German Contributions

A formidable contribution to the academic discipline of American Studies in Germany has been edited by Udo Hebel. The proceedings of the International American Studies Conference hosted by Hebel at Regensburg University in May 2000, Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures (Winter), gathers contributions to the field of memory studies by scholars from the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany. The 20 articles gathered in this volume pay tribute to the pivotal position of memory on the platforms of literary and cultural studies and the immense interest in the processes of individual and collective memory since the 1980s. The opening contributions by Michael Kammen and Aleida Assmann discuss major theoretical issues and perspectives informing the field of American memory studies. Kammen's "Teach Us Our Recollections: Re-siting the Role of Memory in American Culture" (pp. 1–14) investigates the complexities and convulsions of social memory and cultural amnesia in recent American history, especially the paradox of an increasing number of visitors to historically significant sites during a decline in knowledge about the national past. In her article "Three Stabilizers of Memory: Affect-Symbol-Trauma" (pp. 15–30) Assmann explores memory-internal processes and the dynamics that work against forgetting. Memories charged with an effect, she argues, hold a middle position between the active encoding of a symbol and the passive encrypting of trauma.

Further contributions attempt to position a variety of literary texts at the intersection of individual memory and collective memory. In "'Memory May Their Deed Redeem': Emerson, Concord, and History" (pp. 43–50) Joseph Schöpp traces the affinity between Emerson and Concord as one of the sacred spaces in American literary and cultural history. In a series of revisions Emerson worked on the construction of himself as a writer and of Concord as a site of collective memory. Departing from what Toni Morrison calls "rememory"—the deliberate yet painful effort of dis-remembering the forgotten and repressed—François Pitavy in his article "From Middle Passage to Holocaust: The Black Body as a Site of Memory" (pp. 51–64) reads the slave's body as the site where the devaluation and dehumanization of African Americans is contradicted by the scars and suffering deeply ingrained in collective memory. To Pitavy the epigraph to Beloved links the bodily rememory of African American slaves to the Holocaust and to the history of the dispossession of "Sixty Million and More." Ulf Reichardt in "The Dangers of Remembering: Sites and Temporalities of Memory in William Faulkner's Light in August" (pp. 65–74) discusses the relevance of the novel to theories of individual and collective memory. For Reichardt the "eventfulness of remembering" foregrounds the present activity and temporal dynamics of remembering and forgetting. Light in August, he argues, stages a critique of memory that takes the form of an obsessive fixation, both individually and collectively. Nicolas Witschi's "Genre Fictions and Material Representations of the Gold Rush: Writing the 'Real' California at the End of the Nineteenth Century" (pp. 75–96) looks westward to explore the representation of gold mining as a foundational narrative of the West. Renate von Bardeleban focuses on Jewish American writers in "Eastern Sites of Memory in the Writings of Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick" (pp. 97–114). These writers, Bardeleben concludes, move from the margin to the center of American literary production by the inscription of Eastern-connoted memory into the American cultural archive. Kurt Müller in "The Crisis of Memory in Modern American Drama: The Case of Eugene O'Neill" (pp. 115–24) positions O'Neill at the beginning of an epistemological skepticism that would become constitutive of the postmodern sensibility of playwrights such as Edward Albee, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard. In his plays Bound East for Cardiff and Hughie, O'Neill demonstrated how the memories of the characters are shaped into mythical constructs that function as destructive or constructive fictions. Winfried Herget approaches historical pageantry as theatrical forum for the public, on-site enactment of public memory. In "Staging Memory at Plymouth Rock: George Pierce Baker's The Pilgrim Spirit (1921)" (pp. 125–40) Herget...