Ceremonies and Spectacles [antikvár]

Preface The contributions to this volume were first presented at the Conference of the European Association of American Studies (EAAS) in Lisbon, April 3-6, 1998. Its theme, "Ceremonies and Spectacles: America and the Staging of Collective Identities," invited interdisciplinary discussion of the various aspects of American culture as a culture of performance and of spectacle. Accordingly, these essays by Americanist scholars from Europe and the United States inquire specifically into the role of performance in public discourse,—be it in the name of national self-celebration, or in the service of collective or individual identity formation. Yet they also focus on the role and function of performance in American cultural life (institutional and/or private): the role of opera and theater, for instance, but also of that of private theatricals; and they look at texts—in literature and the visual arts, even at textualized landscape—as performative space in which collective or individual identity has been, symbolically constructed and deconstructed since the beginnings of the American Republic. The volume opens with the essays of the three plenary speakers, each approaching the performative aspects of American culture from the diflferent angles of poetry, theater, and fiction: Irene Maria Ramalho Sousa Santos, in her analysis of texts that range from Emerson to DeLillo, discusses the many ambivalences of a specular culture, i.e. a culture 'rooted' in the I/Eye: in projections of the performative self, in spectacle and the spectacular. Herbert Blau ironically probes into the absurdities of a resurgent belief in ritual and a theater based on the ritualistic as a means of reconstructing 'original' or 'authentic' community; Robert Coover, in reflecting on his own fiction, explores the performative elements of American self-mythification. These are followed by articles which thematically cluster around the topics of home-theatricals (Lewis), popular theater (Blair), and opera (Mariani), around exhibitions and world fairs (Rydell, Kroes), around the many different cultural stagings of national or group identity along class, gender or ethnic lines in war and crisis (Hebel, Johnson/Johnson, Fasce, Christol, Banta, Wirth-Nesher, Lorini, Ostendorf), or that deal with the carefully orchestrated celebration of scientific and technological achievements (Niemeyer, Frezza). There are others which uncover the long-ignored Africanist presence in American ballet (Dixon), or inquire into the exploitative dimension of a culture of spectacle (Cagidemetrio), and into the staging of AIDS and the mourning for its victims as ritual and public event (Sielke). Last, but by no means least, there are several articles that analyze the visual text as cultural construction and performance (Cassidy, Bán), and explore the performative element in poetry (Altieri, Ingebretsen, Mihaila). The last two essays are concerned with American landscape: with the docu-fiction of landscape writing (Brönnimann) and with the American desert as a staged and contested space (Gersdorf). Thus the book covers widely