Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: Over the last two decades, scholars from across several fields and periods have taken a renewed interest in spectacle and spectatorship.The trend has been evident among those working on the United States, where it has gathered pace in recent years, and led to a burst of new and innovative studies.This special issue, which took shape at a workshop held at the University of Manchester in 2017, convened to discuss these currents, now attempts to draw some of them together for American Studies scholars and those working on the history and culture of the US. 2The study of spectacle has of course long been established among scholars of theatre and film, and art historians, given shape and force by Guy Debord's polemical Society of the Spectacle (1967), which presented "a society of images" as a new species of political power and social organization.What is notable about this subject's recent ascent is its widening scope, its embrace by literary scholars, and, more cautiously, by some historians and political scientists, and, especially given Debord's dismissal of that tradition of "sociology which began, first in the United States," its place within some discussions of the US.This impulse, admittedly a modest and uneven one among all Americanists, has nevertheless been perceptible in at least three bodies of scholarship, including recent studies of US politics, urban life, and racial subjugation.
DOI: 10.4000/ejas.15359
Author: Andrew M. Fearnley
Institutions: University of Manchester, Columbia University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2996346552