Suchergebnisse

Aristocracy in America: Huckleberry Finn and the democratic art of imposture -- The talented Mr. Dukenfield: W. C. Fields and the American dream -- "I believe in America": the Godfather films and the immigrant's tragedy -- The Macbeth of meth: Breaking bad and the tragedy of Walter White -- The apocalyptic strain in popular culture: the American nightmare becomes the American dream.

Intro -- Contents -- Introduction: Shakespeare's Rome Revisited -- Part 1. Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and the Revaluation of Roman Values -- 1. Shakespeare's Tragic City: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic -- 2. "The Roman Caesar with Christ's Soul": Shakespeare and Nietzsche on Rome and Christianity -- Part 2. Further Explorations of Shakespeare's Rome -- 3. Beasts and Gods: Titanic Heroes and the Tragedy of Rome -- 4. Shakespeare's Parallel Lives: Plutarch and the Roman Plays -- 5. Shakespeare and the Mediterranean: The Centrality of the Classical Tradition in the Renaissance -- 6. Antony and Cleopatra: Empire, Globalization, and the Clash of Civilizations -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index.

Popular culture often champions freedom as the fundamentally American way of life and celebrates the virtues of independence and self-reliance. But film and television have also explored the tension between freedom and other core values, such as order and political stability. What may look like healthy, productive, and creative freedom from one point of view may look like chaos, anarchy, and a source of destructive conflict from another. Film and television continually pose the question: Can Americans deal with their problems on their own, or must they rely on political elites to manage the

"The courage of the fearless crew" : Gilligan's island and the Americanization of the globe -- Shakespeare in the original Klingon : Star trek and the end of history -- Simpson Agonistes : atomistic politics, the nuclear family, and the globalization of Springfield -- Maintreaming paranoia : The X-files and the deligitimation of the nation state.

AbstractTom Stoppard'sDogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbethoffers fresh evidence of the universality of Shakespeare's genius. The play juxtaposes a perfunctory performance ofHamletin an English boarding school with a courageous staging ofMacbethas a protest against Communist tyranny in 1978 Czechoslovakia. The play shows that, paradoxically, Shakespeare's plays have less of an impact in England than they do in foreign countries, where differing political circumstances, far from forming an obstacle to appreciating Shakespeare, actually bring his plays to life with a new power. By portraying the secret police interrupting the CzechMacbeth, Stoppard explores how artists can struggle against totalitarianism, and, in particular, how they can develop secret codes to express their dissidence, even under the watchful eyes of the surveillance state. Encountering Shakespeare behind the Iron Curtain, Stoppard developed a new seriousness as a playwright and a new interest in the relation of art and politics.

Traditionally, the epic focused on the heroic deeds of great public figures, but the Romantics remade the genre into something more personal, making the poet himself the hero of their epics. The Romantic disillusionment with politics, flowing from the failure of the French Revolution, lies behind their revaluation of heroism. The turn to nature, which the Romantics present as immediate, turns out to be mediated by their political experience. Wordsworth's The Prelude and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are good examples of the Romantic transformation of the epic and provide a case study in the relation of politics and literature, specifically the politics of literary form.

A review essay on a book by Eric L. Jones, Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).