European Journal of American Culture - Current Issue

This article investigates Labyrinth as a Gothic narrative; it positions the films as an attempt to ‘educate desire’ into normative channels within the context of the late Cold War and the Culture Wars of the 1980s. Particular attention is paid to the body and performance of David Bowie as Jareth and the way this engages with classic Gothic tropes of the dangerous older man. Sarah is also considered as a liminal adolescent coming to occupy a position defined by desire in a historical moment riven by anxieties around ‘acceptable choices’ amid the AIDS crisis and the activism of conservative pressure groups such as Moral Majority. Ultimately, Labyrinth is shown to be a productive space for the working through of issues of desire, both in its original context and, through the mapping of fan activities, throughout the 40 years since its release.

This article applies a critical posthuman perspective to investigating how – in the context of symbiotic relations defined by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis – Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood outlines and explores issues relating to enslavement and rape. The universe created by Butler invites such an analysis as the writer discusses the issues in relation to both human and non-human persons as well as looking at new evolutionary opportunities offered by merging with an alien civilization. This theoretical framework provides a powerful research tool since critical posthumanism seeks to embrace difference and topple all hierarchies which stifle human potential. I attempt to reach this goal by tracing and exposing human anxieties and phobias transpiring in Butler’s novel. It is my contention that such unfounded phobias hinder human development and lead to uncalled-for conflicts, which – as the novel shows – have already led humanity to self-annihilation.

This article focuses on the teaching of the American family via a large lecture course that examines ideology, culture, family, gender, sexuality, race, class and nation through the study of media texts. The course applies a student-focused approach and attends to the material through a cultural studies frame. First, we describe the course and its goals and then we reflect on the practices we have brought to teaching the course that have garnered a positive reputation so that the course fills on the first day of registration. Through a reflective account of our experiences of teaching this class, the authors address how we engage students with media texts that they normally would not know of or would find difficult or even boring due to students’ curated media environments. We conclude with reflections on what we have learned from teaching this course. We hope this article helps other teachers of popular media and American culture as they construct their own courses to fit both student and teachers’ goals.

This article examines the educational benefits of a workshop on American multimodal fiction. Despite growing research in the fields of multimodality studies and teaching and learning processes, the capacity of print-based multimodal fiction for creative pedagogical objectives remained largely unaddressed. In this workshop, students were introduced to a body of print-based novels that combine writing with design and typographic elements, images and maps, and were able to experience them first-hand in class. The books were arranged in different parts of the room in working stations and students experienced them autonomously. Their impressions fed into the creative work they submitted, where they were asked to re-imagine a short story into a multimodal text. The outcome of this process demonstrated the significance of student engagement in class, the potential of primary material to stimulate curiosity and sharpen their skillset and the capacity of print-based literary texts for inspiring creative output in the digital age.

Review of: The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson (ed.) (2024)

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 306 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-00920-415-6, h/bk, $100.00

ISBN 978-1-00920-419-4, p/bk, $29.99

ISBN 978-1-00920-416-3, e-book, $29.99