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Contents

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction. The Road Now Taken: Cultural Vistas in American Studies
2. Sites of Identity Through Literary Vistas
2.1. Border Stories and Posthegemonic Identities. Reading Getting Home Alive
2.2. Identities at Thresholds in How I Learned to Drive and The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?
3. Sites of Identity Through Cinematic Vistas
3.1. Adaptation, Auteurship, and Identity
3.1.1. The Roman Springs of Mrs. Stone. Auteurship in José Allan Ackerman's Adaptations of Tennessee Williams's Novel
3.1.2. Who's Afraid of Adapting Albee? Synergic Auteurship in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
3.2. Negotiation, Characters, and Identity
3.2.1. Negotiating Identity in Julie Taymor's Frida
3.2.2. Transnational Negotiations in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel
4. Afterword

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Introduction

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Cultural Vistas and Sites of Identity. Essays on Literature, Film and American Studies is an enterprise on the route of New American studies employing among other most traveled roads, transnational American studies 2.0. This volume is the second publication and the first English language ebook of AMERICANA eBook series-a division of AMERICANA - E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, published by the Department of American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary-which was established to promote the use of new media in our current practice of American studies. This open access e-book is part of a larger AMERICANA digital publishing project, which adopted new media practice and aims to become part of the current transnational dialogue in the field of New American studies.

Cultural Vistas and Sites of Identity. Essays on Literature, Film and American Studies is built around the complex issue of contemporary identity construction. Here, I reflect, similar to Kerber's subjective approach, on the representation of several American identities assembled in a heterogeneous compilation of essays concentrating on various American cultural vistas based on topics and texts I taught over the past years at my literature and film courses at the University of Szeged, Hungary. My aim was to (re)examine facets of various contemporary identity forms through a selection of American literary works (poems and dramas), alongside a number of films produced in the United States that present a challenge to diverse intradiegetic and extradiegetic identities. The context of New American studies provided a legitimate framework not only in the case of literary vistas but was crucial also for the context of film, itself an inherently transnational medium.

The present volume is divided into two distinct parts. The first, entitled "Sites of Identity Through Literary Vistas," examines the ways in which identity is constructed in the combined poetic works of two Latina writers, Aurora Levins Morales and her mother, Rosario Morales from Getting Home Alive, and in the controversial dramas of two queer authors, The Goat of Who is Sylvia? by Edward Albee and How I Learnt to Drive by Paula Vogel. The second part of the e-book, "Sites of Identity Through Cinematic Vistas" focuses on the representation of extradiegetic identity in films by discussing in the "Adaptation, Auteurship, and Identity" section the issues of identity as movie authorship in two film versions of The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone by Tennessee Williams and in Mike Nichol's adaptation of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The last section, "Negotiation, Characters, and Identity," concentrates on the negotiations of intradiegetic identities in Frida, directed by Julie Taymor, and in the transnational context in Alejandro González Inárritu's film, Babel.

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