Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos

Darkness in the American Imagination

Laura Álvarez Trigo — 2024-12-02

(Introduction to the issue)

THE BLACKNESS OF THE BEAST

Alex Adams — 2024-12-02

ABSTRACT: The critical consensus around Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Godzilla is widely known: the creature is a metaphor for Japan’s mid-century national traumas, including firebombing, nuclear violence, and Japan’s own war crimes. This essay examines Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla, arguing that the film both draws heavily on the original’s visual darkness (both films feature sequences of night-time destruction and chiaroscuro contrast, for instance) and substantially modifies the conceptual commitments of the creature. Where Honda’s original was a warning about the perils of unfettered political sovereignty – the horrors unleashed by modern war – Edwards’ reboot emphasizes the demonstration of Godzilla’s worldly authority over all other monsters. No longer a critique of the excesses of power, the contemporary incarnation of Godzilla is an embodiment of the natural rightness of violently enforced hierarchy. Visual darkness is key to this political shift: Godzilla 2014 uses darkness to reference the visual style of the original and to emphasize its ‘serious’ take on the monster genre, to be sure, but what is more, its commitment to a ‘gritty’, desaturated, ‘realist’ war-movie visual style aligns the remake with a set of drastically different political positions to those of the original.

"How did it get so dark?": Mapping Liminal Spaces in Music Videos of Billie Eilish

Kavya Mitchi D — 2024-12-02

ABSTRACT: Darkness as it exists in one’s imagination and in the tangible realm is inextricably linked with a confusion of boundaries, a period of uncertainty and transition. By blurring the boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar, liminal spaces are safe yet intimidating. The paper analyses the lyrics and the music videos of songs “bury a friend,” “everything I wanted,” “NDA” and “Happier Than Ever” released by Billie Eilish from her albums When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019) and Happier Than Ever (2021) to trace the configuration of liminal spaces. The dark visuals and lyrics that hint at fear, hatred and death act as liminal spaces where the numerous conflicts arising from separation, nightmares, violation of privacy, and intrusive thoughts are addressed, if not fully resolved. The darkness contributes to the evaluation of personal beliefs, aspirations and challenges in uncanny settings. Engaging with Eilish’s lyrics and music videos facilitates an investigation into the conceptualization of darkness in the popular American imagination

FLOATING IN THIS OCEAN OF NOTHING: WOMEN IN DARK WATERS IN MIKE FLANAGAN’S THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR

Pauline Trotry — 2024-12-02

ABSTRACT: This article reads Mike Flanagan’s 2020 series, The Haunting of Bly Manor, through the lens of the dark waters of the lake at the centre of the narrative. Through textual analyses of The Haunting of Bly Manor supported by Gaston Bachelard’s notions of “dead waters” and underwater “substance-space” as well as Julia Kristeva’s seminal study of the corpse as the quintessential form of abjection, this study demonstrates the ways in which Bly’s lake crystallises the haunting mechanics of the series by attracting and harbouring death in its boundless and unfathomable depths. In particular, the dark waters of the lake engulf women defying the rules of the heteronormative, upper-class society in which they exist, leaving them stagnant in abject waters.

‘GOTTA LIGHT?’: INTERROGATING AMERICAN DARKNESS IN EPISODE 8 OF TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN THROUGH FORMALISM

Nick Davie — 2024-12-02

This article examines how darkness is visually depicted in American storytelling within the eighth episode, “Gotta Light?” of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). To explore the visual storytelling in this episode, I apply the lens of Bruce Block’s The Visual Story (2020), a formalist framework for visual media, to identify specific visual structures in key sequences. The components of Block’s methodology—line, shape, space, and tone—critically explore how visual elements construct thematic depth, portraying darkness as a complex, narrative-rich element of the American psyche. The article provides examples of film scholarship that explore darkness in the context of both America and Twin Peaks, underscoring the narrative significance of darkness as a thematic constant. Block’s framework not only reveals “Gotta Light?” as a seminal televisual reflection on American sociocultural issues but also demonstrates the accessibility and applicability of a contemporary formalist framework in media studies.

Francisco Rodríguez Jiménez, Carmelo Mesa Lago, and Pablo Pardo. Trump: Breve historia de una presidencia singular. Comares, 2022, pp. 189. ISBN: 978-84-1369-423-8

Álvaro Albarrán Gutiérrez — 2024-04-04

This document contains a review of this book: Francisco Rodríguez Jiménez, Carmelo Mesa Lago, and Pablo Pardo. Trump: Breve historia de una presidencia singular. Comares, 2022, pp. 189. ISBN: 978-84-1369-423-8

Review on Beat Myths in Literature: Revisionist Strategies in Beat Women

Lucía Alarcón Reyes — 2024-09-27

Review on Beat Myths in Literature: Revisionist Strategies in Beat Women

Review of MONTESINOS, TONI. OJOS LLENOS DE ALEGRÍA. ESTAR VIVO CON R. W. EMERSON. BARCELONA: ARIEL, 2023.

Juan Ignacio Guijarro — 2024-09-27

Review of MONTESINOS, TONI. OJOS LLENOS DE ALEGRÍA. ESTAR VIVO CON R. W. EMERSON. BARCELONA: ARIEL, 2023.

Review of Losing It

Noelia Hernando-Real — 2024-09-29

Review of Dorothy Chansky's Losing It. Staging the Cultural Conundrum of Dementia and Decline in American Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023

Geographies of Hope

Beatri Hermida Ramos — 2024-04-04

American author Becky Chambers has become well-known for her science fiction works that denounce social inequality while still enunciating kinder and more hopeful worlds. This research paper is centered around her third novel, Record of a Spaceborn Few (2018), which follows the Exodus Fleet, a group of spaceships that harbors the descendants of the last humans to leave Earth after a series of environmental catastrophes. The Fleet is presented as a somewhat literal vehicle of hope, as life inside the starships is organized according to Marxist principles of mutual support, solidarity and horizontal care. The aim of this paper is to examine Chambers’ alternative worlds as a site of hope, both physical and metaphorical, while exploring how Chambers hopeful speculation exemplifies the potential of science fiction as a genre to imagine different realities that not only question the nature of what is normal and possible, but also go beyond capitalist and neoliberal imaginaries.

TRANSCENDING THE LIMITATIONS OF 19TH CENTURY WOMEN’S DOMESTIC SPHERE AND FICTION: ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS’ CONTRIBUTION

María Dolores Narbona-Carrión — 2024-09-27

Nineteenth-century literature written by women has traditionally been associated exclusively with the domestic space. Most upper middle-class white women of that period were similarly confined within the limits of their home environments. However, this article critically examines and questions the sometimes too hermetic interpretations of the role that the domestic realm played in the lives and literary works of nineteenth-century women writers. Specifically, it portrays how Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911), instead of assuming submissively those domestic restrictions, strove to transcend them and shared her innovative initiatives with her contemporary women through her writings. To achieve this objective, this work analyses new female attitudes and the actual houses and domestic environments inhabited by Phelps and some of her female characters. It focuses on how they endeavoured to escape from these settings or to transform them into contexts that might favour their professional lives, instead of passively accepting them as inevitable obstacles to their true vocations.