International Scholarship: German Contributions

a. Introduction

American Studies, including American literary studies, is a vibrant field in Germany. Historically, the furtherance of the study of U.S. culture and literature has been an important cultural and political goal since 1945 and to this day is supported by the American Foreign Office through funding initiatives. Currently, however, the field is undergoing dramatic changes, which may be best summarized as a final departure from simply embracing American culture, including its inherent self-criticisms (such as by American writers, artists, filmmakers, scholars, and intellectuals), toward pioneering new, independent areas of humanities scholarship altogether that would be transnational, transmedial, and transdisciplinary and thus better suited than traditional American Studies to the global historical moment.

The field’s great interest in this present moment is apparent in the fact that more than half of the criticism published this year focuses on contemporary or near-contemporary texts, while studies of literary history strive more than ever to connect to present concerns transhistorically. In an age riddled with anxieties about the breakdown of global ecology and civil safety, German American Studies has begun to campaign for the humanities in general, their important role in helping to create livable human futures. While the legacy of the George W. Bush administration has aroused perhaps the strongest anti-American sentiments among Germans in postwar history, leading to a dramatic decline in student numbers in German American Studies programs, the institutional and academic strength of German American Studies departments has been preserved by this innovative, self-consciously globalist and comparativist de- and reconstruction of the field.

The decision of which texts to consider in the following synopsis was based on the place of publication (the American ius solis, if you will). While many scholars mentioned are not German nationals (according to the German ius sanguis), all contributions discussed were published in German venues. The many publications by German or German-born scholars of American literature in the United States have thus not been considered, which seems appropriate, given that they are likely to be covered elsewhere in this volume. Not surprisingly, the most important publication venues for Americanists in Germany have their headquarters in the southwest, the former American sector. The greatest number of publications in 2013 comes from the Winter-Verlag Heidelberg, its American Studies monograph series and its quarterly journal Amerikastudien/American Studies. Other prolific venues are the American Studies series “Mosaic” by the Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier as well as various series put out by the Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt, including “Mainzer Studien zur Amerikanistik.” Since 2011, the chief general editors of these venues have all been full professors from within the American Studies Program at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, which along with its increasingly transnational, transdisciplinary, and transmedial interests has emerged as an outright hub of the German Americanist profession. How much this profession values transnational communication among scholars and disciplines is evident in the fact that many of the so-called monographs published by Winter in their American Studies series in recent years were in fact anthologies based on conference proceedings, with contributions sometimes so diverse that only a loose connection to American Studies remains.

b. Contemporary and Postmodern American Literature: The Historical Moment, Transnationalism, and Transmedialism

Beyond 9/11: Trans-disciplinary Perspectives on Twenty-First Century U.S. American Culture, ed. Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz, and Sabine Sielke (Peter Lang), contains six essays on post-9/11 American literature: Sylvia Mayer’s “‘Dwelling in Crisis’: Terrorist and Environmental Risk Scenarios in the Post-9/11 Novel” (pp. 77–92); Simone Knewitz’s “9/11 and the Literature Industry” (pp. 153–68); Georgiana Banita’s “Writing Energy Security after 9/11: Oil, Narrative, and Globalization” (pp. 169–95); Andrew S. Gross’s “What Chabon Remembers: Terrorism, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and Nations Without Borders” (pp. 289–302); Birgit Däwes’s “Haunted Fiction: The Ghosts of Ground Zero” (pp. 341–58); and Sascha Pöhlmann’s “Future-Founding Poetry after 9/11” (pp. 359–82). The anthology continues an academic discussion of the causes and effects of 9/11 that was begun by the North...