Aberration In The Heartland Of The Real

Presenting startling new biographical details about Timothy McVeigh and exposing stark contradictions and errors contained in previous depictions of the "All-American Terrorist," this book traces McVeigh's life from childhood to the Army, throughout the plot to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and the period after his 1995 arrest until his 2001 execution. McVeigh's life, as Dr. Wendy Painting describes it, offers a backdrop for her discussion of not only several intimate and previously unknown details about him, but a number of episodes and circumstances in American History as well. In Aberration in the Heartland, Painting explores Cold War popular culture, all-American apocalyptic fervor, organized racism, contentious politics, militarism, warfare, conspiracy theories, bioethical controversies, mind control, the media's construction of villains and demons, and institutional secrecy and cover-ups. All these stories are examined, compared, and tested in Aberration in the Heartland of the Real, making this book a much closer examination into the personality and life of Timothy McVeigh than has been provided by any other biographical work about him

This book tells the story of how madness came to play a prominent part in America’s political and cultural debates. It argues that metaphors of madness rise to unprecedented popularity amidst the domestic struggles of the early Cold War and become a pre-eminent way of understanding the relationship between politics and culture in the United States. In linking the individual psyche to society, psychopathology contributes to issues central to post-World War II society: a dramatic extension of state power, the fate of the individual in bureaucratic society, the political function of emotions, and the limits to admissible dissent. Such vocabulary may accuse opponents of being crazy. Yet at stake is a fundamental error of judgment, for which madness provides welcome metaphors across US diplomacy and psychiatry, social movements and criticism, literature and film. In the process, major parties and whole historical eras, literary movements and social groups are declared insane. Reacting against violence at home and war abroad, countercultural authors oppose a sane madness to irrational reason—romanticizing the wisdom of the schizophrenic and paranoia’s superior insight. As the Sixties give way to a plurality of lifestyles an alternative vision arrives: of a madness now become so widespread and ordinary that it may, finally, escape pathology.

Focusing on works by Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, and Don DeLillo, Joseph Tabbi finds that a simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from technology has produced a powerful new mode of modern writing—the technological sublime.

An evaluation that tracks American culture's shift from modernism into postmodernism

Peripheralizing DeLillo tracks the historical arc of Don DeLillo's poetics as it recomposes itself across the genres of short fiction, romance, the historical novel, and the philosophical novel of time. Drawing on theories that capital, rather than the bourgeoisie, is the displaced subject of the novel, Thomas Travers investigates DeLillo's representation of fully commodified social worlds and re-evaluates Marxist accounts of the novel and its philosophy of history. Deploying an innovative re-periodisation, Travers considers the evolution of DeLillo's aesthetic forms as they register and encode one of the crises of contemporary historicity: the secular dynamics through which a society organised around waged work tends towards conditions of under- and unemployment. Situating DeLillo within global histories of uneven and combined development, Travers explores how DeLillo's treatment of capital and labour, affect and narration, reconfigures debates around realism and modernism. The DeLillo that emerges from this study is no longer an exemplary postmodern writer, but a composer of capitalist epics, a novelist drawn to peripheral zones of accumulation, zones of social death whose surplus populations his fiction strives to re-historicise, if not re-dialecticise as subjects of history.

This book argues that the war on terror is a paradigmatic foreign policy that has had profound effects on domestic social order. Cameron develops an original framework which inverts the traditional analysis of foreign policy in order to interpret its impact upon subject formation through everyday practises of security and social regulation.

A collection of articles that analyses the role of the media in America from a deconstructionist viewpoint. This collection of original essays is a response to the paradigm shift that has taken place in cultural studies in the wake of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Such concepts as 'truth' or 'reality' have been increasingly called into question, since the realization that our experience of 'the real' is always mediated through an "empire of signs," as Roland Barthes put it. After a predominantly optimistic evaluation of the effects of the media in the 1960s (by Marshall McLuhan, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and others), a growing awareness of the total manipulation of society by mass-media imagery has emerged. The very concept of 'representation' has become problematic, witness the influential essay "The Precession of Simulacra" by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, in which he defines simulation as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal"- the current boom in 'realityTV' comes to mind. In the seventeen years since the publication of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, ever more sophisticated technologies based on the computer as the simulacrum machine par excellence have offered us powerful new means of manipulating data - and consequently, means of manipulating, editing, and inventing 'reality.' The aim of this study is to unmask false 'representations', showing history, personal and cultural identity (especially gender and racial identities), the simulacrum of speed -- and American 'reality' itself -- to be constructs.

What started as a small New York City youth group quickly became one of the most prominent grassroots activist/citizen journalist organizations, with over 260 chapters worldwide. We Are CHANGE emerged from the ashes of a post-9/11 New York and would eventually change the world in a historic effort of epic proportions. The group became a leading force within key political movements, including the 9/11 Truth movement, the antiwar movement, the liberty/patriot movement, and Occupy Wall Street, and confronted some of the most powerful war criminals, propagandists and institutions, on their deepest, darkest lies and secrets. Featuring the insider account of a founding member, keynote speeches and important dialogue from 21st century thought-leaders, and much more, We Are CHANGE exposes covert reconnaissance operations against peaceful activist groups, explores pressing philosophical questions, and shares tales of trials and tribulations, as well as brotherhood and camaraderie.