The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age
- ISBN-10
- 0803217838
- ISBN-13
- 9780803217836
- Category
- Literary Criticism
- Pages
- 383
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2008-12-01
- Publisher
- U of Nebraska Press
- Author
- Neil Campbell
Description
Is the American West in Sergio Leone?s ?spaghetti westerns? the same American West we find in Douglas Coupland?s Generation X? In Jim Jarmusch?s movies? In Calexico?s music? Or is the American West, as this book tells us, a constantly moving, mutating idea within a complex global culture? And what, precisely (or better yet, imprecisely) does it mean? ø Using Gilles Deleuze and Fälix Guattari?s concept of the rhizome, Neil Campbell shows how the West (or west-ness) continually breaks away from a mainstream notion of American ?rootedness? and renews and transforms itself in various cultural forms. A region long traversed by various transient peoples (from tribes and conquerors to immigrants, traders, and trappers), the West reflects a mythic quest for settlement, permanence, and synthesis?even notions of a national or global identity?at odds with its rootless history, culture, and nature. Crossing the concept of ?roots? with ?routes,? this book shows how notions of the West?in representations ranging from literature and film to photography, music, and architectural theory?give expression to ideas about identity, nationhood, and belonging in a world increasingly defined by movement across time and borders. The Rhizomatic West offers a new vision of the American West as a hybrid, performative space, a staging place for myriad intersecting and constantly changing identities.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West
By Neil CampbellIn 2006 Alex Cox, British director of the “punk” Westerns Straight to Hell and Walker, and his reinterpretation of The Searchers, Searchers 2.0 (2007), wrote, “This genre ... has, to all intents and purposes, died.
-
Worlding the Western: Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community
By Neil CampbellHe proposes worlding as a different and more open form of politics. Diversity, disparity, and opposition are central to the dynamic frictional fiction considered in this book.
-
EPZ Thousand Plateaus
By Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari‘A rare and remarkable book.' Times Literary Supplement Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII.
-
The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West
By Susan BernardinRisk”. and. Legacies. of. Selfhood. in. Contemporary. White. Western. Men's. Memoir. Linda Karell DOI: 10.4324/9781351174282-8 Readers of contemporary Western writing will inevitably come across one or another of Ivan Doig's two memoirs ...
-
Affective Critical Regionality
By Neil CampbellInvestigates the concept of affective critical regionality to demonstrate how it deepens our sense of and relations to place.
-
From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine
By Marcelo Svirsky, Ronnen Ben-ArieBoth Byrd and Young focus on the following passage from A Thousand Plateaus: 'But there is the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever receding limits, its shifting and displaced frontiers'.
-
American Cultural Studies: An Introduction to American Culture
By Neil Campbell, Alasdair KeanPraise for previous editions: 'Something of a godsend ... as a teaching resource this book is second to none ... achieves levels of multiplicity rarely, if ever, reached by others.
-
Lost in the New West: Reading Williams, McCarthy, Proulx and McGuane
By Mark Asquithreinforcing the hunters' irrelevance; for all Miller's instinctive grasp of the land, he could have arrived more quickly and safely at his destination if he had simply taken the train. A similar act of narrative revision takes place ...
-
The Post-2000 Film Western: Contexts, Transnationality, Hybridity
By M. Paryz, J. LeoIn The Rhizomatic West, one of the most important recent books on the representations of the eponymous region in film and other visual arts and media, Neil Campbell describes the West as a “geographical, cultural and economic crossroads ...
-
Left in the West: Literature, Culture, and Progressive Politics in the American West
By Gioia WoodsThe Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age (U of Nebraska P, 2008), p. 14. 3. In addition to the rhetoric documented here, it is important to note that, despite his anti-racist rhetoric in ...