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SPELL 14, American Foundational Myths, edited by Martin Heusser (Zürich) and Gudrun Grabher (Innsbruck), contains a selection of papers given at the 2000 joint conference of the Swiss Association for North American Studies (SANAS) and the Austrian Association for American Studies (AAAS). The volume explores some of the myths that have profoundly marked the mapping of American territories, the 'body' of American peoples, and America's body politic. American Foundational Myths investigates the rhetorical, political, economic or creative strategies it has taken for these myths to gain their constitutive and performative power.
It offers a wide range of approaches - from a discussion of the role of elsewhere realities in the American Dream to an analysis of the rewriting of American foundational myths in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and from a study of early white male myths to an investigation into Ginsberg's and Ferlinghetti's attempts in the 50s and 60s to counteract the Disneyfication of America.
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