On Violence

In this essay, I argue that the pedagogical, or, more generally, heuristic potential of HBO’s crime drama The Wire (2002/2008) is related to the specific institutional developments in post-network television, the show’s didactic intention, and its focus on the delineation of the economic process, or what has been called its “openly class-based” politics. I will dedicate most time to the latter, as it represents a particularly welcome intervention for American Studies, a discipline in which the problem of class has usually been either marginalized, or articulated in terms of the historically hegemonic disciplinary paradigm, that of identityKeywords: The Wire, American studies, cognitive mapping, capitalism, TV, HBOIn this essay, I would like to approach HBO’s crime drama The Wire (2002-2008) based on my experience of teaching the show in an American Studies class in Croatia. The course in which I try to work with it, Cultural Aspects of American Neoliberalism, deals with the gradual dep...

The departure point of this article is that however one conceives the practice of American Studies one has to recognize that it is a disciplinary practice. In accordance with this contention the author proceeds to discuss the notion of the discipline as such before he goes on to ask and answer the question: “How do American Studies constitute themselves?” The author argues that American Studies, like other disciplines, constituted itself by objectifying an exceptional polity. The crux of his argument is that this self-constitution was founded on an act of erasure, whereby the evidence of capitalism was elided from the research agenda of the discipline. Contending that this erasure is paradoxical considering that American Studies has as its object the exemplary capitalist nation, the author proceeds to delineate the reasons for this erasure. He goes on to contend that American Studies was complicit with the capitalist system of production and that one can speak of it as being a part of ...

Historian Mark Noll’s magisterial America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln was an immediate sensation when it appeared in 2002. Jon Butler, the Howard R. Lamar Professor of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University, declared “America’s God delineates the Americanization of an Old World Protestantism with a breadth, learning, and sophistication unmatched by any other historian.” Noll describes this process of “Americanization” as consisting of a “shift away from European theological traditions, descended directly from the Protestant Reformation, toward a Protestant evangelical theology decisively shaped by its engagement with Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America.” And Noll concludes that this American “Protestant evangelicalism differed from the religion of the Protestant Reformation as much as sixteenth-century Reformation Protestantism differed from the Roman Catholic theology from which it emerged.”This paper will argue that, notwithst...

This paper sets out to examine the extent to which the novel The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo confirms the hypothesis that in the 21st century the crime novel has become a platform suitable for the examination of national identity and the nature of violence in given social surroundings. The paper introduces the hypothesis that there is an undercurrent of unease perceivable in contemporary Norwegian society. The existence of the supporters of the Nazi regime in the history of the nation which after World War II has constituted itself as a modern, tolerant and multicultural society, causes a crisis of identity and evokes a new take-off of right-wing politics. Therefore, the policy of resistance to Nazism and the celebration of tolerance and multiculturalism are on slippery ground. But Nesbo's re-examination of national identity is not conducted solely for the purpose of questioning the absoluteness of ethical positions of good and evil; Nesbo transposes the contemporary Norwegian crime novel fr...

This paper unveils the revolutionary potential incarnated in the post-9/11 transformed figure of the cinematic zombie. It is my contention that zombies, through their cinematic (r)evolution, came to embody Deleuze and Guattari’s vision of the nomad war machine. Zombie films are used as a vehicle for addressing the tension between the hegemonic fear of the violent multitude in revolt and the counter-hegemonic liberatory potential of the rising masses. It is impossible to achieve a final resolution between these contradicting tendencies since the narrative structure of zombie films remains open-ended. The characteristics of the zombies and the meaning ascribed to them transform over time but they also maintain a continuity with a difference with the previous expressions of the monstrous. The monstrous characteristics which have pertained since George A. Romero’s paradigm shift in the 1960s (the zombifying contagion, violence and swarm attacks), joined with the new features appearing in t...

In “The Order,” Matthew Barney transforms the Guggenheim Museum into a space reminding of a computer game or sports-arena. The protagonist struggles his way through different ‘levels’ and at the heart of the setting, he is confronted with the para-athlete Aimee Mullins, a cyborg embodying the Deleuzian notion of the ani/omalous. To complete his final task, the protagonist kills the creature. The question arises, why the ani/omalous has to be violently eliminated. In this respect, it is important to know that the DVD offers two viewing options: a film version structured according to a fixed narrative order and an interactive version where one can switch between the levels simultaneously. Thus, Barney’s film also raises the question of the aesthetic order at work and invites to consider how what is shown relates to the way in which it is shown.Keywords: Matthew Barney, becoming ani/omalous, Deleuze & Guattari, violence in artMatthew Barney’s hybrid monumental aesthetic work the Cremaster...