For many weeks, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 dominated the newspapers which covered the consequences with an unprecedented immediateness. This study looks at diverging representations of 9/11 in U.S. and German newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung) and explores effects on its possible readerships. The impact of the attacks, forms of heroism, the enactment of leadership, various demonstrations of patriotism and grief as well as the textual and visual presentation of the attacks are analyzed in detail. These intermedial representations reaffirm or contest U.S. American grand narratives. While the German newspapers tend to focus on information and analysis, the U.S. papers tend to strengthen shattered U.S. American identity constructions. The study is based on nearly 2,000 newspaper articles and documents the wide scope of topics prevalent in the post-9/11 newspaper coverage.

The years following the attacks of September 11, 2001 have seen the publication of a wide range of scientific analyses of terrorism. Literary studies seem to lag curiously behind this general shift of academic interest. The present volume sets out to fill this gap. It does so in the conviction that the study of literature has much to offer to the transdisciplinary investigation of terror, not only with respect to the present post-9/11 situation but also with respect to earlier historical contexts. Literary texts are media of cultural self-reflection, and as such they have always played a crucial role in the discursive response to terror, both contributing to and resisting dominant conceptions of the causes, motivations, dynamics, and aftermath of terrorist violence. By bringing together experts from various fields and by combining case studies of works from diverse periods and national literatures, the volume Literature and Terrorism chooses a diachronic and comparative perspective. It is interested in the specific cultural work performed by narrative and dramatic literature in the face of terrorism, focusing on literature's ambivalent relationship to other, competing modes of discourse.

The ways in which we watch television tell us much about our views of gender, the family and society. Bringing together the leading experts in the field of audience studies, this book investigates how viewers watch television, and what they think about the programmes they see. Originally published in 1989, the book is divided into two sections which discuss some of the theoretical issues at stake and then present case studies of a wide range of viewers: women office workers, Israeli watchers of Dallas, German families, the elderly, and American daytime soap fans. Contributors from Britain, the United States, Western Europe, Australia and Israel offer a wide range of perspectives, from feminism to post-modernism, and from semiotics to Marxism. ‘Together these essays constitute one of the best possible introductions to the leading edge of research into the phenomenon of television.’ Choice

How is decadence being staged today – as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for? This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value – namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism. Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse – and what might lie in its wake.