Dreams and catastrophes have accompanied the American Project from the start. The movie theater is the place where they have been taken up, negotiated and newly designed. The essays collected in this volume focus on the cultural imaginings of America as a history of ordeals. Elisabeth Bronfen presents cross-mapping as a process that shows links between literature, films and other media, such as the cultural afterlife of Shakespeare and that of Wagner in Hollywood. She furthermore analyzes the aesthetic interlacing of femininity and death with a special focus on the character of the femme fatale and presents the practices and structures of the cinematic re-imagining of history.
