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The concept of the game illustrates a collectively recognized representation of existence in American literature. This investigation explores the concealment of the function of division beneath the function of communication. The philosophical cornerstones of this investigation are Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, and Michel Pêcheux. Inspired by Henry Miller, an innovative methodology is established that focuses on patterns of experience (symbol/sign), patterns of structure (myth), and patterns of language (metaphor). The concept of the game renders an essential social relation tangible (interpellation), and it epitomizes a commitment to the restoration of American spiritual values. It is a rejection of “a mistaken idea of freedom” and an advocate of “true freedom.”

To this day, Salem, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the witch trials of 1692. Their unique pace and structure has not only made the infamous town a strong cultural metaphor, but has generated countless novels, short stories, and plays over the past 200 years. This book marks the first comprehensive analysis of literary Salem and its historical as well as contemporary significance, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's literature of the 19th century to Arthur Miller's The Crucible to a growing corpus of contemporary fiction.

Based on the theory and methodology of transcultural memory, this book describes and analyzes the fictional representations of memory and forgetting and the multiple roles they play in identity construction of immigrants and exiles. It focuses on fiction by contemporary American writers of East-Central European descent: Askold Melnyczuk, Domnica Radulescu, and Aleksandar Hemon. The analysis of selected novels highlights a distinct historical slant with elements of generational memory, memory of places, rememory, and postmemory. The author introduces and develops the concept of post-immigrant ethnic fiction and identifies a mnemonic pattern characteristic of American post-immigrant ethnic and exile writing.

As a space of extremes, the skyscraper has been continually constructed as an urban frontier in American cultural productions. Like its counterpart of the American wilderness, this vertical frontier serves as a privileged site for both subversion and excessive control. Beyond common metaphoric readings, this study models the skyscraper not only as a Foucauldian heterotopia, but also as a complex network of human and nonhuman actors while retracing its development from its initial assemblage during the 19th century to its steady evolution into a smart structure from the mid-20th century onward. It takes a close look at US-American literary and filmic fictions and the ways in which they sought to make sense of this extraordinary structure throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. More traditional poststructuralist spatial theories are connected with concepts and methods of Actor-Network Theory in a compelling account of the skyscraper's evolution as reflected in fictional media from early 20th-century short stories via a range of action, disaster and horror films to selected city novels of the 1990s and 2000s.

American Studies has witnessed the emergence of major freeways, as well as more obscure lanes, while featuring ideological collisions during the last decades of the 20th century and at the beginning of the present millennium. The volume undertakes to contribute a variety of views on facets of a dynamic, ever changing United States and on some of its current and past stories. It is generally aimed at addressing, expressing or clarifying ideological divides for a better understanding of the challenges that the United States has experienced and faced up to the present.

Terrorism has long been a popular subject for American fiction writers. This book argues that terrorism in 1990s novels by Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and Bret Easton Ellis serves as a key trope to interrogate the limits of writing and the power of literature. Based on the complex literary and philosophical thought of Maurice Blanchot, this study deals with the writer's terrorist temptation, language's investment in violence, and literature's negotiation of radical alterity. Auster's, Roth's, and Ellis's novels elucidate contemporary political and economic developments as well as our cultural fear of, and fascination with, terrorism. The writing of terrorism can thus become the foundation of a different politics where, according to Maurice Blanchot, «there is no explosion except a book.»