- German Contributions
The titles of the first four subsections of this commentary—"The Novel, Poetry, Autobiography"; "American Literature, American Studies, and Transnational Approaches"; "Ethnicity and American Literature"; "The Holocaust and American Literature"—provide a sense of the current general orientation of scholarship in American literary studies from German-speaking countries, which tends to emphasize generic and topical issues rather than the traditional rigors of periodization.
a. The Novel, Poetry, Autobiography
In Money and Gender in the American Novel, 1850-2000 (Winter) Eva Boesenberg provides an impressive study of the "function of money in the construction of masculinities and femininities" and "the opportunities for developing more flexible, less hierarchical gender constellations related to women's control over financial capital." In 9 chapters Boesenberg reads 35 novels, ranging from such long canonized texts as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple to less read novels such as Tess Slesinger's The Unpossessed (1934) and Mary Gordon's Spending (1998). Boesenberg proceeds chronologically, contextualizing her selected materials in American cultural and social history. Employing Pierre Bourdieu's theory of distinction and cultural capital as well as feminist theory [End Page 20] and intersections between gender conceptions and systems of exchange, her close readings explore the gendered symbolic economics of such literary styles as naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism, extrapolating both affirmative patriarchal conceptions and critical imaginaries. Boesenberg's is a highly valuable study that proffers well-documented insight into "the language of money" in the American novel.
Astrid Franke's Pursue the Illusion: Problems of Public Poetry in America (Winter) approaches poetry written between the late 18th and the early 21st centuries from a sophisticated, historically grounded standpoint and within a convincingly developed theoretical framework based on concepts derived from John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas. Franke reads poems that are marked by a posture of public obligation, relating poetic practice to specific historical moments of social change. Each of the first four chapters focuses on the work of two poets (Phillis Wheatley and Philip Freneau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay and T. S. Eliot, and Robert Lowell and Robert Hayden), and each illustrates characteristics of the public discourse of the relevant historical period and poetic style. The fifth chapter discusses two recent poetry anthologies and their notion of a contemporary "global public." Throughout her discussion Franke offers sensitive and profound analyses not only of referential aspects and social/political issues but also—a particularly remarkable feature of this study—of "formal" strategies and poetic devices. As Franke highlights in her conclusion, she favors Dewey's pragmatist conception of the "public" over Habermas's "public sphere" and thus sets her study in relation to contemporary debates (Michael Warner's Publics and Counterpublics [2002] features prominently). Franke's study received the 2009 Rob Kroes Publication Award of the European Association of American Studies and is published as part of the series European Views of the United States, edited on behalf of that organization. Despite its demanding intellectual sophistication and theoretical focus, Pursue the Illusion is written and argued with astonishing clarity and deserves the awards and honors it has already received.
The topic of public poetry is also addressed by Klaus Martens in his edited volume State(s) of the Art: Considering Poetry Today (Könighausen), which assembles 14 articles based on papers presented at a 2008 conference of the same title at the University of Saarbrücken. As Martens explains in his introduction (pp. 9-12), the volume explores the cultural functions and forms of expression of "the poetic" in our contemporary [End Page 450] world, where the "poetic . . . is, at the same time, prominent in popular culture in forms extending from advertisement to contemporary music, and yet poetry and easy familiarity with a range of poets and poems has mostly departed from the cultural repertoire of most readers." Thus, while in danger of disappearance, poetry "also appears at the cusp of an emergent stage of development of public poetic utterance." The essayists in the volume address these issues in very different ways and from different national and regional perspectives...