Snapshots from the USA: Student Essays – Cristina Cheveresan (ed. coord.)

PREZENTARE CARTE Balanced and ambitious content-wise, Snapshots from the USA is part of a series of volumes opened, in 2014, by Studying America in the 21st Century. This new editorial project is designed as a long-term initiative of the team of professors and students grouped around the American Studies M.A. program, one of the West University of Timișoara’s most coherent, prolific and visible ones from the point of view of research. The authors’ passion for and focus on the United States as their main study-topic are the basic elements which reunite the essays collected in the three large sections, Alternative Spaces, Literary Spectra and Cultural (Inter)Sections. As in the case of the first volume, which inaugurated the American Studies series at the West University of Timișoara, the content is structured by a complex view of American Studies as an essential component of the Cultural Studies field, bringing together a wide array of research-interests. If literature continues to be a dominant area of in-depth discussion and interpretation, in the present case, its dedicated research is accompanied by studies on identity issues, trauma or the urban space, as well as by perspectives revolving around concepts such as race, gender, ethics, morals.