The Cultural Career of Coolness: Discourses and Practices of Affect Control in European Antiquity, the United States, and Japan - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0739173162 ISBN 13: 9780739173169

Publisher: Lexington Books, 2013

Synopsis

Today, coolness is a term most often used in advertising trendy commodities, or, more generally, in promoting urban lifestyles. The Cultural Career of Coolness explores the history of the term as a metaphor for affect control and aesthetic detachment, charts various cultural practices of coolness in the United States and Japan, and links them to the rationalization of intimate relations and an incorporation of disaffection in modernity.

About this title

Review:

Brought together by an outstanding group of editors, The Cultural Career of Coolness: Discourses and Practices of Affect Control in European Antiquity, the United States, and Japan presents a multi-faceted and in-depth look at 'coolness.' Not only does the volume deepen and complicate our common understanding of this cultural phenomenon by incorporating essays on philosophy, sociology, literature, music, and film, it also broadens the field of inquiry to include both Euro-American and Japanese contexts, offering a rich transcultural assessment rare in affect studies.... The Cultural Career of Coolness will appeal to a wide swathe of researchers, academics, students, and informed readers with an interest in affect studies, American studies, and Japanese studies as well as in cultural and literary studies generally. With its broad interdisciplinary focus and careful attention to pertinent questions that engage contemporary global culture, this anthology is certain to inspire further research, particularly in those areas that treat the cross-cultural, transcultural, or transnational.--Journal of the American Oriental Society

About the Author:

Ulla Haselstein is professor of American Literature (chair) at the John F. Kennedy Institute and the director of the Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universitat Berlin. Her book publications include Entziffernde Hermeneutik (1991); Die Gabe der Zivilisation (2000); Iconographies of Power: The Politics and Poetics of Visual Representation (2003, co-edited with Berndt Ostendorf and Peter Schneck), Cultural Transactions: 50 Years of American Studies in Germany (2005, co-edited with Berndt Ostendorf), and The Pathos of Authenticity. American Literary Imaginations of the Real (2010, co-edited with Andrew Gross, MaryAnn Snyder-Koerber). Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit is professor of Japanology (chair) and director of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at Freie Universitat Berlin. She was awarded the Leibniz Prize 1992. Series Editor: 1990-2000 - Japanische Bibliothek (Japanese Library), 34 volumes; 1994-present - Iaponia Insula (Studies on Japanese Culture and Society), 27 volumes. Her monographs include: Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishosetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon. Cambridge, MA. 1996 (German version 1981, expanded ed. 2005, Japanese version 1992); ed.: Canon and Identity: Japanese Modernization Reconsidered: Trans-Cultural Perspectives. (2000). Catrin Gersdorf is professor and chair of American Studies at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany. From 2009 to 2012 she was a member of the research group on "Coolness" at the research cluster "Languages of Emotion," Freie Universitat Berlin. The author of The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the Construction of America (2009), she has published several articles on nineteenth and twentieth-century US-American literature and culture. Elena Giannoulis is advanced research fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies at Freie Universitat Berlin. From 2010 to 2012 she was a researcher in the "Languages of Emotion" Cluster at Freie Universitaet Berlin. She currently works on her project Emotion Management in Japanese Literature and Culture since the 1980s. Publications: Giannoulis, Elena. Blut als Tinte: Wirkungs- und Funktionsmechanismen zeitgenoessischer shishosetsu [Blood as Ink: Mechanisms of effects and functions of contemporary shishosetsu]. (2010).

About this edition

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0739173162
• ISBN 13: 9780739173169
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 294
• Editor: Haselstein Ulla, Hijiya-Kirschnereit Irmela, Gersdorf Catrin