Suchergebnisse

This essay brings a fundamentally Americanist question to bear on Leo Marx's fundamental piece of Americanist scholarship: What cultural work does the machine-in-the-garden trope perform in literary texts, texts that—as Marx highlighted—emphatically invoke the socio-economic upheavals of industrialization? Rather than asking what the trope means, I am interested in what it does in textual environments that, literally or metaphorically, navigate a protean discourse of class.1 I want to pursue this question in a reading of two texts that directly engage with industrialization and its machinery, two pieces of literature written in markedly different circumstances—one by an eminently canonical writer of the American Renaissance, Herman Melville, the other by a woman who worked in the factories of Lowell, the period's model industrial town. My reading of these texts aims to draw attention to the ways in which representations of the machine in the garden are perspectivized: While engaging with the juxtaposition of nature and technology, these representations always also work on negotiating social subjectivities—on defining, contrasting, authorizing, critiquing subject positions in the rapidly shifting social matrix of an industrializing USA. In other words, I propose to not only attend to the texts' images of the machine in the garden but also to the imaging that they depict. The texts with which I will be concerned dramatize this imaging as work that is deeply situated and entangled in other practices of selffashioning, practices which resonate with industrialism's new regimes of social difference. Herman Melville's short-story "The Tartarus of Maids" (1855) constructs a narrator who renders his encounter with industrialism in a rhetoric greatly informed by the machine-in-the-garden trope. By correlating this figurative practice with the notably limited and biased perspective of its narrator—a perspective whose marking laminates class and gender—the text exposes the work of socio-economic self-fashioning enabled by the trope. The sketch "A Merrimack Reverie" (1840), published in the "factory-girl"2 magazine The Lowell Offering, develops a motif that seems to invert the trope Marx identified—the motif of horticulture in the factory. This motif unfolds much ambiguity in the text which, I will suggest, registers the precarious quality of the magazine's project to establish the 'factory girl' as an affirmative subject position. ; "Der vorliegende Beitrag ist die pre-print Version. Bitte nutzen Sie für Zitate die Seitenzahl der Original-Version." (siehe Quellenangabe)

David Mamet's Race is overdetermined by the paratexts hovering around it, most notably the essays in which he publicizes his conservative turn. This textual environment accentuates the text's participation in a contemporary political discourse that social scientists have theorized as post-racialism. But Race accommodates more complex and conflicted meanings: I read the play not so much as an advertisement of post-race ideology but as a text that exposes and deconstructs this ideology. I argue that this layer of meaning is primarily an effect of the legal drama genre on which the text draws. The conventions of the legal drama that Race invokes activate meanings in the text that cannot be fully controlled by the backlash-agenda articulated in the author's essays. ; "Der vorliegende Beitrag ist die pre-print Version. Bitte nutzen Sie für Zitate die Seitenzahl der Original-Version." (siehe Quellenangabe)

The following essay addresses Alexandr Volko's adaption and appropriation of L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz". Exceedingly popular throughthout the Easern bloc, Volkov's novels have endeared a magical setting and cast of characters to readers who rarely knew of their American origins. I discuss the Wizard's 'travels' throught the Iron Curtain as an incidence of cultural exchange at once motivated by and subverting Cold War cultural politics. I suggest that it is not so much the changes to which Baum's narrative universe has been subjected on its way from West to East that makes this case study remarkable but the ways in wich the two Wizards have been interpreted to fit contestable notions of 'American' and 'Soviet' culture.

This article explores the specific capacity of TV courtroom drama to dramatize civic issues and to seduce viewers to an active engagement with such issues. I argue that television series of this genre eyploit the apparent theatricality of their subject matter-trials-to invite their audiences to the deliberation of social or political issues, issues that they negotiate in their courtroom plots. contemporary courtroom dramas amend this issue orientation with a self-reflexive dimension in wich they encourage viewers to also reflect on how the dramatic construction of 'issues' shapes their civic debate. I unfold this argument through a reading of episodes from two very different legal dramas, Boston Legal (2004-2008) and The Good Wife (2009-).

The legal drama episode from which this dialogue is taken depicts an impossible case: a Sudanese immigrant, who lost most of his family to the violence in Darfur, wants to sue the U.S. government for failing to intervene in the face of obvious genocide. The case is unwinnable. Lori Colson's construction of a legal basis for the case is more than shaky. But neither the client nor his lawyers expect to win the case. Their proclaimed objective – to "make noise" – pinpoints a significant cultural potential of litigation, of its "real" practice in the courtroom and, even more importantly, in its various forms of mass-medialization and fictionalization: to raise public awareness about instances of injustice, to educate the public and encourage civic debate.

This article proceeds from the observation that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—two politicians frequently correlated and compared since Trump's bid for the Presidency—have been remarkably successful in mobilizing support for their politics and in seemingly immunizing their rhetorics against vernacular critique. To work toward an understanding of this phenomenon, we propose to look at how political communication by and around the two politicians draws on forms and venues of popular culture. Both contexts, we will argue, have developed new strategies for the instrumentalization of popular culture, strategies that, while actualized differently in the two settings, revolve around an 'invective turn' in political communication—a radicalization of the familiar nationalist rhetoric of 'us versus them' that seems specifically fueled by pop-cultural forms. To explore this traffic between pop and politics, this article puts into conversation two case studies: On the one hand, of Trump's campaign speeches which, we contend, symbolically organize around the logic of agôn—of the competitive game—as it has coagulated in the reality-tv genre of the gamedoc. On the other hand, we look at (state-controlled) pop music in the Russian genre of Ėstrada which, thus our argument, advertises a distinct form of patriotism through the principle of 'glamour.' Glamour, in Putin's Russia, operates simultaneously as a style and as an ideology of self-glorification. The article will outline how reality tv's logic of agôn and patriotic pop music's aesthetics of glamour each fuel a qualitatively new orientation of political discourse toward the aesthetically charged, affect-saturated denigration of others and valorization of self.

This book calls for an investigation of the ›borderlands of narrativity‹ — the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the ›beyond‹ of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of »narrative liminality,« which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years.

This book calls for an investigation of the 'borderlands of narrativity' - the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the 'beyond' of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of "narrative liminality," which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years.

A large number of recent scholarship in (American) literary and cultural studies is devoted to describing the contemporary moment as a monumental break from the previous (or current) period, postmodernism, by hailing our contemporary times as the era of post-postmodernism, late postmodernism, metamodernism, cosmodernism, or of a similarly termed construction. In these different proclamations, we recognize a pervasive tendency to periodize, an attempt to separate phases of human existence and cultural creation into neat stages that 'logically' follow after one another to form a supposedly coherent narrative. This practice of periodizing comes with a number of pitfalls that many of these studies seem not fully aware of, and it in turn speaks to (and characterizes) the contemporary moment as one marked by a desire for the boundedness of such clear divisions. In the following pages, we chronicle the quandaries that follow from such implicit and explicit efforts of periodization by focalizing them through three different 'creation myths' of the contemporary that such efforts at periodization typically subscribe to. As a way of sidestepping these, we accentuate the strengths of more 'local' critical lenses, approaches that historicize without periodizing. As one such lens, we suggest to engage the contemporary moment through the 'poetics of politics,' a historical discursive formation in which literary and popular texts' desire for political relevance is matched by a recognition, in politics, of the (meta)textual quality of political action.

This is a book about contemporary American(ized) narratives and the audiences they call into being. It brings together eight very diverse case studies covering and investigating a wide range of media, genres, and modes to ask how contemporary 'texts' encourage 'imagined communities' of readers/viewers that operate as 'public spheres' of social and political deliberation, self-fashioning, and debate. In asking this question, the contributions collected in this volume shift perspectives in a number of ways: They question the boundary between the audiences of (often popular and broadly circulating) narratives on the one side and national public spheres on the other; they thus encourage rereading the transnational mobility of American(ized) narratives not simply as a phenomenon of popular culture but as an indicator of emerging transnational public spheres; and they invite us to look closely at the narrative dynamics with which these texts operate their audiences as public spheres.