asking viewers to sympathize with imperfect, often unscrupulous individuals. In this article, I discuss the moral trajectories of a number of key characters, including Tony Soprano, Walter White, and Jimmy McGill. White’s and McGill’s alter egos (Heisenberg and Saul Goodman, respectively) represent two very different moral compromises in a world defined by white-collar corruption, self-sabotage, and a questionable judicial system that simultaneously protects criminals as it reprimands them. These two characters in particular exemplify a radical break with traditionally morally upstanding characters and have taken audiences into a new frontier of morally ambiguous television that celebrates the complex world of the anti-hero.","PeriodicalId":53953,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42572870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Justified: Transitioning the Old TV Western Lawman into a New Television Protagonist","authors":"Karen A. Stewart","doi":"10.3138/CRAS-2020-012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/CRAS-2020-012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The western has long been a staple genre of American television. Starting in the late 1960s, however, the genre began falling out of favour as its stock content—the relatively simple moral exploration of right and wrong—shiſted to detective shows and police procedurals. The \"new television\" trend, however, brought about a revival of the western. Central to this revival is the TV series Justified, which demonstrates that old western tropes and storylines can be made popular again if the tropes receive socially aware updates and moral questions about right and wrong are not presented with easy or obvious answers. This article provides a rhetorical analysis of the first season of Justified and identifies the specific strategies used to modernize the American western genre: (1) shiſting from episodic to serial narrative structure; (2) presenting male characters struggling with identity roles within the context of contemporary identity/masculinity politics; (3) presenting female characters with more narrative complexity and agency; and (4) updating the setting to better engage cultural themes. It concludes by arguing that these strategies allowed the series to successfully revive the best elements of the old western and return the television western to a culturally relevant position.Résumé:Les westerns ont longtemps été un genre principal de la télévision américaine. À partir de la fin des années 1960, par contre, le genre a commencé à ne plus avoir la cote alors que son contenu classique — l'exploration morale relativement simple du bien et du mal — a changé pour la diffusion d'émissions policières. La mode de la « nouvelle télévision », par contre, a apporté une renaissance des westerns. Au centre de cette renaissance se trouve la série télévisée Justified, qui démontre que les vieux stéréotypes et les vieilles intrigues des westerns peuvent être à nouveau populaires si ces stéréotypes deviennent socialement conscients et si les questions morales du bien et du mal n'ont pas de réponses faciles et évidentes. Cet article offre une analyse rhétorique de la première saison de Justified et identifie les stratégies spécifiques utilisées pour moderniser le genre western américain : (1) le passage d'une structure épisodique à une narration sérielle ; (2) la présentation de personnages masculins qui luttent avec les rôles identitaires au sein du contexte de politiques d'identité/masculinité contemporaines ; (3) la présentation de personnages féminins qui ont une complexité et une agentivité narratives accrues ; et (4) la mise à jour de l'environnement pour mieux présenter les thèmes culturels. Il conclut en soutenant que ces stratégies ont permis à la série de faire renaître les meilleurs éléments des vieux westerns et de remettre les westerns télévisuels dans une position culturellement pertinente.","PeriodicalId":53953,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"276 - 289"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69927381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Purloined Paranoia: The Insistence of Schreber","authors":"Dan Adleman","doi":"10.3138/CRAS-2019-011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/CRAS-2019-011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:University of Chicago German-Jewish studies scholar Eric L. Santner is a singular psychoanalytic thinker. His criticism stands out for the finesse with which he brings Lacanian thought into resonance with Foucault’s ideas about the advent of modernity. To this end, Santner’s My Own Private Germany performs a nuanced meta-reading of Lacan’s reading of Freud’s reading of finde-siècle Saxon jurist Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). Surprisingly, many psychoanalytic humanities scholars have never encountered the Schreber affair and know little of Lacan’s work beyond his “Seminar on The Purloined Letter.” However, the portrait Santner paints of what I call Schreber’s “purloined paranoia” is arguably even more replete with significance for the future of Lacanian thought across the disciplines. His supple analysis of the travails of Schreber’s “psychotic” text, as it passes hands from thinker to thinker, tracks the itinerary of subjectivity in a paranoid milieu defined by the impossibility of a metalanguage or God’s-eye-view. Through this lens, Schreber’s gender-bending text, and the cascade of interpretations it produced (and continues to produce), indexes a modern “crisis of sovereignty” whereby phallic authority is slowly divested of its long-standing libidinal buttressing as the calamity of media modernity sends seismic tremors through the architecture of the Lacanian unconscious. Drawing on the work of the aforementioned thinkers and others, this article works through the import of Schreber to our particular historical moment. As Santner’s work reveals, a historiography of Schreber’s text and its cascade of effects gestures toward vital new pathways for Lacanian reading strategies in the digital twenty-first century.Résumé:Eric L. Santner, chercheur en études germano-juives à l’Université de Chicago, est un penseur psychanalytique particulier. Ses critiques se démarquent par la finesse avec laquelle il jumelle la pensée lacanienne aux idées de Foucault en ce qui concerne la venue de la modernité. C’est dans ce but que Santner, dans My Own Private Germany, fait une métalecture de la lecture que Lacan a faite de la lecture que Freud a faite du mémoire intitulé Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), écrit par le juriste saxon Daniel Paul Schreber. Étonnamment, de nombreux chercheurs en sciences humaines psychanalytiques n’ont jamais eu connaissance de l’affaire Schreber et en savent peu sur le travail de Lacan au-delà de son « Séminaire sur La Lettre volée ». Par contre, le portrait que Santner peint de ce que j’appelle la « paranoïa volée » de Schreber est encore plus rempli d’importance en ce qui concerne l’avenir de la pensée lacanienne à travers les disciplines. Son analyse fine des peines du texte « psychotique » de Schreber, alors qu’il va de penseur à penseur, trace l’itinéraire de la subjectivité dans un milieu paranoïaque défini par l’impossibilité d’un métalangage ou de point de vue de Dieu. De ce point de v","PeriodicalId":53953,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"44 - 62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43106719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction—Lacan in America","authors":"Chris Vanderwees","doi":"10.3138/CRAS-2019-015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/CRAS-2019-015","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53953,"journal":{"name":"CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"1 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44941549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}