Joshua Parker reviews Katherine D. Johnston's Data Surveillance in Twenty-First Century Literature (U of Iowa P, 2023).
Burdened with the choice whether to become a mother or not, the protagonist of Sheila Heti's autofictional work Motherhood develops a thoroughgoing critique of the notion of having to make that choice in the first place, encompassing philosophical musings on the impossibility of controlling one's existence by making decisions and astute commentary on social pressures on women to fulfill expected roles. It identifies pro-natalism as a culturally pervasive narrative, which is subtle but rigid in its exclusionary binarism and consequent pressure and divisiveness it imposes upon women. Heti dismantles the narratives that make up the concept of motherhood and redefines it as an inclusive, non-divisive, non-coercive concept. Maintaining its relational basis, she reverses its temporal trajectory and suggests the relationship with the mother as its central concern. Mobilizing the creative potential of writing, she rewrites the narrative of motherhood as the reconstruction of ancestral bonds between women through literature. Via this reversal, she undermines the one-directional conception of motherhood and allows for the term's inclusiveness of all women. In this way, she deflates the notion of decisional compulsion and so creates a spirit of egalitarianism and tolerance from which all mothers, non-mothers, and non-non-mothers can benefit.
F. O. Matthiessen was a key player in an event which took place at Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg in the summer of 1947 and which launched the legendary Salzburg Seminar and may be considered the birth of American studies in Europe. Matthiessen's reflections on this remarkable session, From the Heart of Europe, remains outstanding in its conjuring of a humanist vision amidst ruins. This travelogue, his last major—if largely forgotten—work published shortly before his suicide, has been variously reassessed as an elegiac document of his tragic failure, as a politically deluded scholar, and as a groundbreaking foray into sketching out a radically alternate transnational understanding of American studies avant la lettre. These highly diverging perspectives on Matthiessen's final book, in particular, and on the professional and personal troubles during his last years, more generally, account for the lasting myth-making fascination with Matthiessen, which has left its mark not only on academic discourses ranging from socialist criticism to queer theory but may also be found in the novels of May Sarton (Faithful Are the Wounds) and Mark Merlis (American Studies). Hence, this article reflects on Matthiessen's impact on the 1947 seminar and traces the legacy of this controversial founding father of American studies.
In Catherynne M. Valente's The Past Is Red, the world as we know it has already drowned. However, even after the apocalypse, traces of extractive capitalism – responsible for the destruction of the planet in the first place – are still lingering on as the novella is set in Garbagetown, a floating habitat of waste that emerged from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This article takes this rubbish as its starting point and examines what Elizabeth DeLoughrey calls our "anticipated history of ruins" through the lenses of utopian theory and salvage-Marxism. By conceptualizing waste as one of the most visible markers of the Capitalocene (Moore), I argue that it is not only a planet's resources that are considered disposable in a capitalist economy but also some of its inhabitants. The analysis focuses on the novella's main character Tetley, who, in contrast to her fellow citizens, attempts to locate beauty in the ruins and has hope – not for salvation but for the broken world. By reading Tetley as a salvagepunk character, this article nods towards a different utopian horizon in The Past Is Red, one that is not defined by solastalgia (Albrecht) for the past or the hope for a future Eden but as a praxis of becoming post-apocalyptic, by learning to "stay with the trouble" (Haraway) of a world built out of trash.
Philipp Reisner reviews Laura Marcus's Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction (2018)
Canadian-American playwright and activist Chantal Bilodeau finds that we need innovative plays that meld climate change into the aesthetics, arguments, and social fabrics of drama and performance. Testing Bilodeau's suggestion, this essay focuses on the poetics of her newest full-length play, No More Harveys (2022). This reading of climate change theater and in particular of Bilodeau's one-actor play applies Caroline Levine's New Formalist method, which strives to read aesthetic and social forms simultaneously and non-hierarchically, and which raises pertinent questions as to how activist theater manages to balance aesthetics and (political and/or scientific) argumentation. While Levine's New Formalism offers a productive analytical angle on small- and large-scale forms, it cannot cover all literary and social phenomena single-handedly. The analysis offered here proposes to demonstrate the usefulness of complementary readings that take into account (a) decolonial and ecocritical concepts of planetarity, (b) a historically informed understanding of monodramatic and of autobiographical generic practices, and (c) the affordances of climate change theater at the present moment. As this contribution argues, Bilodeau employs and modifies elements of form and genre in a manner that allows multiple narratives of social injustice, violence, and detrimental hierarchies across large swaths of time and place to bleed into each other.
In lieu of an abstract, this is the first paragraph of the contribution:
This third issue of the Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAAS) is a special issue in more ways than one. The idea at its core was to highlight contributions by emerging scholars in American studies at Austrian universities, compiled and arranged by a team of guest editors who are members of Austria’s Young Americanists (AYA)—the graduate network affiliated with the Austrian Association for American Studies (AAAS). Beyond that, the journal itself is likewise young—at the time we began our work, it had just been founded and was still in its conceptual stages. As such, the editing process presented a number of unique challenges in the ambitious process of putting together a special issue. While most jobs in academia are tenuous, with 78% of all scientific jobs at universities being limited term,1 coordinating long-term projects presents an exciting but sometimes unpredictable endeavor, especially at the early career level. This is reflected in both the composition of the issue’s editorial team, as well as the remarkable flexibility demonstrated by all contributors throughout the process.
This introduction to the special issue on the American entrepreneurial spirit sketches its significance to American culture. The entrepreneur is an important cultural archetype that reflects the zeitgeist. Accordingly, fears, anxieties, desires, and wishes may be projected onto the entrepreneur; the figure of the entrepreneur—and interpretations of the entrepreneur as a hero or villain—is thus a cultural barometer that provides insight into the American psyche.
This article analyzes the relationship between power, knowledge, and an idea of American Exceptionalism in Cold War-themed videogames. The article focuses on three perspectives. The first section engages with how knowledge is positioned in videogames and what role it plays for shifting power dynamics. Next, it looks at the relationship between notable historio-political events—such as Ronald Reagan's 1983 "Evil Empire" speech and the United States' proposed Strategic Defense Initiative—and videogames to determine how historical knowledge is impacted when it is remediated in games. The third part of this article discusses how Cold War-themed videogames focusing on the US-American perspective embellish a hero who epitomizes and performs American Exceptionalism by establishing a notion of (moral) power that lies with the West. By connecting these three dimensions of knowledge and power in Cold War-themed videogames released between the 1980s and the present, this article suggests that videogames alter players' perception of Cold War ideologies by associating the US with victory while vilifying the USSR and depicting Soviets as the losers in this conflict.
In the United States, people of color are not allowed to move around freely in spatial or social terms. Confronted with the everyday horrors of racial segregation, discrimination, and the legacies of slavery, African Americans continue to be excluded from opportunities of upward mobility and experience cultural displacement based on the immobilizing practices of what Michelle Alexander calls "the New Jim Crow." On-screen representations of Black individuals in the horror genre mirror this racial(ized) ideology. Many earlier horror films, texts Isabel Cristina Pinedo classifies as "race horror," mark them as ferocious monsters who must be villainized, imprisoned, or murdered and thus subscribe to a logic of race as the root of American fears. Jordan Peele's directorial debut Get Out (2017) provides a counter-argument, depicting racism as the primary horror in American (popular) culture by investing in the decolonizing strategies of critical race theory to uncover the very real horrors of the prison industrial complex, commodification of the Black body, and racial profiling. In this article, I read Get Out as an example of what I term "critical race horror," texts whose narrative, generic, and cinematographic strategies subvert essentialist strategies of racial silencing and thus invest in necessary measures toward (Black) mobility justice.
According to a 2018 survey conducted by The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, "over one-fifth of Millennials (22%) haven't heard or are not sure if they have heard of the Holocaust." Since the publication of that study, calls for Holocaust-mandated education have been intensifying. Some academics and teachers have advocated the use of simulations to create empathy for Holocaust victims and survivors. However, sensitive subjects such as the Holocaust must be taught with great care, keeping sound, age-appropriate pedagogical goals in mind. Otherwise, it may do more harm than good. This article discusses two early twenty-first-century Holocaust-themed short stories which serve as stern warnings about the potential dangers and lasting effects of irresponsible Holocaust pedagogy. In Ellen Umansky's "How to Make it to the Promised Land" (2003) and Nathan Englander's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" (2013), characters engage in "what if" scenarios by playing seemingly harmless Holocaust "games" that take a dark turn and conclude with unsettling revelations. While the stories are works of fiction, the analog "games" described in both narratives are loose adaptations of actual games hat Umansky and Englander played as teens.
On June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court officially overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision thus ending the constitutional right to abortion. Much of the subsequent mainstream media narrative has focused on the fact that this decision does not even carve out exceptions for victims of rape and incest, which, while important and horrifying, diverts attention away from the actual issue: a person's right to decide not to give birth for any reason. This reframing of the abortion debate around the most extreme cases is clearly informed by a pronatalist ideology that is still pervasive in US culture. However, it is not just the news media that frequently buys into this pronatalist narrative by evading the inclusion of, if not actively undermining, a woman's right to be childfree. Depictions of abortions are rare in popular fictional narratives, be it in television, film, or literature, and so are voluntarily childless female characters, not only but particularly when it comes to lead characters. This introduction to the special issue on childfree female characters in fictional narratives frames the issue of childfreeness, i.e., voluntary childlessness, in the still dominant pronatalist ideology and examines some stereotypical depictions in recent US-American television series.
Marijana Miki´c reviews Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek's edited volume Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (The Ohio State University Press, 2020).
Set during the Great Depression, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) focuses on an American family who are forced to leave their home in Oklahoma and travel to California in search for a better life. Apart from its authentic representations of the economic instability in the U.S. in the 1930s, industrial transformations that took place throughout the country, as well as the severe draught, the novel also comments on the issue of (auto)mobility that this articles analyzes from an eco-critical perspective. The major part of the novel takes place on the road, as the reader witnesses the family traveling west on Route 66. While the road turns into a symbol of freedom and, in a way, a means to pursue the American Dream, the truck that the family travels by makes one ponder the meaning of U.S. mobility and the nation's fascination with, and dependence on, cars. Through its focus on the highway and car, The Grapes of Wrath also touches upon the issue of environment. Providing meticulous descriptions of the vehicle, commenting on its enormous size and the large amount of smoke that it exhausts, the novel introduces automobility as menacing to ecology and the environment.
This article examines the speed and mobility of surveying of pre-revolutionary America in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997). Pynchon contrasts the extremely slow and directed physical drawing of the Mason-Dixon line with the infinitely fast and undirected speed of magic and dream. This confrontation of mobilities extends into a more general discussion of Enlightenment science and romantic reverie and their clash in Pynchon's novel. I contend that this investigation of mobility furthermore helps to extend the conceptualization of the well-established opposition of rationality and irrationality in current Pynchon scholarship and beyond.
"William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) focuses on what the author calls the "earth's long chronicle," a century-long story about an imaginary and truthful land of the American South. In this article, I show how this chronicle is built on the idea of "im/mobility," considered from different perspectives. First, the seven stories that form Go Down, Moses depict various forms of exploitation, the effects induced by time and human movements on fields, woods, and animals, underlying the contrast between an "immobile" wilderness and a "mobile" (tamed, exploited) plantation. Second, these stories follow the destiny of the im/mobile people who inhabit the land—like Ike McCaslin, the most prominent character, who is blamed precisely for his "immobility," i.e. his inability to take action and change the status quo, at the end of the story. Finally, the literary form of Go Down, Moses contains the idea of "im/mobility" in its hybrid and fragmented structure, halfway between a novel and a short story collection.
Histories of the American West, including reports of settler colonial expeditions to newly occupied territories of the United States and accounts of life at the "frontier" have often been told as "heroic tales: stories of adventure, exploration and conflict" (Jameson and Armitage 10). White cisgender male protagonists captured the imagination of Americans in historiography and fiction. Gradually, historians like Patricia Limerick (1987), Anne M. Butler and Michael J. Lansing (2008), and Stephen Aron (2022) acted as game changers when they re-told the story of the American West as a shared space where different groups came into contact and conflict. Limerick describes the American West as "an important meeting ground" (27). This article argues that Jaclyn Backhaus's play Men on Boats (2015) brings such a "meeting ground" to the stage by re-versioning the story of the first government-sanctioned expedition on the Colorado River (1869). By means of an analysis of the play's devices, particularly its gender-fluid mode of casting, the article demonstrates how the dramatic text challenges the dominant ideology of manifest destiny and actively engages the audience in a transformative reimagining of America's frontier. This article dissects multiple versions of the Powell narrative: Powell's journal, a bronze statue of his boat, a monument on the Grand Canyon's South Rim, and a dramatic reimagining of Powell's journey performed by students based on Backhaus's text. It concludes with findings from two acting workshops conducted in the summer and winter semesters of 2023-2024, where pre-service teachers engaged with Men on Boats as the core text.
This article explores the sexual and racial politics of anal vulnerability in Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. The article shows how the book negotiates the relationship between vulnerability as an embodied relation—configured as forms of bodily receptiveness, permeability, and dependency that necessarily constitute the formal basis of any intersubjective encounter—and vulnerability as a social relation, configured as frameworks of legitimation that differentiate populations in terms of how they encounter, and are affected by, risk, attachment, desire, violence, and physical and mental health. By reading a series of teenage sexual encounters between the Asian American narrator-protagonist Little Dog and Trevor, his white first lover, the article shows that the novel uses anal sensation and metaphoricity to negotiate the vulnerabilities that come with sexual shame and stigma, racial trauma, internalized homophobia, as well as with racialized sexual stereotypes, all the while suggesting ways in which these vulnerabilities may be turned into sources of pleasure, care, reparation, and healing.
This article introduces and explores the implementation, potential, and challenges of investigative aesthetics, a methodology established by the interdisciplinary Forensic Architecture Network, as a specific didactic method in the realm of aesthetic education in the American studies classroom, more specifically in the teaching or, rather, learning of 9/11. Investigative aesthetics is particularly suited to the hermeneutic inquiry of 9/11 because, as Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman emphasize, it is an anti-hegemonic approach to knowledge-production which acknowledges that the "capacity for collective sensing and sense-making" enables a collective to "work towards a renewed, careful, but politically powerful conception of truth practices" (4). By employing a multiplicity of methods, skills, and literacies, the methodology is inherently interdisciplinary. However, as its implementation also poses challenges, the article discusses the use of Alejandro González Iñárritu's short film in 11'09''1: September 11 (2002) as an accessible and low-threshold version of investigative aesthetics. By staging eleven minutes of (almost) visual silence, the film neither fits the dominant narratives and iconography of 9/11 nor lends itself to easy interpretations. Instead, its analysis requires a critical holistic, transnational approach, a reflection of presences and absences, a consideration of material involvements, and an openness of the learners to attune their senses to perceive and experience the film as an aesthetic object. The short film exemplifies the effects of shifting the sensibilities and of playing with different modes of perception, thus allowing the learners to simultaneously encounter the effect of 9/11 footage while also critically engaging with its aftermath.
This article examines the relationship of sound and gender politics in revolutionary America by reading two late eighteenth-century dramatic texts, the 1774 pamphlet A Dialogue, Between a Southern Delegate, and His Spouse (written pseudonymously by Mary V. V.), and Virginia playwright Robert Munford's five-act play The Patriots (written c1777, published only posthumously in 1798). Even though the sounds of early America cannot be accessed directly, as there was no sound recording in the modern, technology-based sense, and even though neither of the two dramatic texts has a known record of performances, the article sets out to explore how sound and speech were heard and negotiated, and how they reflected on prevailing cultural assumptions about gendered personhood, and the relationship between gender and politics. Arguably, attention to sound in these texts offers specific insights into the joint articulation of gender and transatlantic politics in the larger struggle over the American revolution. As this article shows, both texts, albeit for different reasons, strategically use gendered sounds to stage specific political interventions: By "listening" carefully to these sounds (as they are represented in writing), one can understand in more detail how acoustic environments impacted on the articulation, legitimation and deliberation of political argument in revolutionary America.
Joy Harjo's signature project as US poet laureate was published as an intricately designed online experience and as the eponymous printed anthology Living Nations, Living Words. While both versions feature the same poems, they differ in several respects. This article elucidates the argumentative gist of the project's online and printed versions and briefly discusses poems by Deborah A. Miranda, Kimberly Blaeser, Laura Tohe, and Craig Santos Perez. Harjo's project prefigures routes towards a future in which Native poets' conceptualizations and dynamic engagement with maps, historical trauma, and collective and individual memories will allow all readers to revise their understanding of the beginnings, components, and implications of histories of "America" and of "American" poetry.
This article analyzes American pro-Russian revolutionary newspaper and magazine articles, biographies, political speeches, poems, etc. between roughly 1880 and 1917. It asks what strategies American social progressives, including suffragists and feminists, developed to create empathy for the Russian revolutionaries, and the Russian people more generally, at a time when the American authorities, as well as the public, was rather anxious about foreign and domestic radicalism. The article identifies suffering Russian women at the center of narratives that intended to create sympathy for the Russian Revolution. Particularly vulnerable female bodies were used as veneers to draw the American audience and the world into supporting the revolution. The article approaches the topic of vulnerability through the work of literary scholar Thomas Laqueur, and specifically his analyses of suffering as a literary trope, to explore the narratives' particular structures and the kinds of Russian vulnerabilities that the writers presented. It analyzes the affective attachments to the bodies at the center of these narratives, and the subsequent imaginaries they inspire, thereby crucially influencing American cultural and political imaginaries as such through the application of Laqueur's ideas. Additionally, the analysis will focus on the question why suffragists and feminists were so particularly invested in the creation and dissemination of these humanitarian narratives, suggesting that the support of Russian revolutionary women was as much in solidarity with the Russians as it was a means to further their own causes and ideas, including women's emancipation.
Nassim W. Balestrini reviews Erin James's Narrative in the Anthropocene (Ohio State UP, 2022).
This is a review of Alexa Weik von Mossner's Affective Ecologies (2017)
Each year on April 18, the city of San Francisco commemorates the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire with a series of elaborate and tightly scripted ceremonies. As one of the key events, the ceremony at Lotta's Fountain features, among others, commemorative speeches, the hanging of a memorial wreath, and the ceremonial wailing of fire sirens, followed by a minute of silence for the victims. The acoustic tension building up between the sirens' piercing warning sounds and the ensuing collective gesture of mournful quietude is subsequently resolved by the communal sing-along of the upbeat theme song "San Francisco" from the eponymous Academy Award-winning 1936 musical film. This performance seems to stand in stark contrast to the other events at the ceremony, which are painstakingly staged to appear historically accurate. Nonetheless, the anachronistic inclusion of the triumphant "San Francisco," written three decades after the earthquake and released in the context of a purely fictional narrative, fits the purpose of memorializing the 1906 earthquake, since it sonically embodies the "new" city's founding myth. San Francisco, especially its theme song, this article argues, memorializes the 1906 disaster as a social equalizer and a patriotic affirmation of American resilience by portraying the pre-earthquake city as a loud, decadent, and disorderly soundscape that only the earthquake could unite, refine, and ultimately Americanize.