Here Is New York

In the summer of 1948, E.B. White sat in a New York City hotel room and, sweltering in the heat, wrote a remarkable pristine essay, Here is New York. Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, the author’s stroll around Manhattan—with the reader arm-in-arm—remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America’s foremost literary figures. Here is New York has been chosen by The New York Times as one of the ten best books ever written about the city. The New Yorker calls it “the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city.”.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 New York in 1999 can’t offer the gift of loneliness and privacy, the way it did in the book. It’s hard to feel private in the surging daily crowds at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or lonely on a side street packed with gridlocked traffic. #2 The loss of the sense of separation and connection that New Yorkers once felt with their resident celebrities is a major loss. The old New York street encounter, in which celebrities would meet fans, has almost gone by the boards thanks to street loonies and the paparazzi..

.

.

Activists working in post-traumatic societies have tended to resist psychoanalytical terms because they fear that pathologizing individual suffering displaces the collective and political causes of traumatic violence. In a contrary direction, some thinkers about discourse and power have latterly embraced what Judith Butler insists is 'the psychic life of power'. An openly psychoanalytical modelling of trauma for approaching major historical events such as the Holocaust adds yet a third position. Drawing on all three strands, this book poses the question of visual politics to psychoanalysis. It also explores the relevance of the many psychoanalyses to the study of art and other images in post-traumatic conditions. Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis builds on maverick art historian Aby Warburg's project of combining social, cultural, anthropological and psychological analyses of the image in order to track the undercurrents of cultural violence in the representational repertoire of Western modernity. In this innovative collection, a distinguished group of international authors dare to think psychoanalytically about the legacies of political violence and suffering in relation to post-traumatic cultures worldwide. Drawing on post-colonial and feminist theory, they analyse the image and the aesthetic in conditions of historical trauma from enslavement and colonisation to the Irish Famine, from Denmark's national trauma about migrants and cartoons to collective shock after 9/11, from individual traumas of loss registered in allegory to newsreels and documentaries on suicide bombing in Israel/Palestine, from Kristeva's novels to Kathryn Bigelow's cinema..

This interdisciplinary study of how 9/11 and the 'war on terror' were represented during the Bush era, shows how culture often functioned as a vital resource, for citizens attempting to make sense of momentous historical events that frequently seemed beyond their influence or control.Illustrated throughout, the book discusses representation of 9/11 and the war on terror in Hollywood film, the 9/11 novel, mass media, visual art and photography, political discourse, and revisionist historical accounts of American 'empire,' between the September 11 attacks and the Congressional midterm elections in 2006. As well as prompting an international security crisis, and a crisis in international governance and law, David Holloway suggests the culture of the time also points to a 'crisis' unfolding in the institutions and processes of republican democracy in the United States. His book offers a cultural and ideological history of the period..

Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to form relationships and shaping relationships to create communities. In this beautiful book, Margaret Olin explores photography’s ability to “touch” us through a series of essays that shed new light on photography’s role in the world. Olin investigates the publication of photographs in mass media and literature, the hanging of exhibitions, the posting of photocopied photographs of lost loved ones in public spaces, and the intense photographic activity of tourists at their destinations. She moves from intimate relationships between viewers and photographs to interactions around larger communities, analyzing how photography affects the way people handle cataclysmic events like 9/11. Along the way, she shows us James VanDerZee’s Harlem funeral portraits, dusts off Roland Barthes’s family album, takes us into Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and logs onto online photo albums. With over one hundred illustrations, Touching Photographs is an insightful contribution to the theory of photography, visual studies, and art history..

Once symbols of the past, ruins have become ubiquitous signs of our future. Americans today encounter ruins in the media on a daily basis--images of abandoned factories and malls, toxic landscapes, devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods. In this sweeping study, Miles Orvell offers a new understanding of the spectacle of ruins in US culture, exploring how photographers, writers, painters, and filmmakers have responded to ruin and destruction, both real and imaginary, in an effort to make sense of the past and envision the future. Empire of Ruins explains why Americans in the nineteenth century yearned for the ruins of Rome and Egypt and how they portrayed a past as ancient and mysterious in the remains of Native American cultures. As the romance of ruins gave way to twentieth-century capitalism, older structures were demolished to make way for grander ones, a process interpreted by artists as a symptom of America's "creative destruction." In the late twentieth century, Americans began to inhabit a perpetual state of ruins, made visible by photographs of decaying inner cities, derelict factories and malls, and the waste lands of the mining industry. This interdisciplinary work focuses on how visual media have transformed disaster and decay into spectacles that compel our moral attention even as they balance horror and beauty. Looking to the future, Orvell considers the visual portrayal of climate ruins as we face the political and ethical responsibilities of our changing world. A wide-ranging work by an acclaimed urban, cultural, and photography scholar, Empire of Ruins offers a provocative and lavishly illustrated look at the American past, present, and future..

Matthias N. Lorenz: Nach den Bildern - 9/11 als "Kultur-Schock". Vorwort - Michael Beuthner: 9/11-Fernsehnachrichtenbilder und Echtzeitjournalismus als Teil kultureller Bedeutungsproduktion - Stephanie Bunk: Eine Demokratie der Fotografien. Die fotografische Archivierung des 11. September 2001 - Christiane Käsgen: Inszenierte Wirklichkeit. Physische Terrorerfahrung und fiktionaler Erzählmodus in Jules und Gédéon Naudets Dokumentarfilm "9/11" - - Bernd Scheffer: "... wie im Film": Der 11. September und die USA als Teil Hollywoods - Stefan Neuhaus: "Spiderman" und der 11. September - Andreas Jahn-Sudmann: 9/11 im fiktionalen Film: Analysen zu "11'09''01" und "September" - Russell B. West: Writing the Disaster: New York Poets on 9/11 - Walter Uka: Der 11. September auf dem Theater. Betroffenheit, Zynismus, stumme Bilder und lärmende Absurdität - Werner Jung: Terror und Literatur. Miszelle - Ole Frahm: Dreierlei Schwarz. Art Spiegelmans und Elein Fleiss' Interpretationen des 11. September '01 - Pierangelo Maset: Die Kunst und der 11. September 2001 - Olaf Winkler: Original medial. Daniel Libeskinds Pläne für Ground Zero: Zur Verlagerung der Originalität aus dem Entwurf in dessen Erläuterung - Andreas Schmitt-Sattelberg: "Deceit and Betrayel's a bitter fruit". Auf der Suche nach einer Poetik der populären Kultur in Bruce Springsteens "The Rising" - Carola Schormann: "We'll put a boot in your ass - it's the American way". Patriotismus und moralische Werte in der Country Music nach dem 11. September - Miriam Reinhard: Alles wie bisher - nichts wie es mal war. Der 11. September in der deutschen Musik zwischen den Generationen - Andrea Payk-Heitmann: "Freundschaftsdienste" im Nachhall des Terrors. Zu den Reaktionen deutscher Literaten im Kontext intellektueller Amerikabilder - Andreas Hetzel: Das reine Ereignis. Philosophische Reaktionen auf den 11. September - Steffi Hobuß: "Die Wahrheit ist irgendwo da draußen". Verschwörungstheorien zum 11. September und die Frage nach dem Entkommen aus der Skepsis - Matthias N. Lorenz: Lachen nach dem / über den 11. September 2001. Komik im Angesicht des Schrecklichen.

"The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a world war."—E. B. White on fatherhood "I was lucky to be born abnormal. It ran in the family."—on luck "I would really rather feel bad in Maine than feel good anywhere else." —on Maine "The English language is always sticking a foot out to trip a man."—on language The author of Charlotte's Web and One Man's Meat, coauthor of The Elements of Style, and columnist for The New Yorker for almost half a century, E. B. White (1899–1985) is an American literary icon. Over the course of his career, White inspired generations of writers and readers with his essays (both serious and humorous), children's literature, and stylistic guidance. In the Words of E. B. White offers readers a delightful selection of quotations, selected and annotated by his granddaughter and literary executor, Martha White. The quotations cover a wide range of subjects and situations, from Automobiles, Babies, Bees, City Life, and College to Spiders, Taxes, Weather, Work, and Worry. E. B. White comments on writing for children, how to tell a major poet from a minor one, and what to do when one becomes hopelessly mired in a sentence. White was apt to address the subject of security by speaking first about a Ferris wheel at the local county fair, or the subject of democracy from the perspective of roofing his barn and looking out across the bay—he had a gift for bringing the abstract firmly into the realm of the everyday. Included here are gems from White's books and essay collections, as well as bits from both published and unpublished letters and journals. This is a book for readers and writers, for those who know E. B. White from his "Notes and Comment" column in The New Yorker, have turned to The Elements of Style for help in crafting a polished sentence, or have loved a spider's assessment of Wilbur as "Some Pig." This distillation of the wit, style, and humanity of one of America's most distinguished essayists of the twentieth century will be a welcome addition to any reader's bookshelf..

In Couplets, Brian Massumi presents twenty-four essays that represent the full spectrum of his work during the past thirty years. Conceived as a companion volume to Parables for the Virtual, Couplets addresses the key concepts of Parables from different angles and contextualizes them, allowing their stakes to be more fully felt. Rather than organizing the essays chronologically or by topic, Massumi pairs them into couplets to encourage readers to make connections across conventional subject matter categories, to encounter disjunctions, and to link different phases in the evolution of his work. In his analyses of topics ranging from art, affect, and architecture to media theory, political theory, and the philosophy of experience, Massumi charts a field on which a family of conceptual problems plays out in ways that bear on the potentials for acting and perceiving the world. As an essential guide to Massumi's oeuvre, Couplets is both a primer for his new readers and a supplemental resource for those already engaged with his thought..

A history of New York subway passengers as they navigated the system's constraints while striving for individuality, or at least a smooth ride. When the subway first opened with much fanfare on October 27, 1904, New York became a city of underground passengers almost overnight. In this book, Stefan Höhne examines how the experiences of subway passengers in New York City were intertwined with cultural changes in urban mass society throughout the twentieth century. Höhne argues that underground transportation--which early passengers found both exhilarating and distressing--changed perceptions, interactions, and the organization of everyday life..

Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction is an interdisciplinary study that presents masculinity as a key thematic concern in contemporary New York fiction. This study argues that New York authors do not simply depict masculinity as a social and historical construction but seek to challenge the archetypal ideals of masculinity by writing counter-hegemonic narratives. Gendering canonical New York writers, namely Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, and Don DeLillo, illustrates how explorations of masculinity are tied into the principal themes that have defined the American novel from its very beginning. The themes that feature in this study include the role of the novel in American society; the individual and (urban) society; the journey from innocence to awareness (of masculinity); the archetypal image of the absent and/or patriarchal father; the impact of homosocial relations on the everyday performance of masculinity; male sexuality; and the male individual and globalization. What connects these contemporary New York writers is their employment of the one of the great figures in the history of literature: the flâneur. These authors take the flâneur from the shadows of the Manhattan streets and elevate this figure to the role of self-reflexive agent of male subjectivity through which they write counter-hegemonic narratives of masculinity. This book is an essential reference for those with an interest in gender studies and contemporary American fiction..

This book offers an exploration of the comprehensive impact of the events of September 11, 2001, on every aspect of American culture and society. • More than 100 aspects of American culture are discussed in terms of their response to—or reflection of—the events of September 11 • 68 scholars from a variety of disciplines contributed to this book • A compelling chronological view of how America responded to the September 11 attacks—in our everyday life, our work environments, and in popular culture • Helpful indexes offer access to the entries by genre, title, and author • Spotlight essays discuss specific television shows, films, music, literature, and art works that came as a result of September 11, while shorter essays focus on specific books, TV shows, songs, and films..

It is all but impossible to think of September 11th 2001 and not, at the same time, recall an image. The overwhelmingly visual coverage in the world's media pictured a spectacle of terror, from images of the collapsing towers, to injured victims and fatigued firefighters. In the days, weeks and months that followed, this vast collection of photographs continued to circulate relentlessly. This book investigates the psychological impact of those photographs on a stunned American audience. Drawing on trauma theory, this book asks whether the prolonged exposure of audience to photographs was cathartic or damaging. It explores how first the collective memory of the event was established in the American psyche and then argues that through repetitive use of the most powerful pictures, the culture industry created a dangerously simple 9/11 metanarrative. At the same time, people began to reclaim and use photography to process their own feelings, most significantly in 'communities' of photographic memorial websites. Such exercises were widely perceived as democratic and an aid to recovery. This book interrogates that assumption, providing a new understanding of how audiences see and process news photography in times of crisis..

.

“America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement.... No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and in his eyes what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do”—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835). “Americans will pay a big price for an invention that will help them save time they don’t know what to do with”—Anonymous. This collection of quotations—both serious and humorous—about America is divided into 19 main topics: The Nation, The American People, Places, Nature, Mind, The Individual, Human Relations, Social Life, Culture and Media, Literature and Language, Religion and Belief, Past and Future, History, War and the Military, International Relations, Politics and Government, Law and Order, Business and Economy, and Food. Each main topic is divided into subtopics; for example, “Culture and Media” has these: Architecture, Art, Charlie Chaplin, Dance, Fashion, Intellectuals, Marilyn Monroe, Movies, Music, Elvis Presley, and Television. The author attributes each quote to its speaker, author or composer, and wherever possible, provides the date of the quote and the name of the work in which it was published. In the case of uncertainty about the exact date of a quote, the author provides the birth and death dates of the person to whom the quote is attributed. Also included are a keyword and subject index and a speaker index..