German Contributions

This year's review maintains essentially a chronological order. Essay collections covering a wide range of topics are treated together at the outset, while collections on a single author or a single century are placed in the corresponding century subsection. My thanks to Camelia Rata for her help.

a. Collections

Under the title Conformism, Non-Conformism and Anti-Conformism in the Culture of the United States (Winter), Antonis Balasopoulos et al. have edited selected proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the European Association of American Studies. Heinz Ickstadt subjects the very idea of nonconformism to critical scrutiny, given that subversion and transgression have become both so ubiquitous and generalized in literary studies that they may have lost their meaning ("Conformism and Non-Conformity as Categories of Literary Criticism," pp. 45–63). With references to Herman Melville's Bartleby, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets, Charles Chesnutt, George Oppen, and most notably Slavoj Žižek, Ickstadt builds a case for historicizing the notion of subversion as a function of literature. Johannes Völz offers a fresh reading of the concept of "recognition" in Ralph Waldo Emerson, the champion of nonconformism ("'The Most Indebted Man': Emerson, Recognition, and the Reconfiguration of Non-Conformity," pp. 101–15). Claiming that the full significance of recognition appears only in the later writings, Völz points to the shifting relationships between self and other in Emerson's career; the self achieves self-trust only once it recognizes the Other as part of the self, a process that comes to conclusion in "Shakespeare; or, The Poet." Andrew S. Gross, "Signs of Violence: Terrorism, (Post-)Modernism, and the Nostalgia for Disaster" (pp. 131–47), gives a balanced overview of how terrorism has long proven seductive as a literary topic before turning to a detailed analysis of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and Don DeLillo's Players.

American Studies as Media Studies, ed. Frank Kelleter and Daniel Stein (Winter), collects 23 of the 51 papers delivered at the 2006 Göttingen conference of the German Association for American Studies. Mary Ann Snyder-Körber takes a close look at Washington Irving in "Building the Better Book: Conversation, Complication, and the Constitution of the Medium in The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent." (pp. 27–35). She argues that the book's episodic format encourages an active, nonlinear reading that suggests the increasing complexity of the American reality it portrays. Christine Gerhardt analyzes Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) and Emily Dickinson's herbarium of the 1840s as instances of the proto-ecological discourse of their times, seeing their authors as both "bookmakers" and "curators" (" 'Earth Adhering to Their Roots': Dickinson, Whitman, and the Ecology of Bookmaking," pp. 37–46). Using John Dos Passos's description of relentless New York industrial noises and Zora Neale Hurston's evocation of the spoken African-American voice as his primary references, Philipp Schweighauser, "The Noises of Modernist Form: John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the Soundscapes of Modernity" (pp. 47–55), sets literary modernism in relation both to the proliferation of physical noise in the modern era and to the invention of sound-reproducing media, both of which contributed to a marked acoustic component of modernism. John Johnston establishes a tentative literary history that parallels the advances in computer technology in the past 70 years ("Computer Fictions: Literary Representation and Computational Media," pp. 57–69). Proposing the subdivisions of "Hacker Novel," "Virtual Reality Novel," "Internet Novel," and "Nanotech Visionary Novel," Johnston takes us from Isaac Asimov to Philip K. Dick and Richard Powers in classifying computer fiction. Subjecting the 2003 film Sylvia to critical analysis, Georgiana Banita considers the iconic status of Sylvia Plath, "a literary figure who lived and died before the onset of the media age." Plath turned her poetry into performance art, beginning a mediation of her life that has now become part of a literary-iconic industry in its own right (" 'No More Idols But Me': Sylvia Plath as Cinema Icon," pp. 119–26). Starting from the canonical status of portrait painting, Ulla Haselstein...