“Are You a Bad Boy?”: Variations of the American Adam in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet

This paper mobilises R. W. B. Lewis’ myth of the American Adam, articulated in 1955, to examine David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet’s formulaic use of this masculinity archetype. Lewis’ ideal type of innocent masculinity is replicated by Blue Velvet’s protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who must navigate the stereotyped conventions of good and evil against the backdrop of the idealised US suburb. Beyond the generalised assessment of David Lynch as the quintessential eccentric, this article brings to the fore the ways in which his work can be analysed as formulaic, paying special attention to the interaction between masculinity, spatiality, and dominant national mythology.

A selection from the war diaries of Dan Davin

<p>This thesis is an edited selection from Dan Davin's wartime diaries, running from 1940-1941 and covering training in England, travel through Egypt, and fighting in Greece and Crete. The selection is a scholarly edition combining the two extant versions of the diaries (Davin's original manuscript and a typescript copy he made some years later) with heavy annotation. The diaries themselves are examined in two ways; as a historical record, showing the lives of many New Zealand soldiers; and as an attempt to explore how the inchoate material of the diaries is transformed into Davin's later fiction. The first draws particular interest from Davin's perspective as both a junior officer, with an account of events from below, and a self-conscious outsider who after escaping provincial New Zealand feels he has returned to its traveling manifestation. He observes with a sense of detachment from his counterparts and from responsibility for events outside his own sphere of command. This gives new insight into what has become part of national mythology.</p>

A selection from the war diaries of Dan Davin

<p>This thesis is an edited selection from Dan Davin's wartime diaries, running from 1940-1941 and covering training in England, travel through Egypt, and fighting in Greece and Crete. The selection is a scholarly edition combining the two extant versions of the diaries (Davin's original manuscript and a typescript copy he made some years later) with heavy annotation. The diaries themselves are examined in two ways; as a historical record, showing the lives of many New Zealand soldiers; and as an attempt to explore how the inchoate material of the diaries is transformed into Davin's later fiction. The first draws particular interest from Davin's perspective as both a junior officer, with an account of events from below, and a self-conscious outsider who after escaping provincial New Zealand feels he has returned to its traveling manifestation. He observes with a sense of detachment from his counterparts and from responsibility for events outside his own sphere of command. This gives new insight into what has become part of national mythology.</p>

European Integration as New National Mythology: On The Resolution of the Macedonian Name Dispute

The paper examines the effect that the resolution of the naming dispute between North Macedonia and Greece has on the re-definition of the Macedonian nation. It discusses the narratives of supporters and opponents to the Prespa Agreement and poses the question of whether the European integration (under which auspices the name change occurred) has indeed served as new national mythology for Macedonians.

AMLO’s Mexican Time (Business Is Good!)

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has promoted himself as a historical figure equal to the great heroes of Mexico’s national mythology. His populist rhetoric denigrates political opponents as enemies of the people. But more than two years into his term, his promises of economic growth have failed to materialize, partly because of his attachment to austerity.

The Role of Britain in the Historiography of 1968:

This article subjects standard literature on 1968 in Britain to a critical, discourse-focused reading, asking not primarily what role ’68 played in Britain, but what role Britain is allowed to play in the (international) historiography of 1968. It finds a discursive formation in historiography that revolves around divisions of presence/absence, rise/decline, extremism/moderation and original/imitation, with a narrative structure or emplotment that commonly privileges the second term of each pair as the endpoint of the story of ’68 in Britain. It also finds that there is a way to undermine the dominant discursive patterns by validating and integrating elements of subjective and collective experience and discourse into historical reconstruction and evaluation, not least in order to avoid some of the pitfalls of master narrative and national mythology.

Revision as Nostalgic Practice: The Imagined Adaptation of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

This article investigates the role of nostalgia vis-à-vis practices of adaptation and revision in the genre of the American Western and specifically in Joel and Ethan Coen’s episodic film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018). It proposes a view of the Western as a genre that originates in the revisionist adaptation of American national mythology. As an inherently nostalgic genre, the Western has grappled with its ambivalent relationship with the past throughout the twentieth century. Recent Western productions demonstrate their awareness of the genre’s sentimental falsifications of the past and integrate nostalgic tensions into their aesthetic repertoire. Buster Scruggs taps into both the current success of nostalgic formats on screen and the specific affordances of the Western genre. The close readings in this article explore the visual, structural, and narrative strategies the film employs to, on the one hand, permit and, in fact, encourage nostalgic indulgence while, on the other, engaging in the revision of both the postmodern aversion against affective involvement and its wholesale acceptance in the Western’s early incarnations.

‘The dense, murky water of the past’: Swamps, Nostalgia and Settlement Myth in Meir Shalev’s The Blue Mountain

This chapter examines the changing meanings of swamp drainage in Israel’s national mythology. Swamp drainage was undertaken in the early twentieth century by the Jewish National Fund and again after the establishment of the State of Israel. Once seen as a triumph of Zionist ingenuity, draining swamps was redefined in the late twentieth century as an emblem of Zionism’s environmental hubris. This chapter assesses this history through Meir Shalev’s magical realist novel The Blue Mountain (1988), situating Shalev’s text in its contemporary contexts of environmentalism and post-Zionism.

Cowboys and Slaves

This chapter pans westward to investigate a single novel, Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), regarded as the beginning of the Western, an origin story for that national mythology. The Virginian and the Western would seem to have nothing to do with slavery, but as this chapter reveals, slavery supplies the scaffolding for that most American of heroes, the cowboy. This chapter explores the centrality of anti-Blackness in the origins of the Western, engaging with genre theory and Sigmund Freud’s work on jokes. It explains the Western’s appearance against a backdrop of incorporation, finance capitalism, and emerging economic theories of marginalism. Tracing the connections between the frontier economies of the South and the West, and between the slave overseer and the cowboy, it reveals the Western as originating from a fantasy of Black genocide and white supremacy.

The Song of Nibelungen Bodies and How They are Described, Idealised and Eroticized. Part I. Der Helt Was Wol Gewahsen...

The discovery of the medieval heroic epic “Das Nibelungenlied”in the XIX century Germany coincided with the search for new national mythology and symbols within the movement of Romantic medievalism. The heroic epic got a country-wide recognition asa great literary work that was supposed to serve as a source of German values and to reflect the German national character. With this approach the characters of the epic were re-constructed as embodiments of these German values, as ideals to follow. The article analyses the iconography of these characters, the “nibelungs”: the way they were visualized and depicted in fine arts and fiction and what ideological concepts were ascribed to their bodies and appearances. The first part of the article compares the descriptions of Nibelungen characters in the works of German authors of XIX-XXI centuries and compares them to the descriptions in the original text of the poem to see how cultural codes are constructed and interpreted through visualization of human bodies.