The American cultural imaginary is hungry for death, and thus representations of death are prominently repeated and serialized in US literature and media. Stella Castelli shows how American culture fetishizes death as part of a repetition compulsion which stems from the inability of language to satisfactorily grasp death. Taking an intermedial approach, she investigates the forms and tropes born from this preoccupation with death and conceptualizes its imagination alongside an appetite which manifests as repetitive encoding. These metaphors of food consumption provide a hermeneutic framing for analyzing representations of death across American literature and media.
Price: $50.00
Pages: 220
Publisher: transcript publishing
Imprint: transcript publishing
Series: American Culture Studies
Publication Date:
23 May 2023
Trim Size: 8.86 X 5.83 in
ISBN: 9783837665697
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies, PERFORMING ARTS / Television / History & Criticism
»Castelli [hat] einen gelungenen Beitrag zum Diskurs gegenwärtiger Todesdarstellungen geleistet, der durch die Analogie zum Essen eine besondere Würze erhält.«
Stella Castelli, born in 1989, works as a teaching associate at the English Department of Universität Zürich. In 2023, she finalized her doctoral dissertation discussing the serial representation of death in American culture. Her research focuses on American studies, literature, film and television studies, psycho-analytic criticism as well as philosophy.
Frontmatter 1
Contents 5
Introduction: The Paradoxical Nature of Death in America 7
1. The Text Devouring the Dead: Edgar Allan Poe and David Lynch's American Gothic 23
2. I am Dead, Yet I Live - The Zombie's Gluttonous Craving for the Living 59
3. Producing the Corpse: Quentin Tarantino's Revenge Narratives 89
4. Ingesting the Corpse: The Cannibal's Taste for Death - American Psycho and Hannibal 125
5. Creator/Destroyer: The Serial Killer as an American Phenomenon 155
Conclusion: Death. Again 195
Acknowledgements 205
Bibliography 207
List of Illustrations 217