810 Amerikanische Literatur in in Englisch
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (10)
- Master's Thesis (5)
- Doctoral Thesis (4)
- Postprint (2)
- Other (1)
- Preprint (1)
Keywords
- 1990s (1)
- African American literature (1)
- Afroamerican literature (1)
- Age studies (1)
- Ali Smith (1)
- America (1)
- American Indians (1)
- American studies (1)
- Amerika (1)
- Amerikastudien (1)
- Arctic studies (1)
- Atlantic studies (1)
- Belletristik (1)
- Bildung für Soziale Gerechtigkeit (1)
- Biohacking (1)
- Biologie (1)
- Biopolitik (1)
- Biotechnology (1)
- Christentum (1)
- Christianisierung (1)
- Christianity (1)
- Christianization (1)
- Cultural studies (1)
- D'Ar (1)
- D'Arcy McNickle (1)
- DIY (1)
- Dekolonisierung Der Hochschulbildung (1)
- Detektivgeschichten (1)
- Do-it-yourself (1)
- Eurocentrism (1)
- Evolutionary theories of ageing (1)
- Geschlecht (1)
- Herkunft (1)
- Hungarian-German bilinguals (1)
- Identität (1)
- Indigenität (1)
- Integritätspädagogik (1)
- Kolonialisierung (1)
- Kulturwissenschaft (1)
- Körper (1)
- Literatur der Indianer Nordamerikas (1)
- Longevity narratives (1)
- Ludwig Leichhardt (1)
- Medizin (1)
- Melville (1)
- Memory (1)
- Metaphorologie (1)
- Metaphorology (1)
- Moby-Dick (1)
- N. Scott Momad (1)
- Narrative (1)
- Native American literature (1)
- Northwest Passage (1)
- Pacific studies (1)
- Postmoderne (1)
- Postmodernism (1)
- Refugee Tales (1)
- Religion (1)
- Romane (1)
- Romanticism (1)
- Romantik (1)
- USA (1)
- afroamerikanische Literatur (1)
- amerikanische Ureinwohner (1)
- anagogy (1)
- ancestral remains (1)
- anti-black representation (1)
- archipelagic theory (1)
- avant-gardism (1)
- biocultures (1)
- biohacking (1)
- biology (1)
- biopolitics (1)
- biotechnology (1)
- black women (1)
- black women's literature (1)
- body (1)
- cognates (1)
- colonial patterns (1)
- colonization (1)
- critical pedagogies (1)
- cultural narratives (1)
- cultural studies (1)
- culture (1)
- decolonizing higher education (1)
- detective fiction (1)
- ethics (1)
- feministische Literatur (1)
- fiction (1)
- foreign language acquisition (1)
- futurity (1)
- gender (1)
- genre (1)
- identity (1)
- indigeneity (1)
- indigenes Wissen (1)
- indigenious knowledge (1)
- indigenity (1)
- indigenous knowledge (1)
- interference (1)
- interracial (1)
- interrassisch (1)
- intertextuality (1)
- koloniale Muster (1)
- kritische Pädagogik (1)
- language transfer (1)
- life sciences (1)
- medicine (1)
- museums and anthropological collections (1)
- newness (1)
- nicht-traditionelle Studierende (1)
- non-traditional students (1)
- novels (1)
- origin (1)
- pedagogy of integrity (1)
- race (1)
- radical pedagigies (1)
- radikale Pädagogik (1)
- religion (1)
- representation (1)
- restorative justice (1)
- singularity (1)
- social justice education (1)
- sovereignty (1)
- transformative learning (1)
- transformatives Lernen (1)
- white violence (1)
- world literature (1)
Institute
The biosecurity individual
(2024)
Discoveries in biomedicine and biotechnology, especially in diagnostics, have made prevention and (self)surveillance increasingly important in the context of health practices. Frederike Offizier offers a cultural critique of the intersection between health, security and identity, and explores how the focus on risk and security changes our understanding of health and transforms our relationship to our bodies. Analyzing a wide variety of texts, from life writing to fiction, she offers a critical intervention on how this shift in the medical gaze produces new paradigms of difference and new biomedically facilitated identities: biosecurity individuals.
Introduction
(2010)
Interested in the ideological workings of fiction, I study how major avant-garde tropes promote the potential of permanent renewal as white America’s property. Renewal ties to the capacities to create, progress, transcend, and simply be. From Black critique we know that, within dominant discourse, all these capacities have been denied to Black bodies ever since colonization. Black work has been fetishized, appropriated, stolen, and dismissed in and by dominant culture, while Black being is construed as negativity and barred on the level of ontology. It follows then that racialization operates on multiple levels in the conceptual frame of renewal. I study this conceptualization by re-reading the works of and criticism on progressive white authors. I examine how images of renewal enable the claim on futurity, transformative potential, and movement forward as exclusively white properties. Premised on oppositions between positive capacities and a state of complete incapacitation, these images are often viewed as separate constructions. This project shows that, deriving from white ideology, such representations are symbiotic and simultaneous - the "good" story of white renewal rests on the continual transgression towards Black being.
Recollecting bones
(2018)
This article critically engages with the different politics of memory involved in debates over the restitution of Indigenous Australian ancestral remains stolen by colonial actors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and brought to Berlin in the name of science. The debates crystallise how deeply divided German scientific discourses still are over the question of whether the historical and moral obligations of colonial injustice should be accepted or whether researchers should continue to profess scientific ‘disinterest’. The debates also reveal an almost unanimous disavowal of Indigenous Australian knowledges and mnemonic conceptions across all camps. The bitter ironies of this disavowal become evident when Indigenous Australian quests for the remains of their ancestral dead lost in the limbo of German scientific collections are juxtaposed with white Australian (fictional) quests for the remains of Ludwig Leichhardt, lost in the Australian interior.
This essay sets out to theorize the "new" Arctic Ocean as a pivot from which our standard map of the world is currently being reconceptualized. Drawing on theories from the fields of Atlantic and Pacific studies, I argue that the changing Arctic, characterized by melting ice and increased accessibility, must be understood both as a space of transit that connects Atlantic and Pacific worlds in unprecedented ways, and as an oceanic world and contact zone in its own right. I examine both functions of the Arctic via a reading of the dispute over the Northwest Passage (which emphasizes the Arctic as a space of transit) and the contemporary assessment of new models of sovereignty in the Arctic region (which concentrates on the circumpolar Arctic as an oceanic world). However, both of these debates frequently exclude indigenous positions on the Arctic. By reading Canadian Inuit theories on the Arctic alongside the more prominent debates, I argue for a decolonizing reading of the Arctic inspired by Inuit articulations of the "Inuit Sea." In such a reading, Inuit conceptions provide crucial interventions into theorizing the Arctic. They also, in turn, contribute to discussions on indigeneity, sovereignty, and archipelagic theory in Atlantic and Pacific studies.
From self-help books and nootropics, to self-tracking and home health tests, to the tinkering with technology and biological particles – biohacking brings biology, medicine, and the material foundation of life into the sphere of »do-it-yourself«. This trend has the potential to fundamentally change people's relationship with their bodies and biology but it also creates new cultural narratives of responsibility, authority, and differentiation. Covering a broad range of examples, this book explores practices and representations of biohacking in popular culture, discussing their ambiguous position between empowerment and requirement, promise and prescription.
This article discusses how Alex Garland’s The Beach (1996) engages with conceptions of utopian islands, nation, and colonialism in modernity and how it, from this basis, develops a different spatiality that reflects on a more deterritorialized form of imperial domination within late twentieth-century globalization, as exercised by the United States. The novel is shown to subvert, but not to abolish, two spatial formations that originated in early modernity: nation and utopia. Building on Jean Baudrillard’s elaborations regarding simulation and simulacra, the article argues that The Beach creates a hyperreal narrative that does away with the idea of isolated, bounded spaces and that in form and content corresponds with the worldwide dominance of the United States at the end of the twentieth century.
Longevity narratives
(2018)
The essay looks at longevity narratives as an important configuration of old age, which is closely related to evolutionary theories of ageing. In order to analyse two case studies of longevity published in the early twentieth century, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall's book Senescence (1922) and the British dramatist Bernard Shaw's play cycle Back to Methuselah (1921), the essay draws on an outline of theories of longevity from the Enlightenment to the present. The analysis of the two case studies illustrates that evolutionary and cultural perspectives on ageing and longevity are ambivalent and problematic. In Hall's and Shaw's texts this is related to a crisis narrative of culture and civilization against which both writers place their specific solutions of individual and species longevity. Whereas Hall employs autobiographical accounts of artists as examples of longevity to strengthen his argument about wise old men as exclusive repositories of knowledge, Shaw in his vision of longevity as an extended form of midlife for both genders encounters the limits of age representation.
This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.
While W.E.B. Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), is set squarely in the USA, his second work of fiction, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), abandons this national framework, depicting the treatment of African Americans in the USA as embedded into an international system of economic exploitation based on racial categories. Ultimately, the political visions offered in the novels differ starkly, but both employ a Western literary canon – so-called ‘classics’ from Greek, German, English, French, and US American literature. With this, Du Bois attempts to create a new space for African Americans in the world (literature) of the 20th century. Weary of the traditions of this ‘world literature’, the novels complicate and begin to decenter the canon that they draw on. This reading traces what I interpret as subtle signs of frustration over the limits set by the literature that underlies Dark Princess, while its predecessor had been more optimistic in its appropriation of Eurocentric fiction for its propagandist aims.
Remembering German-Australian Colonial Entanglements emphatically promotes a critical and nuanced understanding of the complex entanglement of German colonial actors and activities within Australian colonial institutions and different imperial ideologies. Case studies ranging from the German reception of James Cook’s voyages through to the legacies of 19th- and 20th-century settler colonialism foreground the highly ambiguous roles played by explorers, missionaries, intellectuals and other individuals, as well as by objects and things that travelled between worlds – ancestral human remains, rare animal skins, songs, and even military tanks. The chapters foreground the complex relationship between science, religion, art and exploitation, displacement and annihilation.
Pedagogy of integrity
(2019)
The master thesis “Pedagogy of Integrity: an Analysis of the Conceptualization and Implementation of the MA Program Anglophone Modernities in Literature and Culture” deals with colonial patterns in higher education practices. It provides a theoretical framework for decolonization of academic teaching-learning practices on the micro- and meso-didactic levels and suggests concrete solutions for the decolonized education practices, especially for degree programs, which content focuses on post-colonial issues. Besides, through the exemplary analysis of the conceptualization and implementation of the MA Program Anglophone Modernities in Literature and Culture the work explores patterns of colonial heritage as well as will to decolonise these. The main thesis claims that (higher) education should be liberated from colonial patterns, so that real participation for all students in the collective knowledge production becomes possible.
In the theoretical elaborations different concepts of critical and radical pedagogy, e.g. the ones of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, in combination with concepts about modalities of adult learning (e.g. transformative learning) and approaches to education, seeking to combine learning and social justice (e.g. Social Justice Learning) are systematised and explored for their substance and potential to contribute to a criteria catalogue for decolonised educational practises. Besides, attention is paid on higher education research results, which reveal, that students, who belong to underrepresented groups at university (non-traditional students) in their societies of origin, face more difficulties and discrimination as international students at Western universities, than ‘traditional’ international students do. Based on the theoretical elaborations, the work claims that:
(1) the homogeneity-preserving dynamics, found in Western colleges, are an inheritance of colonial time and mindsets, which continue to function in education and multiply social inequality in the context of internationalization, migration, and participation;
(2) all, but especially those higher educational programs, dealing explicitly with inequality phenomena, social and cultural diversity, power relations and issues of domination, as well as with postcolonial criticism, should establish premises of equity and provide de-facto equal opportunities for participation through embodiment of social justice as a way to remain credible;
(3) decolonization of the educational space can be enabled through appropriate didactic action both on the meso- (institution) and micro-didactical (teaching-learning arrangements) agency levels with sufficient will and willingness of responsible professionals at.
By examining representative documents, published by the MA Program Anglophone Modernities in Literature and Culture, using the 'close reading' methodology, as well as through the exemplary analysis of the concept of a teaching-learning program’s event and a student survey, the work seeks to examine wo what extent the Master's Degree Program represents a space of decolonised higher education. The results of the analysis indicate the need for stronger normative value-positioning of the Study program, while many practices that show commitment to participation, social justice and diversity, have been identified.
In the last chapter, the results of the theoretical elaboration and the program’s analysis are synthesized in the concept of an integrity-based pedagogy conceptualisation, called Pedagogy of Integrity, and suggestions are formulated for the teaching practice in the study program, which are meant to help overcome the discrepancy between will and practice towards decolonised educational space.
Moby-Dick als Leerstelle und romantische Chiffre für die Aporie eines transzendentalen Signifikats
(2010)
Die Arbeit unternimmt den Versuch, Melvilles Moby-Dick als einen Vorboten postmoderner Literarizität in den Blick zu nehmen, der in seiner Autoreferentialität den eigenen textuellen Status kritisch-ironisierend reflektiert und Sprache als einen krisenhaften Zugang zu Welt und Kosmos ins Spiel bringt. Sie legt dar, dass Melvilles opus magnum ein im Verlaufe der abendländischen Philosophie epistemologisch und semiologisch virulent gewordenes Krisenbewusstsein vom "Phantasma der Umfassung der Wirklichkeit" (Lyotard) einerseits auf inhaltlicher und andererseits autoreferentiell auf der Ebene der écriture inszeniert. Entsprechend wird davon ausgegangen, dass die vom Text absorbierten Diskurse in ihrer schieren Vielzahl nicht als partikulare Bezüge hermeneutisch isoliert werden können, sondern stattdessen in ihrer Heterogenität selbst die zentrale Problematik illustrieren, in deren Dienst sie als konstitutive Elemente stehen: Statt positiven Sinn zu stiften, verunmöglichen sie jegliche interpretatorische Direktive und verweisen dadurch auf eine dem Roman inhärente negative Dimension von Sinn – sie sind also vielmehr Bestandteile eines verhandelten Problems als dessen Lösung. Nicht nur in den cetologischen Abschnitten des Romans – gleichwohl dort am offenkundigsten – lässt sich Melvilles spielerisch-dekonstruktiver Umgang mit westlichen Wissens- und Denkmodellen erkennen: Dringt man in ahabischer Manie(r) in das semantische Feld des Romans auf der Suche nach einem letzten Grund, einer inferentiellen Letztbegründung, gerät man in einen infiniten regressiven Strudel, der jede getroffene semantische Arretierung auf die Bedingungen ihrer Möglichkeit hin befragt und dadurch wieder aufbricht. Eine ishmaelische Lektüre des Moby-Dick bestünde darin, den Anspruch auf Letztbegründetheit im Sinne der différance Derridas aufzuschieben und sich damit der Gravitation eines transzendentalen Signifikats zu entziehen. Liest man die cetologischen Kapitel vor diesem Hintergrund, kann man in ihnen – so eine der zentralen Thesen der Arbeit – eine autoreferentielle Kontrastfolie erkennen, eine negative Exemplifikation dessen, wie sich der Moby-Dick nicht erfassen lässt: gewissermaßen eine Lektüreanleitung ex negativo. Wesentliche Merkmale der Melvilleschen écriture sind Ambivalenz, Parodie und Dialogizität. Er verwendet stilistische und motivische Versatzstücke, destruiert sie und unterläuft so permanent die Ernsthaftigkeit der den Roman strukturierenden Schicksalszeichen wie auch die interpretativen Anstrengungen des Lesers. Die Autorität des eigenen Diskurses wird ironisch unterminiert und der Text damit in einer Schwebe zwischen Parodie und Monomanie, Unabschließbarkeit und Universalanspruch gehalten. Als die figurativen Kraftfelder dieser konkurrierenden Paradigmen stehen Ahab und Ishmael auf der Handlungsebene personifizierend für die paradoxe Konstellation des gesamten Textes, der nicht die Auflösung oder Aufhebung seiner konfliktiven Elemente sucht, sondern als ästhetischer Ausdruck des Paradoxen feste Orientierungspunkt vorenthält. Anstatt beide Figuren und die ihnen zugrundeliegenden epistemologischen Strategien antagonistisch in Opposition zueinander zu stellen, begreift diese Arbeit sie als komplementäre Elemente eines romantischen Metatextes, der sie in eine konfliktive Rezeption einfasst. In Analogie zum Konzept der romantischen Ironie Friedrich Schlegels wird Ahab hierbei als prototypischer Allegorisierer begriffen, wohingegen Ishmael als Ironiker für die Relativierung derartig monomanischer Kraftakte steht – zwischen Anspannung und Abspannung, Unbedingtem und Bedingtem baut sich jene Dynamik auf, die den gesamten Text durchwaltet. Im Sinne der romantischen Universalpoesie ist der Moby-Dick nicht auf einen systemischen Abschluss hin orientiert, sondern besteht auf/aus seiner Unabschließbarkeit: Heterogenität, Inkonsequenz, Verworrenheit und mitunter Unverständlichkeit sind demnach keine Folgen kompositorischer Nachlässigkeit, sondern in ihrer Gesamtheit als das performative Moment der eigentlichen Mitteilung zu begreifen.
Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit den Konstruktionen literarischer Figuren in Bezug auf die kulturellen Konstruktionen von „race“ und Gender. Die beiden hier besprochenen Romane „Quicksand“ und „Passing“ von Nella Larsen zeigen Hauptprotagonistinnen mit interrassischen Identitäten, die auf einer schwarzen und weißen Elternschaft beruhen und sich damit an den bis in die späten 1970er Jahre in den USA tatsächlich existierenden sog. Rassenmischungsverboten (Anti-Miscegenation Laws) sowie an schwarzen Weiblichkeitsentwürfen reiben. Aus kultureller wie auch aus literarischer Perspektive sind diese Identitäten interessant, da sie lange als „schwarz“ und nicht als „interrassisch“ eingeordnet wurden und eigene interrassische Identitätsentwürfe damit weitenteils fehlen. Eine Ausnahme ist die Figur der Tragischen Mulattin, die in Kapitel 3 besprochen wird. Die Arbeit blickt nach einer Darlegung kultureller Prozesse der Identitätsbildung auf interrassische Figuren in der Literaturgeschichte, Identitätsentwürfe in der Harlem Renaissance, Vorstellungen von Weiblichkeit und Sexualität und schließlich auf die Praxis des Passing (dem Verschleiern eines Teils der Herkunft zu Gunsten eines anderen).
This paper focuses on mysteries written by the Afro-American women authors Barbara Neely and Valerie Wilson Wesley. Both authors place a black woman in the role of the detective - an innovative feature not only in the realm of female detective literature of the past two decades but also with regard to the current discourse about race and class in US-American society. This discourse is important because detective novels are considered popular literature and thus a mass product designed to favor commercial instead of literary claims. Thus, the focus is placed on the development of the two protagonists, on their lives as detectives and as black women, in order to find out whether or not and how the genre influences the depiction of Afro-American experiences. It appears that both of these detective series represent Afro-American culture in different ways, which confirms a heterogenic development of this ethnic group. However, the protagonist's search for identity and their relationships to white people could be identified as a major unifying claim of Afro-American literature. With differing intensity, the authors Neely and Wesley provide the white or mainstream reader with insight into their culture and confront the reader's ignorance of black culture. In light of this, it is a great achievement that Neely and Wesley have reached not only a black audience but also a growing number of white readers.
The dissertation examines aspects of the interlingual lexical processes of word recognition and word retrieval in Hungarian-German bilinguals learning English as a foreign language, with particular respect to the role of cognates. The purpose of the study is to describe the process of lexical activaton in a polyglot system and to model the mental lexicons and the ways entries in the lexicons are connected and activated (e.g. activation through direct word association or through concept mediation). Three dependent variables are studied in quantitative and qualitative analysis of empirical data taken from experiments: rate of accurate responses, response latencies and phonological interference. The results of the experiments are interpreted in the framework of a multiple language network model.
This MA thesis examines novels by Native American authors of the 20th century in regard to their representation of conflicts between the indigenous population of North America and the dominant Christian religion of the mainstream society. Several major points can be followed throughout the century, which have been presented repeatedly and discussed in various perspectives. Historical conflicts of colonization and Christianization, as well as the perpetual question of Native American Christians -- 'How can you go to a church that killed so many Indians?' [Alexie, Reservation Blues] -- are debated in these novels and analyzed in this paper. Furthermore, I have tried to position and classify the works according to their representation of these problems within literary history. Following Charles Larson's chronologic and thematic examination of American Indian Fiction, the categories rejection, (syncretic) adaptation, and postmodern-ironic revision are introduced to describe the various forms of representation. On the basis of five main examples, we can observe an evolution of contemporary Native American literature, which has liberated itself from the narrow definition of the 1960s and 1970s, in favor of a broader and more varied approach. In so doing, and by means of intercultural and intertextual referencing, postmodern irony, and a new Indian self-confidence, it has also taken a new position towards the religion of the former colonizer.