Contenu du sommaire : Civilisation américaine : problématiques et questionnaires.

This paper aims at contributing to the ongoing debate about research in and the teaching of American Studies in France. It focuses in particular on the definition of what is known as «civilization» and on its scientific status. It argues that, in the French context, history has a hegemonic position in the teaching of non-literary American Studies. This hegemony must be analyzed and challenged in some respects — without losing sight of Clio's crucial hermeneutic possibilities. The link between disciplines and methodologies, on the one hand, and institutional positions and power relationships, on the other, is investigated in the last two parts of this article.

In 1941 welfare residency requirements and removal laws targeted at destitutes in 28 states made a dent in the right of free ingress and egress. The trials and tribulations of Fred F Edwards and Frank Duncan in moving from Texas to California led the United States Supreme Court to reassess the values encapsulated in both the federal union concept and the myth of free and equal opportunities, especially in the American West. The opening of state borders to all citizens, regardless of their property status, entrenched the right to travel. This case also documents the notion that legal discourse is not just a set of technical words but claims meaning for cultural experience.

After a celebration at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel, last March, the glamorous Barbie hosted her official 40th birthday party in Paris 's Bon Marche Rive Gauche, with pomp and ceremony to be relayed throughout the planet. These events received a lot of media attention. They stand as good opportunities to study how the doll can be used to produce meaning(s). First the route taken by the Barbie doll is interesting since the official story of the doll designed and manufactured in America is a misconception. In this study we look at the Barbie doll as a semiotic resource taken up to really construct meanings in the specific context of America and its debates on otherness, difference, feminine identity and globalization among others. Yet unlocking semiotic doors does not assuredly introduce us into the secrecy of the child's private world : is the fit close, between how the doll has been designed and how it is actually used ?

Freed from Italian occupation by the Allies in 1941, Haile Selassie's Abyssinian empire benefited in the 1950s from an American economic and military development plan rooted in the alignments of the Cold War, and motivated by a bipartisan wish to transform this rare case of African independence into a model for other emerging countries about to break loose from European colonial powers. A stronghold on the shores of the Red Sea, strategically located in the defense area meant to assert US hegemony over both the Middle East and Africa, Ethiopia offered a rare example of political stability favorable to Western interests, whose economic progress was designed to counter the growing influence of the "non-aligned" movement born in Bandung. Suddenly granted the status of a regional power against the global background of the East-West struggle, Ethiopia thus became Washington 's proxy when the United States set out to curb down Nasser's nationalist influence in the region and his claims over the Suez canal. A cornerstone in the containment ring established in the Middle East by the Eisenhower doctrine, Ethiopia was to be a bridgehead from which to win over the rest of the African continent.

This paper examines the inaugural ceremony in order to understand presidential inaugural addresses. Epideictic rhetoric is paradoxical. It invents its original kairos out of banal topoi. Fostering deliberative action through epideictic contemplation, the inaugural address as a genre is an extension of the ceremony but can also become autonomous and create its own tradition. By using the antitheses of jeremiadic logic, the presidents fetch continuity out of change, chosenness out of adversity and consensus out of discrimination.

Although Hawthorne himself chose it in the preface to describe The House of the Seven Gables, paving the way for almost universal critical usage, the word «romance» fails to convey the gloomy atmosphere of the book. Going back to Aristotle's Poetics but also drawing from recent critical assessments, this article purports to demonstrate that the text is informed by a tragic vision. Through the staging of a hereditary malediction in a gothic house that brings together xviith-century opportunistic fanaticism and contemporary greed and hypocrisy, and in spite of too conspicuously comic an ending, the writer expresses a conception of time and fate much akin to the spirit of Greek tragedy — a conception that entails a dialectics of fate and individual freedom.