Sophie Discovers Amerika ed. by Rob McFarland and Michelle Stott James (review)

Rob McFarland and Michelle Stott James’ Sophie Discovers Amerika is an ambitious collection of essays that paints Germany as a Kulturnation, most candidly revealed by the writings of German-speaking women about the New World from the last four centuries. A play on Austrian journalist Ann Tizia Leitich’s 1928 novel, Ursula entdeckt Amerika, this volume assembles twenty-two essays, most covering only a single work from a single German-language woman writer, starting with writers from the eighteenth century until well into the twenty-first. The collection is intended for both specialists and general interest readers.

The breadth of the material covered is clearly demonstrated on the first page, which pairs Goethe’s poem “To the United States” with Christa Wolf’s final novel, City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud. This is just the start of the editors’ introduction, which then introduces the works by theme and provides a glimpse of the scholarship to follow through a critical analysis of Wolf’s City of Angels. An extensive bibliography of 255 German-language works written by women about the New World serves as proper conclusion to a volume intended to inspire further reading. Throughout, the textual analysis illustrates the compilers’ intention of placing “German” “representations of America into a broader historical and cultural context” (3).

In order to provide this broad historical and cultural context, the collection draws writers from a period of 200 years, from a wide range of genres, and it includes a broad range of techniques to analyze them. The collection begins with an analysis of Sophie von La Roche’s novel Erscheinungen am See Oneida, published in 1798, and concludes with Milena Moser’s Travel Guide to San Francisco, “Amerika ist alles und das Gegenteil von allem. Amerika ist anders,” published in 2008. In addition to novels and travel guides, the collection includes poetry, stories, films, erotica, photojournalism, other forms of travel literature, and memoirs. The included essays employ various theoretical approaches, including comparisons with contemporary works, explorations of the historical context, critical engagements with the social, political and economic arguments of writers, as well as expositions of the writers’ biographies to better contextualize the works.

By way of organization, the essays are ordered chronologically by publication date of the work discussed in the collection itself, although the introduction organizes each essay by theme. Three essays explore the disparate changes and developments of the unique female experience in the New World, whereas another two take on the taming of the wilderness, promoting superiority and dominance of the immigrant culture over the indigenous. Three essays interpret the New World as a reflective space that challenges a reexamination of the writers’ own paradigms and values, and another four essays highlight the diachronic discourse of their writers with history. Two essays explore the varied and even conflicting viewpoints of the writers, while another four essays introduce writers from German-speaking groups that have since disappeared, such as those from the German Democratic Republic, or that are endangered, such as heritage speakers in Eastern Europe. Lastly, four essays read the fiction of these women writers as providing an important glimpse into the “inner continent of the self” (12), that is, their fictional accounts of the New World are here read as projections of the writers themselves.

McFarland and Stott James admit that their compilation is somewhat eclectic, spanning a wide variety of genres and themes and hundreds of years, but they defend their decision, arguing that this highlights the diversity of women writing about the New World. They see their volume as being firmly nestled within German literature and transatlantic studies, making also partial contributions to the study of travelogues and colonialism. Because of their interest in examining the unique perspective of women writers, I question why the editors chose not to acknowledge the contribution this volume makes towards gender studies.

While editors McFarland and Stott James were eager to include a good deal of variety with regards to...