German Contributions

In this section I discuss a selection of publications representative of the historical and thematic scope of Americanist literary scholarship in Germany. In line with last year's section, I do not include a part devoted to the German academic publishing scene. I wish to mention, however, that the main publication of the German American Studies Association, Amerikastudien/American Studies, has undergone a major transition in its editorial setup. The journal is now available in print and as an openaccess online edition. Following the intent to flatten institutional hierarchies, the editorial team has changed and is now assisted by a group of young, preprofessorial scholars. The transition will surely affect the thematic and methodological scope of the journal.

a. Author Studies

This year saw a considerable number of publications on individual authors, of which I want to mention five. Christian Eilers's Paul Austers Autobiographische Werke (Heidelberg: Winter) considers how Auster uses prose fiction to ponder his own life as a literary author. Eilers focuses on four works within Auster's oeuvre that have long been classified as "autobiographical." At the same time, Eilers argues, they have been broadly neglected by contemporary scholarship: White Spaces, The Invention of Solitude, Hand to Mouth, and Winter Journal. Eilers's treatment of each work is meticulous, including central motives, narrative situation, the evolution of plotlines, and the historical contexts of Auster's career. But the real asset of the study is its frame narrative, occasioned by an extended interview with Auster that Eilers conducted before writing the book. Auster's staged author persona in the four works analyzed by Eilers is featured in constant conversation with Auster himself, thus performing academically the type of literary self-reflexivity for which Auster is so well known. Precisely because of this sense of scholarly self-reflexivity, it is lamentable that Eilers distinguishes rather categorically between Auster's autobiographical and his fictional works, instead of pointing out how much they are in fact speaking to one another.

Petra Steiners's Das Erbe Europas im Erzählwerk Nathaniel Hawthornes (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag) traces how far Nathaniel Hawthorne's critique of Puritan historiography was inspired by the author's engagement with European religious and cultural history rather than merely the religious-philosophical heritage of New England. Steiners shows how Old and New World notions of guilt and redemption shape character and plot development in both Hawthorne's short fiction and The Scarlet Letter. What this study professes to reveal, unlike the plethora of Hawthorne scholarship, is that Hawthorne's literary assessment of individual guilt goes notably beyond the Puritan-Protestant conceptions of sin and sinfulness because it also relies on a European-Catholic tradition of redemption and self-edification. The study as a whole is very conventional, suited to the needs of first-time Hawthorne readers seeking to grasp the various religious and intellectual contexts interwoven in Hawthorne's fiction. The book, however, also contains more specialized sections on Puritan historiography that may also attract connoisseurs of New England history and religion.

Heide Ziegler's "John Barth and David Foster Wallace: An Abortive Patricide" (Anglia 137: 449–62) investigates the conflicted relationship between Barth and Wallace, using Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence to contend that Wallace's indebtedness to Barth also conditioned his desire to transcend the legacy of literary postmodernism's spiritus rector. Ziegler's essay is centered on Wallace's novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, in which the author variously references Barth and his iconic short story collection Lost in the Funhouse. But Ziegler's discussion also includes the history of postmodernism and its aftermaths and a socio-institutional account of Wallace's relationship with creative writing. What these frameworks highlight is the question of audience that distinguishes Wallace from Barth—despite their more obvious biographical difference—as Ziegler maintains: "Barth keeps his distance from the reader, while Wallace wants to love and be loved by the reader. Their attitudes toward the reader are not identical with Barth's and Wallace's attitudes as teachers in their classrooms, but there is a connection."

Daniel Stein's "'Sei a mensch': Mezz Mezzrow's Jewish...