German Contributions

If this review variously invokes categories of chronology, ethnicity, and genre in a vain attempt to systematize, such flexibility is dictated by the diverse scholarship that appeared in 2006. Festschriften and collections covering a wide range of topics are discussed in the opening section unless they can clearly be attributed thematically to one of the later sections. I would like to thank Ms. Camelia Rata for her assistance.

a. Festschriften and Collections

Under the title Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature (Winter) Thomas Claviez et al. have assembled a Festschrift for Winfried Fluck. The fact that some of the essays collected into three subsections are in genuine conversation with each other enhances the value of this volume, since the stated aim of the collection is to find the middle ground between a Kantian aesthetics of disinterestedness and a contemporary politicization of all aesthetic effort. Emory Elliott (“Aesthetic Headaches: Politics and Art in the American Novel,” pp. 59–80) links “Benito Cereno” and Twain’s Connecticut Yankee but also Brown, Poe, Hawthorne, and James to a literary enactment of the U.S. Army’s “shock and awe” campaign at the start of the Iraq war. In her response, Ulla Haselstein (“The Power of Illusion and the Illusion of Power,” pp. 81–94) cautions against overestimating literature’s political effectiveness, as literature may move increasingly “towards the margin of public discourse.” Sieglinde Lemke surveys extant scholarship on the significance of the letter A in The Scarlet Letter and adduces her own view that Hester can be seen as an altruistic caretaker whose simultaneous aesthetic presence and distance may induce readers into socially responsible activity and a better self (“Awe, Alterity, and Apprehension in The Scarlet Letter,” pp. 163–94). Drawing on Hawthorne’s Lost Notebook, 1835–1841 and the intertwining of science and romance, Stefan L. Brandt unravels the indeterminate aesthetic of “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” claiming that readers become “participants in the sensual act of concretization” (“Hawthorne’s Negative Romanticism: Aesthetic Self-Reflection and the Discursivity of Story-Telling in ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ ” pp. 195–200). Turning to visual aesthetics and its political repercussions, Christof Decker (“The Ambiguous Critique of Lynch Law: Fritz Lang and Hollywood’s Representation of Injustice,” pp. 221–37) provides the social history in which the lynching scenes in Fritz Lang’s film Fury (1936) can be seen as statements against lynching. Susanne Rohr (“Transgressing Taboos: Projecting the Holocaust in Melvin Jules Bukiet’s After and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated,” pp. 239–60) sensitively investigates the transgressive aesthetic of what she calls “Holocaust comedy.” Rohr argues that both of these third-generation representations of the Holocaust are concerned primarily neither with truthful rendering nor with ethical judgment but with exploring “the structures of representing the unrepresentable.” The strong American tradition of aesthetic contributions to democratic participation and to the bridging of race and class divisions is the subject of the final group of essays. Heinz Ickstadt (“Aesthetic Experience and the Collective Life: John Dewey’s Democratic Aesthetics and the Peculiarities of American Modernism,” pp. 261–87) invokes Dewey in linking William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes to Richard Powers’s recent The Time of Our Singing. Ickstadt asks provocatively, “Is a pragmatist aesthetics anti-modernist? Or a non-pragmatist aesthetics undemocratic?” and finds a partial answer in Powers’s work, which chronicles the “undeniable reality of a multicultural particular.” Thomas Claviez (“ ‘Muted Fanfares’: The Topos of the Common Man in the Works of Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and James Agee,” pp. 289–313) starts with de Tocqueville and looks at the larger question of elitist versus vernacular simplicity in American poetic language. Claviez introduces each section devoted to one author with an epigraph from one of the others, weaving connections (marred by misspellings) that make the pessimism of Agee stand out sharply against the poetry of his predecessors and against the triumphalism of Aaron (not Aron) Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man (not “Fanfares for a Common Man”). Kurt Müller (“Modernist Point-of-View and the Ethics of Reading: A Rortian Approach to Ernest Hemingway,” pp. 315–35) invokes...