Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
Terence McSweeney
Keyword(s):  
Iraq War ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
First Century ◽  
War Films ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Cultural Artefact ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Times ◽  
Affective Impact

This chapter analyzes the film The Hurt Locker, including its stylistic and narrative devices, cultural impact, reception, and relationship to the genre. It analyzes what The Hurt Locker ultimately portrays about the Iraq War, which was officially brought to an end by President Barack Obama on the 18 December 2011, but still continues to be fought onscreen. It also explores the central contentions that are key to the affective impact of The Hurt Locker during the time of its release and after a decade later. The chapter talks about The Hurt Locker as one of the definitive American war films of the twenty-first century and as the first film from the genre to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. It describes The Hurt Locker as a vivid and dynamically realised film, which should be regarded as a powerful cultural artefact intrinsically connected to the times in which it was made.

Studying The Hurt Locker

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terence McSweeney
Keyword(s):  
Iraq War ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Affective Impact ◽  
Industrial Context ◽  
War Film

This book, drawing on a broad tapestry of research, offers an exploration of The Hurt Locker (2009), its stylistic and narrative devices, its cultural impact, its reception, and its relationship to the genre of the war film. The book begins with an analysis of what The Hurt Locker ultimately portrays about the Iraq War, which was officially brought to an end by President Barack Obama on the 18 December 2011, but still continues to be fought onscreen. It also explores the central contentions that are key to the affective impact of The Hurt Locker during the time of its release and after a decade later. The book places the film in a richly textured historical, political, and industrial context, arguing that The Hurt Locker is part of a long tradition of films about American wars that play a considerable role in how audiences come to understand the conflicts that they depict. Thus, films about a nation's wars are never “only a movie” but rather should be considered a cultural battleground themselves on which a war of representation is waged.

West of the Magic Circle

The Race Card ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 113-137
Author(s):  
Tara Fickle
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Times ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Japan And China ◽  
Magic Circle

This chapter radically revises our understanding of game studies’ conceptual foundations by revealing the Orientalist assumptions embedded in Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) and Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games (1958). These founding fathers’ discussions of play as a liberating “magic circle” have been endlessly cited, excerpted, and romanticized, most recently by popular and academic rhetoric extolling video games as the cure for a “broken” and alienating twenty-first-century reality. Unsurprisingly, contemporary scholars have regarded the patronizing and exotifying references to Japan and China which crop up nearly from the very first pages of these tomes as embarrassing but irrelevant signs of the times. Recontextualizing these early chapters within the longer and rarely read remainders of both monographs, however, reveals that those initial ludic schemas were in fact the raison d’être for an elaborate ethnocentric sociology that rationalized the cognitive and cultural inferiority of nonwhites by ranking them according to the “primitivity” of their play. Showing how these theorists legitimized their taxonomies by naturalizing fantasies of a ritualized, stagnant East and an innovative, rational West, this chapter demonstrates that Orientalist discourse was not tangential but essential to the seemingly global theories of play that form the basis of modern game studies.

“Don’t Do Stupid Shit”

2020 ◽  
pp. 294-318
Author(s):  
Christopher Preble ◽  
William Ruger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
International Order ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
First Century ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
New Strategy ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter uses a quote by Barack Obama to outline how foreign relations in the twenty-first century, especially for great powers such as the United States, should be handled with deftness, caution, and prudence. It emphasizes the idea that people often take action without knowing the consequences. The authors highlight the need for wisdom, patience, and restraint in important political situations and argue that Obama’s diplomatic approach provides a good model when considering a new strategy to replace approaches that have proved ineffective, counterproductive, or disruptive to what remains of the international order Woodrow Wilson helped forge.

Coda

2019 ◽  
pp. 117-120
Author(s):  
Richard Carlin
Keyword(s):  
Country Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One

Country performers have always balanced two contradictory impulses: on the one hand, they value their musical influences and the many earlier styles that made the music what it is today; on the other, they are interested in adding to the tradition by incorporating the latest technical and musical innovations. The Coda shows how, in the twenty-first century, we see the same scenario playing out among the latest country stars. While some stars adjust their music to fit the times, others continue to perform pretty much in the same style for decades. Country music keeps trucking along, despite many transformations and changes over the years.

Reading Dylan Thomas

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
First Century ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
War Films ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Dylan Thomas ◽  
The Many

Reclining quietly with a book; an ear glued to the Hi-Fi; sifting a library stack; the TV flickering; a website gone live… Few poets have inspired such remarkable scenes and modes of interpretation as Dylan Thomas. Our means of access and response to his work have never been more eclectic, and this collection sheds new light on what it means to ‘read’ such a various art. In thinking beyond the parameters of life writing and lingering interpretative communities, Reading Dylan Thomas attends in detail to the problems and pleasures of deciphering Thomas in the twenty-first century, teasing out his debts and effects, tracing his influence on later artists, and suggesting ways to understand his own idiosyncratic reading practices. From short stories to memoirs, poems to broadcasts, letters to war films, manuscripts to paintings, the material considered in this volume lays the ground for a new consideration of Thomas’s formal versatility, and his distinctive relation to the many kinds of media that constitute literary modernism.

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