The American cultural imaginary is hungry for death, and thus representations of death are prominently repeated and serialized in US literature and media. Stella Castelli shows how American culture fetishizes death as part of a repetition compulsion which stems from the inability of language to satisfactorily grasp death. Taking an intermedial approach, she investigates the forms and tropes born from this preoccupation with death and conceptualizes its imagination alongside an appetite which manifests as repetitive encoding. These metaphors of food consumption provide a hermeneutic framing for analyzing representations of death across American literature and media.
Author(s): Stella Castelli
Series: American Culture Studies | 40
Edition: 1
Publisher: Transcript Verlag
Year: 2023
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 221
Tags: Death, America, Popular Culture, Media, Literature, Film, Cultural Studies, Television
Cover
Half title
About Authors
Title
Copyright
Contents
Introduction: The Paradoxical Nature of Death in America
1. The Text Devouring the Dead: Edgar Allan Poe and David Lynch’s American Gothic
1.1 Edgar Allan Poe – Various Figurations of the Same Death
1.2 Rewriting the Dead: Twin Peaks
1.3 Overcoming the Dead: Twin Peaks– The Return
2. I am Dead, Yet I Live – The Zombie’s Gluttonous Craving for the Living
2.1 Romero’s Zombies: Dawn of the Dead, Land of the Dead
2.2 Brains a la Mode: iZombie and the Reinterpretation of the Traditional Zombie as Subject
3. Producing the Corpse: Quentin Tarantino’s Revenge Narratives
3.1 The Personal Vendetta: Riding the Pussy Wagon – Kill(ing) Bill and Death Proof
3.2 Reimaginations of History as Collective Vengeance: Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained
4. Ingesting the Corpse: The Cannibal’s Taste for Death – American Psycho and Hannibal
4.1 Fetishizing the Corpse: Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho
4.2 Le cannibalisme pour le cannibalisme: Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal
5. Creator/Destroyer: The Serial Killer as an American Phenomenon
5.1 Catering to a Compulsive Craving: Wes Craven’s Scream Franchise
5.2 An American Tale: The Assassination of Gianni Versace
Conclusion: Death. Again.
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
