About the Book

In Landscapes of Postmodernity, a group of young scholars link key concepts of postmodern thought to our present everyday experience in which we change our identities on a regular basis. While many of the essays look at less conventional modes of aesthetic representation - computer games, graphic novels, telenovelas, queer and animated films - others analyze more canonical works following less conventional approaches. Either way, the cultural and literary cartographies presented in this book allow America to be conceived as polymorphous or transnational, celebrating a new American self that is aware and proud of its non-Anglo-Saxon origins.

Table of Contents

Remapping Postmodern Exchanges: Theory Avant La Lettre, a Travelogue (Michael Rozendal)

I.The Structurality of Poststructure

The Structurality of Poststructure: The Foundations of Postmodernism (Walter W. Höbling & Michael Fuchs
Apocalypse?! Now?! Heart of Darkness as a De(con)structive Survival Guide for Postmodern Times (Michael Phillips
Writing Ahead of the Times? A Postmodern Reading of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
A Horrific Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Simulacra, Simulations, and Postmodern Horror (Michael Fuchs)

II.Postmodern Chronotopoetics

Postmodern Chronotopoetics: An Introduction (Walter W. Hölbling & Petra Eckhard)
Allegories of Playing: Spatial Practice in Computer Games (Michael Fuchs)
Fascination for Confusion: Discontinuous Narrative in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (Cornelia Klecker)
Uncanny Architextures: Reading Time, Space, and Representation in Paul Auster's City of Glass

III.Polymorphous Subjectivities

Polymorphous Subjectivities: An Introduction (Susanne Hamscha)
Losing Nemo, Finding Alternatives: Queer Theory and the Postmodern Subject (Susanne Hamscha)
A Squeeze of the Hand: A Queer Reading of Moby-Dick (Christoph Hartner)
Negotiating Postmodernity and Queer Utopianism in Shortbus (Leopold Lippert)

IV.Transamérica

Transamérica: A Long Journey Through and Beyond the Americas (Gundo Rial y Costas)
Yoknapatawpha Between the Deep South and the West Indies: The Dynamics of Transculturalism in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses (Marcel Vejmelka)
The Chronotopos in the (Postmodern) Novel of the Américas: Towards a Transareal Topology of the Local (Pablo Valdivia Orozco)
Revisiting Spivak: Does the Subaltern Speak In and Through Telenovelas (Gundo Rial y Costas)

V.Afterthoughts

From Copacabana: Varenikes, Kebabs, a Turtle, and a Pigeon (Ana Teresa Jardim Reynaud)