Cultural Career of Coolness

Today, coolness is a term most often used in advertising trendy commodities, or, more generally, in promoting urban lifestyles. The Cultural Career of Coolness explores the history of the term as a metaphor for affect control and aesthetic detachment, charts various cultural practices of coolness in the United States and Japan, and links them to the rationalization of intimate relations and an incorporation of disaffection in modernity.

Ulla Haselstein is professor of American Literature (chair) at the John F. Kennedy Institute and the director of the Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Her book publications include Entziffernde Hermeneutik (1991); Die Gabe der Zivilisation (2000); Iconographies of Power: The Politics and Poetics of Visual Representation (2003, co-edited with Berndt Ostendorf and Peter Schneck), Cultural Transactions: 50 Years of American Studies in Germany (2005, co-edited with Berndt Ostendorf), and The Pathos of Authenticity. American Literary Imaginations of the Real (2010, co-edited with Andrew Gross, MaryAnn Snyder-Körber). Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit is professor of Japanology (chair) and director of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She was awarded the Leibniz Prize 1992. Series Editor: 1990-2000 - Japanische Bibliothek (Japanese Library), 34 volumes; 1994-present - Iaponia Insula (Studies on Japanese Culture and Society), 27 volumes. Her monographs include: Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishosetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon. Cambridge, MA. 1996 (German version 1981, expanded ed. 2005, Japanese version 1992); ed.: Canon and Identity: Japanese Modernization Reconsidered: Trans-Cultural Perspectives. (2000). Catrin Gersdorf is professor and chair of American Studies at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany. From 2009 to 2012 she was a member of the research group on "Coolness" at the research cluster "Languages of Emotion," Freie Universität Berlin. The author of The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the Construction of America (2009), she has published several articles on nineteenth and twentieth-century US-American literature and culture. Elena Giannoulis is advanced research fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. From 2010 to 2012 she was a researcher in the "Languages of Emotion" Cluster at Freie Universitaet Berlin. She currently works on her project Emotion Management in Japanese Literature and Culture since the 1980s. Publications: Giannoulis, Elena. Blut als Tinte: Wirkungs- und Funktionsmechanismen zeitgenössischer shishosetsu [Blood as Ink: Mechanisms of effects and functions of contemporary shishosetsu]. (2010).

Introduction, by Ulla Haselstein and Irmela Hijiya-Kischnereit Part I: "Coolness" in Antiquity Chapter 1: Emotionally challenged, wisely detached, or incredibly cool? On Stoic Apathy, by Catherine Newmark Chapter 2: Roman Cool, by Daniel L. Selden Part II: American Cool Chapter 3: The Cultural Career of Coolness, by Ulla Haselstein Chapter 4: Kinds of Cool: Emotions and the Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century American Abolitionism, by Catrin Gersdorf Chapter 5: The Mask of Cool in Postwar Jazz and Film Noir, by Joel Dinerstein Chapter 6: Cool Revenge: Kill Bill and the Female Warrior, by Sophia Frese Part III: Japanese Cool Chapter 7: Is Japan Cool?, by Irmela Hijiya-Kischnereit Chapter 8: "Hot" and "Cold" and "Cool": Toward a Climatology of Japanese Culture, by Jens Heise Chapter 9: Cold Norms and Warm Hearts: On the Conception of Etiquette Rules in Advice Books from Early Modern and Modern Japan, by Michael Kinski Chapter 10: Iki as a mode of Japanese coolness, by Elena Giannoulis Chapter 11: The Domestication of the Cool Cat, by Paul Roquet Chapter 12: Marketing National and Self Appearances: Cool and Cute in J-Culture, Aviad E. Raz Part IV: Global Cool Chapter 13: Cool Capitalism at Work, by Jim McGuigan About the Authors