“The air of impossibility has been removed”: Realist Political Drama(dy) and the Trope of Becoming President

Over the past ten to fifteen years, film and TV culture have offered new and more complex negotiations of presidential politics through depictions of fictional American presidents. While in the past American popular culture celebrated the president as overwhelmingly positive, larger-than-life figure, recent representations have introduced more complex characters who face, or even trigger, complicated and morally ambiguous conflicts. This article investigates how The West Wing, House of Cards and Veep, three political TV shows, make use of the emerging trope of a brokered nomination convention in order to question one-dimensional fictional representations of the American president and presidential politics

“Lots of doctoring, with great success”: Healthcare within the Port Royal Experiment and the Work of Laura M. Towne

In 1862, Laura M. Towne – abolitionist, teacher, educator, and trained homeopath – joined the Port Royal Experiment, a project initiated by Northern benevolent societies to provide education and relief for former slaves on the South Carolina Sea Islands, which had been occupied by Union troops in late 1861. On the Sea Islands as well as in broader Northern culture, healthcare for freedpeople – and freedpeople’s health – soon became controversial topics. This article traces how Towne as homeopathic practitioner uses medical tropes in autobiographic documents intended for publication or circulation in the North to increase her own authority within a wartime discourse and how, at the same time, she avoids reflection about medical crises

ConspiraCities and Creative Paranoia: Ellis’s Glamorama, Hustvedt’s The Blindfold, and Whitehead’s The Intuitionist

La paranoïa et la théorie du complot on souvent été considérées comme des symptômes d’une culture urbaine contemporaine postmoderne. Par une étude critique de trois romans urbains récents (Glamorama de Bret Easton Ellis, The Blindfold de Siri Hustvedt et The Intuitionist de Colson Whitehead) cet article tente de découvrir les fonctions divergentes du motif littéraire de la pensée de la paranoïa et des structures littéraires de la paranoïa, en complément ou en substitution du sujet universel fragmenté de la culture postmoderne

“Lots of doctoring, with great success”: Healthcare within the Port Royal Experiment and the Work of Laura M. Towne

In 1862, Laura M. Towne – abolitionist, teacher, educator, and trained homeopath – joined the Port Royal Experiment, a project initiated by Northern benevolent societies to provide education and relief for former slaves on the South Carolina Sea Islands, which had been occupied by Union troops in late 1861. On the Sea Islands as well as in broader Northern culture, healthcare for freedpeople – and freedpeople’s health – soon became controversial topics. This article traces how Towne as homeopathic practitioner uses medical tropes in autobiographic documents intended for publication or circulation in the North to increase her own authority within a wartime discourse and how, at the same time, she avoids reflection about medical crises

ConspiraCities and Creative Paranoia: Ellis’s Glamorama, Hustvedt’s The Blindfold, and Whitehead’s The Intuitionist

La paranoïa et la théorie du complot on souvent été considérées comme des symptômes d’une culture urbaine contemporaine postmoderne. Par une étude critique de trois romans urbains récents (Glamorama de Bret Easton Ellis, The Blindfold de Siri Hustvedt et The Intuitionist de Colson Whitehead) cet article tente de découvrir les fonctions divergentes du motif littéraire de la pensée de la paranoïa et des structures littéraires de la paranoïa, en complément ou en substitution du sujet universel fragmenté de la culture postmoderne

Espaces et terres d’Amérique

Les textes qui composent ce recueil prolongent le colloque "Espaces et Terres d'Amérique" organisé les 7-8 avril 2005 à Toulouse par le Groupe d'Etudes Nord-Américaines (G.E.N.A.), composante du centre Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes (C.A.S.). La thématique de ce recueil a attiré des chercheurs spécialisés tout aussi bien en littérature qu'en civilisation, en histoire ou en linguistique. Il est vrai que l'espace nord-américain se prête à des analyses transdisciplinaires. Les articles, qui traitent de questions de société, d'histoire, de littérature et de culture plus généralement, s'intéressent aux diverses définitions de l'espace américain mais aussi au rapport qu'entretiennent les Américains avec les notions d'espace et de territoire. L'ouvrage examine également des phénomènes identitaires d'autant plus intéressants que cette nation, dont on dit qu'elle est "terre d'immigration," est un laboratoire favorable à l'étude de tels phénomènes. Enfin, il étudie la cartographie de l'espace dressée par les artistes aux États-Unis et la façon dont cet espace est représenté dans la littérature et le cinéma américains The, articles collected in this volume grew out of the conference on "Mapping American Space/ Espaces et Terres d'Amérique," hosted by the North American research group (G.E.N.A.), a member of the Anglophone Culture Center (C.A.S.), at the University of Toulouse on April 7-8, 2005. This volume brings together researchers specializing in literature, history, cultural studies and linguistics, for American space is open to all kinds of enquiries. The articles deal with social, historical, literary, and, more generally, cultural topics, examining not only the different ways of defining American space but also the conceptions Americans entertain in relation to space and territoriality. The questions of identity examined here are all the more absorbing as this nation founded on immigration constitutes a real laboratory for the study of these issues. Finally, this volume looks at the ways in which American artists have mapped American space imaginatively and figured its organization through cinematic and literary representations