German Contributions

The following discussion of scholarship in American literary studies from German-speaking countries is structured in four parts, reflecting major interests of scholars publishing in the field: American literature, American studies, and transnationalism; American literary history—early Republic to postmodernism; ethnicity, gender, and American literature; and periodicals.

a. American Literature, American Studies, and Transnationalism

Virtually American? Denationalizing North American Studies, ed. Mita Banerjee (Winter), collects essays that explore the meaning of transnationalism in and for American fiction (mostly contemporary), film, and performance art. In the engaged, thought-provoking introduction ("Towards an 'American Studies Without Borders?,'" pp. 7-22) Banerjee provides a lucid summary of and critical engagement with the more recent debate on transnationalism in American studies, linking European contributions with interventions from such fields as Chicano/a studies, Asian American studies, and Asian Canadian studies. Rüdiger Kunow ("In Sickness and in Health: Transnationalism Reconsidered," pp. 23-36) considers the representation of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799) and John Edgar Wideman's Cattle Killing (1996) for ways contagious diseases and their "biotic mobility" might correlate with, contribute to, or redirect the current critical preoccupation with transgressive and transnational cultural flows. Alfred Hornung ("European Perspectives of American Studies," pp. 55-65) provides an overview on how the development of the critical engagement with American culture and literature in Germany was affected by social contexts such as the postwar era, the rise of the counterculture and multiculturalism, and highlights interrelations between American literature and more recent Turkish German writing. Ingrid Gessner ("Moving Beyond Manzanar: Transnationalizing Japanese American Internment Experiences," pp. 77-95), Roy Miki ("The Poetics of the Hyphen: Fred Wah, or the Ethics of Reading 'Asian Canadian' Writing," pp. 111-22), and Tseen Khoo ("Common Ground? Deploying Asian North American Studies in Australia," pp. 123-34) set Asian American history and literature in relation to literary discourses that are either situated outside the United States or that lead beyond the borders of the United States and common notions of "American" and "Asian American." Katja Sarkowsky ("Democratic Iterations: Articulations of 'Citizenship' in Contemporary Canadian and American Literatures," pp. 97-109) reads fiction by Thomas King, Toni Morrison, and Leslie Feinberg as negotiating notions of citizenship within the discursive complexities of historical, ethnic, gender, and sexual identifications. Nicole Waller ("Omar Sharif as Transnational Trickster: The Overlapping Geographies of Diana Abu-Jaber," pp. 135-46) examines how Arab American writing transforms and reconceptualizes current notions of the American nation-state.

Winfried Fluck's Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies (Winter) is an extraordinary contribution to American literary scholarship. The essays by one of the most influential European Americanists were assembled on the occasion of Fluck's 65th birthday and are edited by Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz, who provide a suitably celebratory preface. Most of the essays are reprints from American and European journals and books published over the past four decades, though a few of the essays are published for the first time in English translation. The book is structured in four thematic parts, each lucidly introduced by Fluck: "American Studies and Cultural Studies," "American Literary History and the Changing Functions of Fiction," "Popular Culture and the Visual Arts," and "Literary Theory and Aesthetics." Although Fluck's analysis ranges from literary naturalism to film noir, from New Historicism to Edward Hopper's paintings, and from Huckleberry Finn to the "transnational turn" in American studies, his methodological preoccupation with the question of how to read American culture as meaningful expression of American society—first brought forward in his 1973 essay "Aesthetic Premises in American Studies" (pp. 15-38)—figures in his entire critical oeuvre. The 495-page volume provides an overview to Fluck's critical interventions in some of the major theoretical debates of American literary studies of the past decades. Fluck's explanations of the function of literature in culture and society and his theory of aesthetic experience and individualism have in different ways been fascinating and provocative challenges to the consensus in the academic communities of our disciplines.

The collection of essays Orient and Orientalisms in U...