Editorial

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Amanda J. Bradley, in her piece entitled "A Vicious American Memory: Sylvia Plath's Feminist Criticism of Wars, Wars, Wars," reads references to war in Plath's poetry as "... metaphorically express[ing] the intensity of emotional or psychological wounds and the experiences of being oppressed in a patriarchal society." She connects the intensity of Plath's work, particularly in poems such as "Daddy" and "Lady Lazurus," with the psychological anguish experienced by the poet in the months before her suicide in February, 1963.

In "Theatres of Extremity: War and Subjectivity in The Thin Red Line," Rose Lucas presents her theory that "The cinematic representation of war -- its protagonists, its myriad events -- is a cultural mode which explicitly seeks to mediate between the present and the past, to comprehend each in the light of the other." Through her reading of the 1998 Terrence Malick film The Thin Red Line, Lucas constructs an understanding of the "cathartic moments of violence" in the film as "points of shock and disruption" that complicate notions of subjectivity.

Offering a segue from the subject of war, Rachel Wall discusses Andrea Lee's Sarah Phillips (1984) and Pam Durban's So Far Back (2000) as contemporary readings of ideas like "heritage" and "tradition." In "Finding Our Right Heritage in Sarah Phillips and So Far Back," she asserts that these novels "work to change a typical view of the past as it relates to the individual," through their stories of black women's struggles to release the constraints of the past while looking ahead to the future.

Finally, Katherine Weiss, in her essay entitled "Cultural Memory and War Trauma in Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, States of Shock and The Late Henry Moss," reads the three Shepard plays as "embody[ing] a discourse which reveals Shepard's concerns regarding a culture of war." The connection of a war culture with the creation of violent and estranged fathers presents concerns, as these figures "... wage a war against the family as it embodies the lie within the American mind -- a lie that see sees expansion and war as heroic, and the American way of life as ideal." Read together, these four papers present challenging readings of American Memory as it relates to both the individual and collective creation of modern American cultural understanding.

The Xchanges journal and the annual conference are made possible through the support of Wayne State University American Studies Program and the Rushton Endowment, an endowment devoted to the exchange of ideas between undergraduate students throughout the university and within the American Studies Program with the goal of spreading the benefits of an interdisciplinary education.

We hope you enjoy this issue of Xchanges. Xchanges' annual Fall issue is comprised of essays submitted by participants in the annual Y|X Conference. The essays are peer-reviewed and are held to a very high standard. The Winter issues of Xchanges serve as a forum for forward thinking American Studies scholarship, by both American and international scholars, and the essays often reconfigure the parameters of the discipline itself. Please look for the Fall journal issue in September 2005. Thank you for supporting the Y|X Conference and Xchanges.