Amerikanisztika és vizualitás: Metszéspontok az információs társadalom horizontján

This ebook is published in Hungarian. English abstract: Part of an effort to bring together scholarly interests and expertise in an interdisciplinary manner, this volume features essays by Hungarian scholars of varied academic background, yet with a common and strong commitment to understanding the cultures of the United States from a visual perspective. Probing into issues emerging at the intersection of visuality and American Studies, the essays address questions related to the impact of information society on the production and reception of American cultural artifacts often in a transnational context. The opening study by László Z. Karvalics sets the framework for an understanding of the significance of visuality in American culture, in relation to the information society. He argues how the related change affected practices of everyday life as well as thinking about the link between visuality and American cultures. His historically inspired analysis is complemented by András Lénárt’s discussion of the reception of Franco’s Spain in Hollywood movies. Lénárt concentrates on the ways in which censorship affected the representation of a political regime that was in sharp contrast with the US political system. The same diachronic concern informs Csaba Lévai’s study of The Patriot (2000), a mainstream Hollywood representation of the American War of Independence, which aims to show how history is reproduced and adapted in a way meeting today’s ideological expectations of the American culture industry. With a more contemporary passion and a strong transnational concern, Erzsébet Barát looks at the ways in which Euro- and Amero-English discourses of feminism informed N.A.P., a Hungarian political visual campaign launched for the apportionment of women’s political representation in Parliament. Her case study sheds light on the politically charged understandings of the various waves of feminism in a Hungarian context. László Sári B.’s essay also chooses a contemporary subject which is nonetheless taken from the world of literature. In his analysis of Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters (1999), he addresses the problem of the influence of visual media on contemporary American minimalist fiction. Sári B. argues for the significance of intermediality in the book as an alternative to issues of post-modernist epistemological concerns or identity politics. The problem of visuality as a theme becomes even more accentuated in the essay of Diána Gollowitzer, who attempts to show how television as a traditional media form is transformed by the new media. Her particular example being TV series, she argues how the new ways of media usage in the transformed internet environment changed both the reception of series and through that the status of consumers also becoming producers. Finally, drawing on Lev Manovich’s insights into the role of software in the production of Hollywood films, Zoltán Dragon’s essay extends the concept of media hybridization to show how films such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-3), eXistenZ (1999) and others draw upon software technology in different ways. Whether through production or representation, they are, to varying extent, the result of the mechanism and the consequences of software-governed film-making technologies.

A borító Orodán Mihály grafikája alapján készült.

E kötet a TÁMOP-4.2.1/B-09/1/KONV-2010-0005 azonosító számú, „Kutatóegyetemi Kiválósági Központ létrehozása a Szegedi Tudományegyetemen” című projekt keretében, az Európai Unió támogatásával, az Európai Regionális Fejlesztési Alap társfinanszírozásával valósult meg.