European journal of American studies, Vol 11, no 2 | 2016
نویسنده
چکیده
This article uses Jacques Lacan’s reading of the Freudian fort-dagame to analyze that most American of cultural constructs, the cowboy, at the time of that figure’s fading from theAmerican landscape: the immediate postwar years. With John Grady Cole, the protagonist of All the Pretty Horses (1992), Cormac McCarthy provides a suitably situated subject for this criticalendeavor, one whose subjective characteristics become present through dramatically playfuldivision of his maternal imago. These games of psychoanalytical maturation, which emerge fromthe alternation between psychoanalysis in theory and that theory in critical practice, and whichtrace their subject’s successive relocations to alternative sides of the American-Mexican border,articulate the inevitable though resisted diminishment of Cole’s cultural construction.
منابع مشابه
European journal of American studies, Vol 9, No 1 | 2014
This article argues that the practical jokes running throughout Wilson’s novel Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) are evidence of a deliberate and sophisticated comic strategy that exploits the spectacular body’s potential for subversive performance and works against thealienating conditions of social and political marginalisation experienced by African Americans in<l...
متن کاملEuropean journal of American studies, Vol 9, No 3 | 2014
Combining insights from human geography, critical regionalism, and environmental literarycriticism, I argue that the concept of the translocal, rather than the transnational, is useful todescribe the complex poetics of place in Agha Shahid Ali’s A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991) and Arthur Sze’s The Ginkgo Light (2009). Engaging with landscapes of the American Southwest and elsewhere...
متن کاملEuropean journal of American studies, Vol 10, no 3 | 2015
San Francisco is known for its small acreage and high population density. Due to its attractiveness, the city has been subjected to a housing shortage, skyrocketing real-estate rates, and a steady process of gentrification over the past 20 years in particular. Access to public spaces and deliberation, negotiation, and conflicts over the proper uses and appearance of such spaces is one aspect of...
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