German Contributions

The field of American literary studies continues to produce historically and methodologically diverse scholarship in Germany on authors, genres, and literary movements since the early colonial period. The previous two editions of American Literary Scholarship included descriptions of the German academic publishing scene (which has not changed much since last year); the following focuses on a selection of particularly noteworthy publications in 2017.

a. Author Studies

There are four important articles on poetry. Christine Gerhardt's "Emily Dickinson Now" (ESQ 63: 329–55) is a response to the essays collected in a special issue on Dickinson and environmentalism, outlining carefully the contemporary state of the environmental humanities and Dickinson scholarship in particular. Gerhardt is an authority in that particular field, and anybody interested in reading Dickinson from an ecocritical perspective should read her essay. In addition, three articles deal with modernist poetry. James Dowthwaite's "'CRIME Ov two CENturies': Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory as a Narrative Arc in Ezra Pound's Cantos" (Amst 62: 413–36) explores how Pound's long poem through its very form conveys a strong anti-Semitic agenda that, Dowthwaite claims, was crucial to the middle period of Pound's career: that "from the establishment of the Rothschild banking dynasty onwards, the economic interests of financiers and international capitalists—who were primarily Jewish—have been the driving factor behind international conflicts." Brian Broadhead Glaser employs trauma theory to engage with Lionel Trilling's claim that Robert Frost was a "terrifying" poet, arguing that Frost's poetry "demonstrates a kind of survival as numbness to imagined death" ("The Terror of Robert Frost," Amst 62: 437–47). Glaser's main claim is that Frost's terror consists in his continued denial, "as a poet and a cultural figure, about the wounding effects on him of capitalist culture." In "Wallace Stevens's Poetics of the Other" (Anglia 135: 490–510) Bülent Eken provides a Deleuzean theoretical framework to address the question of subjectivity and personhood in Stevens's oeuvre, suggesting in somewhat convoluted terms that "Stevens's obsession with subjectivity appears to be correlated with his realization that the other, who is strictly speaking no particular person, cannot be 'another I,' but it is the 'I' who must be Another." Although readers may disagree with some of the essay's theoretical assumptions, these contributions are relevant additions to the field of modernist studies.

Three articles on prose fiction deserve mentioning. Peter Freese's "T. C. Boyle's The Harder They Come: Violence in America" (Anglia 135: 511–42) explores the "American propensity for violence" on the basis of a fictional account of two historical events in postwar America: the killing of a mugger by an American veteran in Costa Rica and the chase of murderer Aaron Bassler in the Mendocino Woods. Combining Richard Slotkin's Regeneration Through Violence and Linda Hutcheon's concept of historiographical metafiction, the framework of the essay allows for a broad perspective on the phenomenon of violence and police schizophrenia in the contemporary United States. Lars-Frederik Bockmann's "Freedom-from Versus Freedom-to: A Dialectical Reading of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest" (ZAA 65: 51–65) adds to the growing body of scholarship devoted to Wallace's legacy. In a surprisingly original though sometimes formulaic reading of Wallace's magnum opus, Bockmann employs a Fredric Jameson-derived Marxist framework to "suggest a way out of what [he] take[s] to have become an impasse in the current historicizing debate on Wallace's famous novel." Günter Leypoldt's "Knausgaard in America" (CritQ 59, iii: 55–69) offers a socioinstitutional assessment of Karl-Ove Knausgaard's critical success in contemporary U.S. literature. Leypoldt shows that to understand the Knausgaard phenomenon, one needs to situate his work at the intersection of the contemporary turn to genre fiction and a simultaneous shift toward a new sincerity paradigm: "The reality-hunger paradigm and the 'turn to genre' may form around very different writerly sensibilities, but they occupy similar positions on the literary landscape." In addition, Sebastian Schmitt's Fifties Nostalgia in Selected Novels of Philip Roth (WVT) presents a nuanced, historically inflected inquiry into...