This collection of essays debates how written printed, visual, and performed works produced meaning and a multimedia culture in America before 1900.

Living and studying away from home can turn out to be an enriching and rewarding experience for many international students. Yet, many of them struggle to cope with their new university life due to distinct challenges such as cultural differences, language and communication barriers, and a lack of social support. Through a diverse collection of personal essays, this book captures some of the stories of international students as they reflect on their intercultural encounters, expectations, and experiences in their new surroundings and local communities. Essay themes range from culture shock to resilience, and they cover a variety of topics including the ways students change and gain new perspectives by being away from their comfort zone, the feeling of isolation and being an outsider, and the uncertainties of making new friends. This book provides readers with a unique opportunity to walk a mile in the shoes of an international student. It also highlights the importance of a strong support system for students in both the curricular and co-curricular settings and offers insights to international educators and university administrators into creating a welcoming environment that fosters international understanding and cross-cultural awareness on campus.

Transmedia Narratives for Cultural Heritage focuses on theoretical approaches to the analysis and creative practice of developing non-fiction digital transmedia narratives in the rapidly growing cultural heritage sector. This book applies a media-focused transdisciplinary approach to understand the conventions of emerging digital narrative genres. Considering digital media’s impact on narrative creation and reception, the approach, namely remixed transmedia, can aid practitioners in creating strategic non-fiction narratives for cultural heritage. These creations also need to be evaluated and a digital-media focused ‘ludonarrative toolkit’ allows for the critical analysis of the composition and public participation in interactive digital narratives. This toolkit is applied and exemplified in genres including virtual museums, serious games, and interactive documentaries. The book also includes a seven-phase theoretical framework that can assist future creators (and project managers) of non-fiction transmedia ‘mothership’ narratives; and a methodology (based on ‘big data analysis’) for how to invent new cultural heritage narratives through bottom-up remixing that allows for public inclusion. Two transnational case studies on the 11 UNESCO World Heritage Australian Convict Sites and the Irish National Famine Way demonstrate the seven-phase framework’s applicability. As many scholars across disciplines are increasingly creating digital narratives on historical topics for public consumption in various forms, the theoretical foundations and practical project management framework will be useful for scholars and project teams in the domains of transmedia studies, interactive narratives, cultural heritage, media studies, comparative literature, and journalism.

This book digs deeply into the meanings systems that make up social groups, addressing contemporary and historical cases both in the U.S. and internationally. Drawing from traditional and social media along with interpersonal communication situations, contributors provide an e...

This edited collection explores the ways in which our understanding of the past in Dutch history and culture can be rethought to consider not only how it forms part of the present but how it can relate also to the future. Divided into three parts – The Uses of Myth and History, The Past as Illumination of Cultural Context, and Historiography in Focus – this book seeks to demonstrate the importance of the past by investigating the transmission of culture and its transformations. It reflects on the history of historiography and looks critically at the products of the historiographic process, such as Dutch and Afrikaans literary history. The chapters cover a range of disciplines and approaches: some authors offer a broad view of a particular period, such as Jonathan Israel's contribution on myth and history in the ideological politics of the Dutch Golden Age, while others zoom in on specific genres, texts or historical moments, such as Benjamin Schmidt’s study of the doolhof, a word that today means ‘labyrinth’ but once described a 17th-century educational amusement park. This volume, enlightening and home to multiple paths of enquiry leading in different directions, is an excellent example of what a past-present doolhof might look like.

There’s no shortage of books talking about the importance of story, and for good reason. Effective storytelling is an important tool for your organization. But … Storytelling is not enough. If you want an organization that creates long-term positive impact, then you need more than clever stories. You need to create meaning through narrative. In Culture-Bending Narratives, Jason Locy takes you through the process of moving beyond the fundamentals of storytelling and into a deeper conversation around the power of narrative. With narrative, your organization can challenge the way others see the world and invite them on a journey to discovering a deeper purpose and meaning. In the end, you will leave with a new way of thinking that weaves your organization’s desire for a better world throughout all you do.

Alan Nadel provides a unique analysis of the rise of American postmodernism by viewing it as a breakdown in Cold War cultural narratives of containment. These narratives, which embodied an American postwar foreign policy charged with checking the spread of Communism, also operated, Nadel argues, within a wide spectrum of cultural life in the United States to contain atomic secrets, sexual license, gender roles, nuclear energy, and artistic expression. Because these narratives were deployed in films, books, and magazines at a time when American culture was for the first time able to dominate global entertainment and capitalize on global production, containment became one of the most widely disseminated and highly privileged national narratives in history. Examining a broad sweep of American culture, from the work of George Kennan to Playboy Magazine, from the movies of Doris Day and Walt Disney to those of Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock, from James Bond to Holden Caulfield, Nadel discloses the remarkable pervasiveness of the containment narrative. Drawing subtly on insights provided by contemporary theorists, including Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson, Sedgwick, Certeau, and Hayden White, he situates the rhetoric of the Cold War within a gendered narrative powered by the unspoken potency of the atom. He then traces the breakdown of this discourse of containment through such events as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and ties its collapse to the onset of American postmodernism, typified by works such as Catch–22 and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. An important work of cultural criticism, Containment Culture links atomic power with postmodernism and postwar politics, and shows how a multifarious national policy can become part of a nation’s cultural agenda and a source of meaning for its citizenry.