Professur für Nordamerikanische und Allgemeine LiteraturwissenschaftHead of Research Unit Prof. Dr.Philipp SchweighauserOverviewMembersPublicationsProjects & CollaborationsProjects & Collaborations OverviewMembersPublicationsProjects & Collaborations Projects & Collaborations 20 foundShow per page10 10 20 50 Memory, Place, and the Postsouthern in Contemporary US Southern Literature Research Project | 2 Project MembersPlaces of memory in Southern literature do not only contain, but also produce memory. At the same time, memory is not only contained in places, but it also produces places in the South. Memory in Southern literature is a way to make the past productive for the present (and future). It allows for confirmation of the status quo, but it also allows one to re-negotiate and reappropriate the past for the present. Memory is a form of the past that is not equal to history, it can be an agent in and of itself. Literature can function as a medium to transport memory and thus offer an account of the past, but it is not necessarily a historical account of the past either. Both memory and literature provide access to the past in a non-historical sense. Memory allows us to access the past in relation to the present, which means that the present - as the point of where the past is accessed from through the process of remembering - is crucial. In the form of memory, the past is not only accessible, but it can also be adapted and altered, and, thus, made productive for the present or even the future. The meaning of a particular place of memory depends on who remembers, and it may shift along with the present in which the act of remembering takes place. Consequently, places do not only contain memory, but they also produce memory as they reveal a particular access and interpretation of the past from the present point in time. This memory can emphasize some aspects of the past and neglect others as well as present an alternative interpretation of the past or even go as far as imagining a past. Fantasy, Fiction, Faction, and Fascism. A Comparative Literary and Discursive Analysis of the Contemporary U.S. American and Russian Radical Right's Narratives of Empire Research Project | 2 Project MembersThis comparative thesis examines narratives of newly revived imperial greatness as expressed in radical right Russian and U.S. American speculative fiction. The annexation of the Crimea in 2014 and Putin's populist and nationalist stance have encouraged the Russian ultraconservative right to openly call for a new Russian empire. Across the Atlantic, the U.S.' long existing imperial policies have never been voiced more clearly than under the Trump presidency with the palingenetic campaign slogan "Make America Great Again," and with the rise of a new radical right-wing movement, the alt-right. While these developments have been analyzed from the perspective of political science, literary studies investigations have been scarce. Literary expertise, however, is absolutely necessary when analyzing this recent surge in neo-imperialism, for a socio-political approach does not fully capture the historical and rhetorical thrust of these issues. Purely historical analyses, on the other hand, often disregard how right-wing notions are developed collectively through literary and fictional means. To address this lacuna of scholarship, the project reads literary texts, more specifically speculative fiction, a highly popular genre of literature including sci-fi, fantasy, and alternate history, for which the concept of alternative utopia will be coined, against the background of far-right texts written or spoken for a realpolitik audience, such as speeches, articles, and essays. Both textual genres will be analyzed with regard to the permeability of fiction and faction by means of close readings in terms of narratology and reader-response criticism in order to reveal the way in which they intend to influence society's opinion-forming processes. In a synchronic approach, the two national discourses, which are inextricably intertwined, are then compared to reveal the ways in which they adopt the other's rhetoric and line of argument, without disregarding the specificity of each literary tradition. This thesis thus aims at examining the literary access to political topics in fictional texts through a comparative approach, paving the way for further interdisciplinary radical right studies, which, in an age of ever-increasing right-wing violence, is needed in order to properly assess, deconstruct, and counteract this discriminatory discourse. Samuel Beckett's Media Art Research Project | 1 Project MembersOver the past decade critics have increasingly recognized Beckett's significance as a media artist, but the contours of this designation have remained rather vague. Just how innovative and how radical was Samuel Beckett as a media artist? What scientific developments and technological blueprints inspired Beckett's media aesthetic? And how urgently does its increasing technological obsoleteness call for a reassessment of this work that has nevertheless lost none of its power to fascinate scholars, to enthral audiences, and to influence new generations of media artists? The project is driven by the conviction that the coexistence of Beckett's literary production, his output in radio and TV, and his experimentation with machine language, coding, and digitality is an essential characteristic of this work that shouldn't be played down in favour of a compartmentalized analysis of these fields, but that cannot be narrativized into a logical sequence of formal experiments either. Insightful as they are, accounts that trace interart influences within the 'oeuvre', the third approach dominating the critical discourse, have also left this particular question unanswered. A series of case studies will serve to test and nuance the hypothesis that Beckett's work represents, among other things, a uniquely subtle artistic negotiation of three successive technological and cultural paradigms: literary culture and the humanist tradition, analogue media and the age of telecommunications, and cybernetics and digitality. The analyses will explore the array of aesthetic strategies, not least textual operations, that produce entanglements between these three different models of signification. With a special focus on the theatrical scripts, the project aims to reconceptualize the Beckettian 'media play', a term conventionally - and perhaps unreflectingly - reserved for the pieces Beckett wrote for radio, film, television, and video. Somewhat provocatively, then, the project addresses the problem of Beckett's 'media art' in the singular, arguing that its generative tensions cannot be neatly mapped onto its radiophonic, filmic, televisual, literary, and theatrical instantiations. Drawing on genetic criticism (facilitated by the ongoing Beckett Digital Manuscript Project), production history, and the recently published letters, the project also looks at the interaction between this work and a changing media ecology, tracing, to give just one particularly intriguing example, Beckett's ingenuity in manipulating various media channels in order to control the reception of his work. A Farewell to Anthropocentrism in American Postbellum Prose from 1850-1970 Research Project | 2 Project MembersIn the age of the Anthropocene, the inseparability of nature and culture has become an undeniable fact. According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Anthropocene denotes "a new geological era", in which "humans [...] have become a geological agent on the planet" (209). Thus, it is inevitable that we reassess our understanding of the world and our relation to the non-human. It is crucial, especially in this time and age, that we promote the kind of thought that allows us to revaluate how we relate to the world around us, no longer seeing ourselves as "the pinnacle of creation" (Shaviro 1) but as one type of actor or agent in a larger network. I propose a move away from anthropological difference towards a more, yet not completely naturalist stance. Among the various media and fields of study that reflect and revaluate the relationship between human beings and nature in this way are literature and literary studies. Bringing the discussion of this relationship into the focus of literary criticism is the main focus of the literary-critical school of Ecocriticsm. In my dissertation project, the focus will lie on six postbellum novels from three different postbellum periods that will function as the fundamental base of a reassessment and revaluation of the man-nature-relationship. The novels chosen for this purpose are A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway and Company K (1933) by William March, two decidedly different modernist depictions, and The Naked and the Dead (1948) by Norman Mailer and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut as examples of postmodernist postbellum literature and Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien as well as one more text from the post-Vietnam War era that is to be determined. Transcendental Poetics and the Futures of American Romanticism Research Project | 1 Project MembersTranscendental Poetics and the Futures of American Romanticism builds on the premise that "romanticism [...] is a living, as yet unrealized possibility," as Nikolas Kompridis has put it. Accordingly, it traces the romantic project from its inception in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries through the twentieth century to today. In order to do so, the book sets in with American transcendentalism, particularly the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, which it understands as the distillation and poignant expression of romanticism as it incorporates and builds on the earlier European romantic discourse. Scrutiny of this original phase of romanticism in the first part of the book yields the following definition of the romantic project: Romanticism emerges as the attempt to draw up a comprehensive and accurate account apt to reconcile the human (thought) and nonhuman (nature) worlds decisively divorced by Kant's critical project. In order to do so without sliding back into dogmatic metaphysics, that is, without relinquishing Kant's critical insights, it needs to come up with a genetic theory (that is, a theory of creation) able to ground thought in nature without reducing thought to mere mechanism. Such a project remains very much a transcendental project, but "transcendental" now comes to signify a real ground in nature, the romantic Absolute, rather than the mere conditions of thought. To comply with Kant's critical project, this Absolute needs to be located beyond the limits of thought. That is, the Absolute has to remain inaccessible by means of rational, conceptual thought. If this is the case, the only remaining option is aisthesis or aesthetic intuition. It is precisely this wager on aisthesis that makes the project of the reconciliation of thought and nature romantic. Since works of art in general and literary works in particular (due to their linguistic constitution) amount to the material manifestation of aesthetic intuition, art and literature attain central importance in romantic discourse-they become the royal road to truth, to the Absolute. This is why romanticism is a genuine literary-philosophical project (with literary-philosophical to be understood as a compound here). The remainder of the book traces this project by focusing on two paradigmatic moments each in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thus, in its second part the book reads Gilles Deleuze as a twentieth-century romantic philosopher and the major late-modernist poet Charles Olson as his literary counterpart. Close readings of their works show how these writers extend the romantic project. Deleuze's two singular achievements in this respect are his thorough immanentization of the transcendental (that is, his extrication of any remnants of transcendence) and a strong account of ontological univocity, two steps already prefigured in the Spinozism of the original eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romantic discourse. Similarly, Olson's poetic as well as theoretical program emphasizes the metaphysical underpinnings of human experience. In a truly romantic spirit Olson's poetry attempts to make tangible the grounding of human experience in nonhuman nature. In the third and final part, the book turns to contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind. Taking its cue from what David Chalmers has called the "hard problem of consciousness," it shows how this debate takes up and extends the romantic discourse on the relation between human and nature or mind and matter in its attempts to explain the relation between non-physical thought and physical matter, a conundrum that was already at the heart of the original romantic movement. Of particular interest here is what analytic philosophers call dual-aspect monism, the analytic counterpart to Deleuze's continental theorizations of immanence and univocity. As to the realm of literature, the final part scrutinizes how contemporary literary works take up this very conundrum thematically and express it formally, thus providing an aesthetic complement to scientific discursivity. The main focus will be on a close reading of E.L. Doctorow's last novel Andrew's Brain (2014). As is the case throughout the book, the respective chapter is not merely interested in the novel's thematic appropriation of neuroscience; rather, in the wake of Emerson's insistence on experimentation and Olson's significant poetic as well as poetological innovations, it brings to the fore the very interrelation of content and form the novel displays. In order to do so, the chapter traces how the novel's flaunting of cognitive and narrative coherence in and through literary language constitutes a genuinely aesthetic exploration of the "hard problem." The book concludes by recapitulating the trajectory it has drawn and by risking a glimpse into the future. The funding served to conduct research at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies to produce first drafts of parts of the manuscript. Beckett's Media System: A Comparative Study in Multimediality Research Project | 2 Project Members"Beckett's Media System: A Comparative Study in Multimediality" is a 3-year project that aims to explore and describe the dynamics of Beckett's media system. Technology shapes Beckett's output in crucial ways on three levels: it plays a pivotal role in the production of his work, appears prominently on the diegetic plane of his plays, and shapes the textual and medial organization of his texts and productions. Yet it has only recently been recognized that Beckett is a pre-eminent multimedia artist whose innovations influence media art to the present day. The excitement of this recognition is coupled with a challenge posed by the realization that much of the technology, which the aesthetics of Beckett's media works depend on, belongs to the past. Since the reflection on the effects of media technologies on culturally established norms of representation define Beckett's work in fundamental ways, this historical distance creates the need for technologically informed re-readings of a representative cross-section of Beckett's work in several media. At the same time, the significance of the project can be understood in broader terms. For Beckett is a privileged observer of a medial transition whose subtle artistic negotiations of newly emerging systems of cultural exchange, which also define our present, offer unique insights into how the epistemological and anthropological parameters of culture change. Our project applies a comprehensive multimedial perspective to Beckett's work, combining media archaeology with close reading, transformational analysis, and media- and genre-historical contextualization. Our main analytical focus is on Beckett's creative combination of varying medial configurations and communication paradigms, including writing, electromagnetic sound recording, radio transmission, cinematography, and audiovisual broadcasting. In staging these combinations, Beckett reflects upon and enacts the radical impact that medial and technological developments had on basic human activities such as reading, speaking, listening, seeing, and remembering. In Beckett's plays, dismembered organs (Mouth), disembodied human faculties (Voice), media fields (Music, Word), and apparatuses (Tape) are dramatic characters that attain a status equal to human beings. Beckett not only thematizes technology and uses it in the production of his work; he also abuses apparatuses in the sense that he disrupts their functioning by staging processes of interference (remediation, mimicry, hybridization) between them to expose how they shape perception and cognition. In the framework of our project, we analyze a range of materials available in The Samuel Beckett Collection of the University of Reading Library, some of which have not been discussed by scholars, while this body of material has not been researched from a sustained media-theoretical perspective yet. Much of the project's innovative thrust stems from its sustained effort to bring together some of the most powerful voices in contemporary anglophone Beckett scholarship and German media analysis (especially media archaeology but also Luhmannian systems theory and historical epistemology) to think anew the interplay between media, materiality, aisthesis, and the discursive processes in Beckett's work. Our ultimate aim is to rethink Beckett's oeuvre as a complex, dynamic media system. Radiophonie, Störung und Erkenntnis. Zur Epistemologie der Radiokunst am Beispiel der Katastrophenhörspiele von Andreas Ammer und FM Einheit. Research Project | 2 Project MembersDie besonders geräusch reichen drei Katastrophenhörspiele von Andreas Ammer und FM Einheit stehen in einem auffälligen Kontrast zur überwiegend besonders geräusch armen Hörspielgeschichte. Dies kann vor allem auf den Wandel des Mediums Radio im Digitalzeitalter zurückgeführt werden, der an ihnen exemplarisch untersucht wird, da in jedem der drei Hörspiele die Störgeräusche die Aufmerksamkeit auf einen anderen zentralen Aspekt des Übergangs vom analogen zum digitalen Radio lenken: In Apocalypse Live (1994) auf den Wandel des Hörspielstudios als exklusivem Produktionsmittel und einstigem Monopol der Rundfunkanstalten, in Deutsche Krieger I - III (1995/97) auf die analogen und digitalen Maschinen und den Wandel ihrer ästhetischen Verfahren und in Crashing Aeroplanes (2001) auf die elektrifizierte Stimme als "archimedischer Punkt des Hörspiels" (Kippert) und Mensch/Maschine-Schnittstelle. Die Kategorie der 'Störung' ist dabei vierfach von Bedeutung: Die 'Störung' als Rauschen und Geräusch, die Katastrophe als 'Störung' einer etablierten Ordnung, die Katastrophe als ästhetische Kategorie des Erhabenen und die Digitaltechnologie als 'Störung' des analogen Radios. Die Forschungsfrage des Projektes lautet: Welche ästhetischen, semantischen und epistemologischen Bedeutungen haben diese 'Störungen'? Die forschungsleitende Hypothese lautet: Das Werk von Andreas Ammer und FM Einheit stellt per se eine 'Störung' dar. Nach dem sog. 'Neuen Hörspiel' seit 1965 markiert es einen weiteren, noch tiefergehenden Bruch mit der Tradition des realistisch-literarischen Hörspiels. Es ist dessen Überwindung und zugleich die Einlösung einer 'absoluten Radiokunst', wie sie von Kurt Weill bereits 1925 konzipiert wurde. Dieses zeitgemäße Beispiel für 'absoluten Radiokunst' ertönt jedoch just in dem Moment, als das Radio in seiner traditionellen Form verschwindet und mit ihm im Zuge der Digitalisierung auch seine charakteristischen Geräusche zum Verstummen gebracht werden. Folgt man der Philosophie der Störung von Michel Serres und seiner These, dass "noise always remains part of the equation" (Philipp Schweighauser), dass also das Rauschen immer Teil der Gleichung bleibt, kann die von Andreas Ammer und FM Einheit künstlerisch mittels Störgeräuschen ausgestellte Materialität der akustischen Medien der Radiogeschichte als Reaktion auf den vermeintlichen technologischen Fortschritt verstanden werden. Dies lässt sich eindrücklich am Beispiel der Katastrophenhörspiele des Künstlerduos aufzeigen. Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives (SANAS Biannual Conference 2014) Research Project | 2 Project MembersIf we follow Jürgen Habermas in glossing ethics as the theory of the good life and morality as a guide to right conduct, then literary texts are neither ethical nor moral in any straightforward sense. Many twenty-first-century literary scholars would also chafe at the idea that literature serves specific moral purposes. Yet the earliest American novelists regularly dedicated their prefaces to assert their novels' truthfulness, social utility, moral rectitude, and didactic value. Later texts as diverse as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and Dave Eggers' What Is the What (2006) were also written with the intent of sensitizing their readers to social ills and alerting them to their responsibilities toward disadvantaged ethnic, social, and cultural others. The controversy surrounding conservative pundit and erstwhile U.S. Secretary of State William J. Bennett's publication of The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories in 1993 further testifies both to the fact that readers do ascribe great moral force to storytelling and that the intersection of literature, ethics, and morality is highly contested ground. This conference is dedicated to surveying that ground from American Studies perspectives. We invite abstracts that propose to close-read literary texts from moral and/or ethical perspectives, develop historical perspectives on literary negotiations of moral issues as well as more theoretically inclined proposals on current contributions to ethics, be they from the Wittgensteinian wing exemplified by the work of Stanley Cavell, the Aristotelian wing for which Martha C. Nussbaum stands, the deconstructive wing influenced by thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, the Spinozist wing most prominently expounded by Gilles Deleuze, or yet to be determined further camps. Possi ble topics include, but are not limited to The writer's and the reader's responsibility U.S. literary narratives and their impacts on readers' lives Literature and the good life Literature as a resource for moral philosophy Literary didacticism The ethics of literary and cultural criticism Cognitive and affective functions of literary texts Are "ethics and aesthetics ... one and the same" (Wittgenstein)? Can literature foster moral understanding? Understanding others through literature Immoral books/censorship Is "[e]thics...a typology of immanent modes of existence" (Deleuze)? Literature's relation to concerns beyond the strictly human: ecology and/or cosmology Of Cultural, Poetic, and Medial Alterity: The Scholarship, Poetry, Photographs, and Films of Edward Sapir, Ruth Fulton Benedict, and Margaret Mead Research Project | 5 Project Members"Of Cultural, Poetic, and Medial Alterity: The Scholarship, Poetry, Photographs, and Films of Edward Sapir, Ruth Fulton Benedict, and Margaret Mead" is a 3-year research project that brings together literary scholars and cultural anthropologists to explore convergences between three types of alterity: cultural alterity (the otherness of the cultures anthropologists study), poetic alterity (the use of poetry in anthropological investigation), and medial alterity (the use of then non-conventional media such as photographs and films in anthropological investigation) in the work of three preeminent cultural anthropologists: Sapir, Benedict, and Mead, who conceptualized 'culture' and 'cultural relativism,' two of the most influential concepts in the 20 th c. social sciences. Out of the three, it is Mead who has become famous for experimenting with media other than the standard ethnographic text already in the 1930s, particularly photography and film. What is less known is that, together, our three anthropologists wrote over 500 poems, dedicated poems to one another, and published a good number of them in renowned literary magazines such as The Dial and Poetry . This prolific, collaborative poetic output, much of which engages with the objects of the writers' anthropological investigations, makes them a unique group in the history of 20 th -century Cultural Anthropology: they were the only anthropologists of the era that left a sizeable (yet sorely understudied) body of poetry. Along with their ethnographic writings and relevant selections from Mead's ethnographic films and photographs, these texts and (audio)visual media form the corpus of our research project. To date, neither our anthropologists' poems nor Mead's photographs and films have been the subjects of a sustained study: previous literary scholarship has analyzed but a fraction of the poems, largely from biographical perspectives that are in danger of reducing the poems to their authors' personal lives, and most of Mead's photographs and films still linger unexamined in the Library of Congress (LoC). The current project proposes to close this gap by asking what difference it makes whether one evokes the cultural Other in standard expository ethnographic prose, in poetic language, or in (what used to be) non-conventional media of ethnographic representation such as celluloid and photographic prints. In tackling this question, we present the first sustained study of Sapir's, Benedict's, and Mead's poetic oeuvres; make an important, canon-revising intervention in the history of US modernism as well as the 20 th -century history of anthropology; and propose a reassessment of Mead's role in the development of visual anthropology that takes into account the aesthetic/aisthetic nature of her work. History, Critique, Utopia: Experimental Writing in the Context of Contemporary Anglophone Literature Research Project | 2 Project MembersMeine Arbeit setzt sich mit Fragen der zeitgenössischen anglophonen Literatur auseinander: mit dem Status der Literatur in der heutigen Kultur, ihren möglichen Zwecken und, entsprechend, ihren möglichen Formen. Im Fokus ist dabei die experimentelle Literatur. Besonders in den englischen und amerikanischen Kulturräumen wurde in den letzten 15 Jahren eine rege Debatte über die experimentelle Literatur geführt. Einige Kritikerinnen und Kritiker verstehen experimentelle literarische Formen als eine veraltete künstlerische Praxis und halten fest, dass wir heute eine Hinwendung zu traditionellen Formen des Schreibens benötigen; andere betonen, dass eine experimentelle Literatur gerade in unserer Zeit mehr denn je gefordert werden muss, da sich eben diese traditionellen Formen des Schreibens immer wie mehr ausbreiten und in dieser Vorherrschaft die Möglichkeit einer alternativen Schreibpraxis immer wie mehr zu verschwinden droht. Die Einleitung meiner Arbeit stellt einen Überblick der verschiedenen Positionen in dieser Debatte dar. Ausgehend von einer Bestandsaufnahme dieser Debatte versuche ich im ersten Kapitel meiner Arbeit sowohl einen genaueren Begriff der experimentellen Literatur als auch ein umfangreiches Argument für ihre heutige Relevanz zu etablieren. Diesem Vorhaben dienen die Werke Theodor W. Adornos als Orientierungspunkt. Adornos Ästhetische Theorie ist die wohl letzte großangelegte Ästhetik des 20. Jahrhunderts und dabei eine Ästhetik, die ein umfassendes Argument für eine experimentelle Kunst entwickelt. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Adornos Ästhetische Theorie (und weiteren seiner Schriften zur Kunst) ermöglicht die Ausarbeitung eines differenzierten Begriffs der experimentellen Literatur in ihren philosophischen, historischen und politischen Implikationen, sowie eine Begründung ihrer Bedeutung für unsere heutige Kultur. Durch den Bezug einer aktuellen Debatte auf die Ästhetik Adornos bringt die Dissertation gleichzeitig auch diese Ästhetik in einen aktuellen Zusammenhang und stellt dadurch eine Revaluation ihrer Prämissen und Forderungen dar. In den drei folgenden Kapiteln wird der in der Arbeit entwickelte Begriff der experimentellen Literatur durch die Interpretation dreier zeitgenössischer literarischer Texte praktisch ausgeführt. Bei den Texten handelt es sich um Lydia Davis' Collected Stories , Tom McCarthys Remainder und Jonathan Lethems The Fortress of Solitude . Im Schlusswort der Arbeit wird nach einer Rekapitulation der Hauptargumente kurz die mögliche Relevanz der experimentellen Literatur für ein Verständnis der ästhetischen Erfahrung (und umgekehrt) angesprochen. Dieser Zusammenhang könnte in einer anschliessenden Studie genauer untersucht werden. 12 12 OverviewMembersPublicationsProjects & Collaborations
Projects & Collaborations 20 foundShow per page10 10 20 50 Memory, Place, and the Postsouthern in Contemporary US Southern Literature Research Project | 2 Project MembersPlaces of memory in Southern literature do not only contain, but also produce memory. At the same time, memory is not only contained in places, but it also produces places in the South. Memory in Southern literature is a way to make the past productive for the present (and future). It allows for confirmation of the status quo, but it also allows one to re-negotiate and reappropriate the past for the present. Memory is a form of the past that is not equal to history, it can be an agent in and of itself. Literature can function as a medium to transport memory and thus offer an account of the past, but it is not necessarily a historical account of the past either. Both memory and literature provide access to the past in a non-historical sense. Memory allows us to access the past in relation to the present, which means that the present - as the point of where the past is accessed from through the process of remembering - is crucial. In the form of memory, the past is not only accessible, but it can also be adapted and altered, and, thus, made productive for the present or even the future. The meaning of a particular place of memory depends on who remembers, and it may shift along with the present in which the act of remembering takes place. Consequently, places do not only contain memory, but they also produce memory as they reveal a particular access and interpretation of the past from the present point in time. This memory can emphasize some aspects of the past and neglect others as well as present an alternative interpretation of the past or even go as far as imagining a past. Fantasy, Fiction, Faction, and Fascism. A Comparative Literary and Discursive Analysis of the Contemporary U.S. American and Russian Radical Right's Narratives of Empire Research Project | 2 Project MembersThis comparative thesis examines narratives of newly revived imperial greatness as expressed in radical right Russian and U.S. American speculative fiction. The annexation of the Crimea in 2014 and Putin's populist and nationalist stance have encouraged the Russian ultraconservative right to openly call for a new Russian empire. Across the Atlantic, the U.S.' long existing imperial policies have never been voiced more clearly than under the Trump presidency with the palingenetic campaign slogan "Make America Great Again," and with the rise of a new radical right-wing movement, the alt-right. While these developments have been analyzed from the perspective of political science, literary studies investigations have been scarce. Literary expertise, however, is absolutely necessary when analyzing this recent surge in neo-imperialism, for a socio-political approach does not fully capture the historical and rhetorical thrust of these issues. Purely historical analyses, on the other hand, often disregard how right-wing notions are developed collectively through literary and fictional means. To address this lacuna of scholarship, the project reads literary texts, more specifically speculative fiction, a highly popular genre of literature including sci-fi, fantasy, and alternate history, for which the concept of alternative utopia will be coined, against the background of far-right texts written or spoken for a realpolitik audience, such as speeches, articles, and essays. Both textual genres will be analyzed with regard to the permeability of fiction and faction by means of close readings in terms of narratology and reader-response criticism in order to reveal the way in which they intend to influence society's opinion-forming processes. In a synchronic approach, the two national discourses, which are inextricably intertwined, are then compared to reveal the ways in which they adopt the other's rhetoric and line of argument, without disregarding the specificity of each literary tradition. This thesis thus aims at examining the literary access to political topics in fictional texts through a comparative approach, paving the way for further interdisciplinary radical right studies, which, in an age of ever-increasing right-wing violence, is needed in order to properly assess, deconstruct, and counteract this discriminatory discourse. Samuel Beckett's Media Art Research Project | 1 Project MembersOver the past decade critics have increasingly recognized Beckett's significance as a media artist, but the contours of this designation have remained rather vague. Just how innovative and how radical was Samuel Beckett as a media artist? What scientific developments and technological blueprints inspired Beckett's media aesthetic? And how urgently does its increasing technological obsoleteness call for a reassessment of this work that has nevertheless lost none of its power to fascinate scholars, to enthral audiences, and to influence new generations of media artists? The project is driven by the conviction that the coexistence of Beckett's literary production, his output in radio and TV, and his experimentation with machine language, coding, and digitality is an essential characteristic of this work that shouldn't be played down in favour of a compartmentalized analysis of these fields, but that cannot be narrativized into a logical sequence of formal experiments either. Insightful as they are, accounts that trace interart influences within the 'oeuvre', the third approach dominating the critical discourse, have also left this particular question unanswered. A series of case studies will serve to test and nuance the hypothesis that Beckett's work represents, among other things, a uniquely subtle artistic negotiation of three successive technological and cultural paradigms: literary culture and the humanist tradition, analogue media and the age of telecommunications, and cybernetics and digitality. The analyses will explore the array of aesthetic strategies, not least textual operations, that produce entanglements between these three different models of signification. With a special focus on the theatrical scripts, the project aims to reconceptualize the Beckettian 'media play', a term conventionally - and perhaps unreflectingly - reserved for the pieces Beckett wrote for radio, film, television, and video. Somewhat provocatively, then, the project addresses the problem of Beckett's 'media art' in the singular, arguing that its generative tensions cannot be neatly mapped onto its radiophonic, filmic, televisual, literary, and theatrical instantiations. Drawing on genetic criticism (facilitated by the ongoing Beckett Digital Manuscript Project), production history, and the recently published letters, the project also looks at the interaction between this work and a changing media ecology, tracing, to give just one particularly intriguing example, Beckett's ingenuity in manipulating various media channels in order to control the reception of his work. A Farewell to Anthropocentrism in American Postbellum Prose from 1850-1970 Research Project | 2 Project MembersIn the age of the Anthropocene, the inseparability of nature and culture has become an undeniable fact. According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Anthropocene denotes "a new geological era", in which "humans [...] have become a geological agent on the planet" (209). Thus, it is inevitable that we reassess our understanding of the world and our relation to the non-human. It is crucial, especially in this time and age, that we promote the kind of thought that allows us to revaluate how we relate to the world around us, no longer seeing ourselves as "the pinnacle of creation" (Shaviro 1) but as one type of actor or agent in a larger network. I propose a move away from anthropological difference towards a more, yet not completely naturalist stance. Among the various media and fields of study that reflect and revaluate the relationship between human beings and nature in this way are literature and literary studies. Bringing the discussion of this relationship into the focus of literary criticism is the main focus of the literary-critical school of Ecocriticsm. In my dissertation project, the focus will lie on six postbellum novels from three different postbellum periods that will function as the fundamental base of a reassessment and revaluation of the man-nature-relationship. The novels chosen for this purpose are A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway and Company K (1933) by William March, two decidedly different modernist depictions, and The Naked and the Dead (1948) by Norman Mailer and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut as examples of postmodernist postbellum literature and Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien as well as one more text from the post-Vietnam War era that is to be determined. Transcendental Poetics and the Futures of American Romanticism Research Project | 1 Project MembersTranscendental Poetics and the Futures of American Romanticism builds on the premise that "romanticism [...] is a living, as yet unrealized possibility," as Nikolas Kompridis has put it. Accordingly, it traces the romantic project from its inception in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries through the twentieth century to today. In order to do so, the book sets in with American transcendentalism, particularly the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, which it understands as the distillation and poignant expression of romanticism as it incorporates and builds on the earlier European romantic discourse. Scrutiny of this original phase of romanticism in the first part of the book yields the following definition of the romantic project: Romanticism emerges as the attempt to draw up a comprehensive and accurate account apt to reconcile the human (thought) and nonhuman (nature) worlds decisively divorced by Kant's critical project. In order to do so without sliding back into dogmatic metaphysics, that is, without relinquishing Kant's critical insights, it needs to come up with a genetic theory (that is, a theory of creation) able to ground thought in nature without reducing thought to mere mechanism. Such a project remains very much a transcendental project, but "transcendental" now comes to signify a real ground in nature, the romantic Absolute, rather than the mere conditions of thought. To comply with Kant's critical project, this Absolute needs to be located beyond the limits of thought. That is, the Absolute has to remain inaccessible by means of rational, conceptual thought. If this is the case, the only remaining option is aisthesis or aesthetic intuition. It is precisely this wager on aisthesis that makes the project of the reconciliation of thought and nature romantic. Since works of art in general and literary works in particular (due to their linguistic constitution) amount to the material manifestation of aesthetic intuition, art and literature attain central importance in romantic discourse-they become the royal road to truth, to the Absolute. This is why romanticism is a genuine literary-philosophical project (with literary-philosophical to be understood as a compound here). The remainder of the book traces this project by focusing on two paradigmatic moments each in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thus, in its second part the book reads Gilles Deleuze as a twentieth-century romantic philosopher and the major late-modernist poet Charles Olson as his literary counterpart. Close readings of their works show how these writers extend the romantic project. Deleuze's two singular achievements in this respect are his thorough immanentization of the transcendental (that is, his extrication of any remnants of transcendence) and a strong account of ontological univocity, two steps already prefigured in the Spinozism of the original eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romantic discourse. Similarly, Olson's poetic as well as theoretical program emphasizes the metaphysical underpinnings of human experience. In a truly romantic spirit Olson's poetry attempts to make tangible the grounding of human experience in nonhuman nature. In the third and final part, the book turns to contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind. Taking its cue from what David Chalmers has called the "hard problem of consciousness," it shows how this debate takes up and extends the romantic discourse on the relation between human and nature or mind and matter in its attempts to explain the relation between non-physical thought and physical matter, a conundrum that was already at the heart of the original romantic movement. Of particular interest here is what analytic philosophers call dual-aspect monism, the analytic counterpart to Deleuze's continental theorizations of immanence and univocity. As to the realm of literature, the final part scrutinizes how contemporary literary works take up this very conundrum thematically and express it formally, thus providing an aesthetic complement to scientific discursivity. The main focus will be on a close reading of E.L. Doctorow's last novel Andrew's Brain (2014). As is the case throughout the book, the respective chapter is not merely interested in the novel's thematic appropriation of neuroscience; rather, in the wake of Emerson's insistence on experimentation and Olson's significant poetic as well as poetological innovations, it brings to the fore the very interrelation of content and form the novel displays. In order to do so, the chapter traces how the novel's flaunting of cognitive and narrative coherence in and through literary language constitutes a genuinely aesthetic exploration of the "hard problem." The book concludes by recapitulating the trajectory it has drawn and by risking a glimpse into the future. The funding served to conduct research at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies to produce first drafts of parts of the manuscript. Beckett's Media System: A Comparative Study in Multimediality Research Project | 2 Project Members"Beckett's Media System: A Comparative Study in Multimediality" is a 3-year project that aims to explore and describe the dynamics of Beckett's media system. Technology shapes Beckett's output in crucial ways on three levels: it plays a pivotal role in the production of his work, appears prominently on the diegetic plane of his plays, and shapes the textual and medial organization of his texts and productions. Yet it has only recently been recognized that Beckett is a pre-eminent multimedia artist whose innovations influence media art to the present day. The excitement of this recognition is coupled with a challenge posed by the realization that much of the technology, which the aesthetics of Beckett's media works depend on, belongs to the past. Since the reflection on the effects of media technologies on culturally established norms of representation define Beckett's work in fundamental ways, this historical distance creates the need for technologically informed re-readings of a representative cross-section of Beckett's work in several media. At the same time, the significance of the project can be understood in broader terms. For Beckett is a privileged observer of a medial transition whose subtle artistic negotiations of newly emerging systems of cultural exchange, which also define our present, offer unique insights into how the epistemological and anthropological parameters of culture change. Our project applies a comprehensive multimedial perspective to Beckett's work, combining media archaeology with close reading, transformational analysis, and media- and genre-historical contextualization. Our main analytical focus is on Beckett's creative combination of varying medial configurations and communication paradigms, including writing, electromagnetic sound recording, radio transmission, cinematography, and audiovisual broadcasting. In staging these combinations, Beckett reflects upon and enacts the radical impact that medial and technological developments had on basic human activities such as reading, speaking, listening, seeing, and remembering. In Beckett's plays, dismembered organs (Mouth), disembodied human faculties (Voice), media fields (Music, Word), and apparatuses (Tape) are dramatic characters that attain a status equal to human beings. Beckett not only thematizes technology and uses it in the production of his work; he also abuses apparatuses in the sense that he disrupts their functioning by staging processes of interference (remediation, mimicry, hybridization) between them to expose how they shape perception and cognition. In the framework of our project, we analyze a range of materials available in The Samuel Beckett Collection of the University of Reading Library, some of which have not been discussed by scholars, while this body of material has not been researched from a sustained media-theoretical perspective yet. Much of the project's innovative thrust stems from its sustained effort to bring together some of the most powerful voices in contemporary anglophone Beckett scholarship and German media analysis (especially media archaeology but also Luhmannian systems theory and historical epistemology) to think anew the interplay between media, materiality, aisthesis, and the discursive processes in Beckett's work. Our ultimate aim is to rethink Beckett's oeuvre as a complex, dynamic media system. Radiophonie, Störung und Erkenntnis. Zur Epistemologie der Radiokunst am Beispiel der Katastrophenhörspiele von Andreas Ammer und FM Einheit. Research Project | 2 Project MembersDie besonders geräusch reichen drei Katastrophenhörspiele von Andreas Ammer und FM Einheit stehen in einem auffälligen Kontrast zur überwiegend besonders geräusch armen Hörspielgeschichte. Dies kann vor allem auf den Wandel des Mediums Radio im Digitalzeitalter zurückgeführt werden, der an ihnen exemplarisch untersucht wird, da in jedem der drei Hörspiele die Störgeräusche die Aufmerksamkeit auf einen anderen zentralen Aspekt des Übergangs vom analogen zum digitalen Radio lenken: In Apocalypse Live (1994) auf den Wandel des Hörspielstudios als exklusivem Produktionsmittel und einstigem Monopol der Rundfunkanstalten, in Deutsche Krieger I - III (1995/97) auf die analogen und digitalen Maschinen und den Wandel ihrer ästhetischen Verfahren und in Crashing Aeroplanes (2001) auf die elektrifizierte Stimme als "archimedischer Punkt des Hörspiels" (Kippert) und Mensch/Maschine-Schnittstelle. Die Kategorie der 'Störung' ist dabei vierfach von Bedeutung: Die 'Störung' als Rauschen und Geräusch, die Katastrophe als 'Störung' einer etablierten Ordnung, die Katastrophe als ästhetische Kategorie des Erhabenen und die Digitaltechnologie als 'Störung' des analogen Radios. Die Forschungsfrage des Projektes lautet: Welche ästhetischen, semantischen und epistemologischen Bedeutungen haben diese 'Störungen'? Die forschungsleitende Hypothese lautet: Das Werk von Andreas Ammer und FM Einheit stellt per se eine 'Störung' dar. Nach dem sog. 'Neuen Hörspiel' seit 1965 markiert es einen weiteren, noch tiefergehenden Bruch mit der Tradition des realistisch-literarischen Hörspiels. Es ist dessen Überwindung und zugleich die Einlösung einer 'absoluten Radiokunst', wie sie von Kurt Weill bereits 1925 konzipiert wurde. Dieses zeitgemäße Beispiel für 'absoluten Radiokunst' ertönt jedoch just in dem Moment, als das Radio in seiner traditionellen Form verschwindet und mit ihm im Zuge der Digitalisierung auch seine charakteristischen Geräusche zum Verstummen gebracht werden. Folgt man der Philosophie der Störung von Michel Serres und seiner These, dass "noise always remains part of the equation" (Philipp Schweighauser), dass also das Rauschen immer Teil der Gleichung bleibt, kann die von Andreas Ammer und FM Einheit künstlerisch mittels Störgeräuschen ausgestellte Materialität der akustischen Medien der Radiogeschichte als Reaktion auf den vermeintlichen technologischen Fortschritt verstanden werden. Dies lässt sich eindrücklich am Beispiel der Katastrophenhörspiele des Künstlerduos aufzeigen. Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives (SANAS Biannual Conference 2014) Research Project | 2 Project MembersIf we follow Jürgen Habermas in glossing ethics as the theory of the good life and morality as a guide to right conduct, then literary texts are neither ethical nor moral in any straightforward sense. Many twenty-first-century literary scholars would also chafe at the idea that literature serves specific moral purposes. Yet the earliest American novelists regularly dedicated their prefaces to assert their novels' truthfulness, social utility, moral rectitude, and didactic value. Later texts as diverse as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and Dave Eggers' What Is the What (2006) were also written with the intent of sensitizing their readers to social ills and alerting them to their responsibilities toward disadvantaged ethnic, social, and cultural others. The controversy surrounding conservative pundit and erstwhile U.S. Secretary of State William J. Bennett's publication of The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories in 1993 further testifies both to the fact that readers do ascribe great moral force to storytelling and that the intersection of literature, ethics, and morality is highly contested ground. This conference is dedicated to surveying that ground from American Studies perspectives. We invite abstracts that propose to close-read literary texts from moral and/or ethical perspectives, develop historical perspectives on literary negotiations of moral issues as well as more theoretically inclined proposals on current contributions to ethics, be they from the Wittgensteinian wing exemplified by the work of Stanley Cavell, the Aristotelian wing for which Martha C. Nussbaum stands, the deconstructive wing influenced by thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, the Spinozist wing most prominently expounded by Gilles Deleuze, or yet to be determined further camps. Possi ble topics include, but are not limited to The writer's and the reader's responsibility U.S. literary narratives and their impacts on readers' lives Literature and the good life Literature as a resource for moral philosophy Literary didacticism The ethics of literary and cultural criticism Cognitive and affective functions of literary texts Are "ethics and aesthetics ... one and the same" (Wittgenstein)? Can literature foster moral understanding? Understanding others through literature Immoral books/censorship Is "[e]thics...a typology of immanent modes of existence" (Deleuze)? Literature's relation to concerns beyond the strictly human: ecology and/or cosmology Of Cultural, Poetic, and Medial Alterity: The Scholarship, Poetry, Photographs, and Films of Edward Sapir, Ruth Fulton Benedict, and Margaret Mead Research Project | 5 Project Members"Of Cultural, Poetic, and Medial Alterity: The Scholarship, Poetry, Photographs, and Films of Edward Sapir, Ruth Fulton Benedict, and Margaret Mead" is a 3-year research project that brings together literary scholars and cultural anthropologists to explore convergences between three types of alterity: cultural alterity (the otherness of the cultures anthropologists study), poetic alterity (the use of poetry in anthropological investigation), and medial alterity (the use of then non-conventional media such as photographs and films in anthropological investigation) in the work of three preeminent cultural anthropologists: Sapir, Benedict, and Mead, who conceptualized 'culture' and 'cultural relativism,' two of the most influential concepts in the 20 th c. social sciences. Out of the three, it is Mead who has become famous for experimenting with media other than the standard ethnographic text already in the 1930s, particularly photography and film. What is less known is that, together, our three anthropologists wrote over 500 poems, dedicated poems to one another, and published a good number of them in renowned literary magazines such as The Dial and Poetry . This prolific, collaborative poetic output, much of which engages with the objects of the writers' anthropological investigations, makes them a unique group in the history of 20 th -century Cultural Anthropology: they were the only anthropologists of the era that left a sizeable (yet sorely understudied) body of poetry. Along with their ethnographic writings and relevant selections from Mead's ethnographic films and photographs, these texts and (audio)visual media form the corpus of our research project. To date, neither our anthropologists' poems nor Mead's photographs and films have been the subjects of a sustained study: previous literary scholarship has analyzed but a fraction of the poems, largely from biographical perspectives that are in danger of reducing the poems to their authors' personal lives, and most of Mead's photographs and films still linger unexamined in the Library of Congress (LoC). The current project proposes to close this gap by asking what difference it makes whether one evokes the cultural Other in standard expository ethnographic prose, in poetic language, or in (what used to be) non-conventional media of ethnographic representation such as celluloid and photographic prints. In tackling this question, we present the first sustained study of Sapir's, Benedict's, and Mead's poetic oeuvres; make an important, canon-revising intervention in the history of US modernism as well as the 20 th -century history of anthropology; and propose a reassessment of Mead's role in the development of visual anthropology that takes into account the aesthetic/aisthetic nature of her work. History, Critique, Utopia: Experimental Writing in the Context of Contemporary Anglophone Literature Research Project | 2 Project MembersMeine Arbeit setzt sich mit Fragen der zeitgenössischen anglophonen Literatur auseinander: mit dem Status der Literatur in der heutigen Kultur, ihren möglichen Zwecken und, entsprechend, ihren möglichen Formen. Im Fokus ist dabei die experimentelle Literatur. Besonders in den englischen und amerikanischen Kulturräumen wurde in den letzten 15 Jahren eine rege Debatte über die experimentelle Literatur geführt. Einige Kritikerinnen und Kritiker verstehen experimentelle literarische Formen als eine veraltete künstlerische Praxis und halten fest, dass wir heute eine Hinwendung zu traditionellen Formen des Schreibens benötigen; andere betonen, dass eine experimentelle Literatur gerade in unserer Zeit mehr denn je gefordert werden muss, da sich eben diese traditionellen Formen des Schreibens immer wie mehr ausbreiten und in dieser Vorherrschaft die Möglichkeit einer alternativen Schreibpraxis immer wie mehr zu verschwinden droht. Die Einleitung meiner Arbeit stellt einen Überblick der verschiedenen Positionen in dieser Debatte dar. Ausgehend von einer Bestandsaufnahme dieser Debatte versuche ich im ersten Kapitel meiner Arbeit sowohl einen genaueren Begriff der experimentellen Literatur als auch ein umfangreiches Argument für ihre heutige Relevanz zu etablieren. Diesem Vorhaben dienen die Werke Theodor W. Adornos als Orientierungspunkt. Adornos Ästhetische Theorie ist die wohl letzte großangelegte Ästhetik des 20. Jahrhunderts und dabei eine Ästhetik, die ein umfassendes Argument für eine experimentelle Kunst entwickelt. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Adornos Ästhetische Theorie (und weiteren seiner Schriften zur Kunst) ermöglicht die Ausarbeitung eines differenzierten Begriffs der experimentellen Literatur in ihren philosophischen, historischen und politischen Implikationen, sowie eine Begründung ihrer Bedeutung für unsere heutige Kultur. Durch den Bezug einer aktuellen Debatte auf die Ästhetik Adornos bringt die Dissertation gleichzeitig auch diese Ästhetik in einen aktuellen Zusammenhang und stellt dadurch eine Revaluation ihrer Prämissen und Forderungen dar. In den drei folgenden Kapiteln wird der in der Arbeit entwickelte Begriff der experimentellen Literatur durch die Interpretation dreier zeitgenössischer literarischer Texte praktisch ausgeführt. Bei den Texten handelt es sich um Lydia Davis' Collected Stories , Tom McCarthys Remainder und Jonathan Lethems The Fortress of Solitude . Im Schlusswort der Arbeit wird nach einer Rekapitulation der Hauptargumente kurz die mögliche Relevanz der experimentellen Literatur für ein Verständnis der ästhetischen Erfahrung (und umgekehrt) angesprochen. Dieser Zusammenhang könnte in einer anschliessenden Studie genauer untersucht werden. 12 12
Memory, Place, and the Postsouthern in Contemporary US Southern Literature Research Project | 2 Project MembersPlaces of memory in Southern literature do not only contain, but also produce memory. At the same time, memory is not only contained in places, but it also produces places in the South. Memory in Southern literature is a way to make the past productive for the present (and future). It allows for confirmation of the status quo, but it also allows one to re-negotiate and reappropriate the past for the present. Memory is a form of the past that is not equal to history, it can be an agent in and of itself. Literature can function as a medium to transport memory and thus offer an account of the past, but it is not necessarily a historical account of the past either. Both memory and literature provide access to the past in a non-historical sense. Memory allows us to access the past in relation to the present, which means that the present - as the point of where the past is accessed from through the process of remembering - is crucial. In the form of memory, the past is not only accessible, but it can also be adapted and altered, and, thus, made productive for the present or even the future. The meaning of a particular place of memory depends on who remembers, and it may shift along with the present in which the act of remembering takes place. Consequently, places do not only contain memory, but they also produce memory as they reveal a particular access and interpretation of the past from the present point in time. This memory can emphasize some aspects of the past and neglect others as well as present an alternative interpretation of the past or even go as far as imagining a past.
Fantasy, Fiction, Faction, and Fascism. A Comparative Literary and Discursive Analysis of the Contemporary U.S. American and Russian Radical Right's Narratives of Empire Research Project | 2 Project MembersThis comparative thesis examines narratives of newly revived imperial greatness as expressed in radical right Russian and U.S. American speculative fiction. The annexation of the Crimea in 2014 and Putin's populist and nationalist stance have encouraged the Russian ultraconservative right to openly call for a new Russian empire. Across the Atlantic, the U.S.' long existing imperial policies have never been voiced more clearly than under the Trump presidency with the palingenetic campaign slogan "Make America Great Again," and with the rise of a new radical right-wing movement, the alt-right. While these developments have been analyzed from the perspective of political science, literary studies investigations have been scarce. Literary expertise, however, is absolutely necessary when analyzing this recent surge in neo-imperialism, for a socio-political approach does not fully capture the historical and rhetorical thrust of these issues. Purely historical analyses, on the other hand, often disregard how right-wing notions are developed collectively through literary and fictional means. To address this lacuna of scholarship, the project reads literary texts, more specifically speculative fiction, a highly popular genre of literature including sci-fi, fantasy, and alternate history, for which the concept of alternative utopia will be coined, against the background of far-right texts written or spoken for a realpolitik audience, such as speeches, articles, and essays. Both textual genres will be analyzed with regard to the permeability of fiction and faction by means of close readings in terms of narratology and reader-response criticism in order to reveal the way in which they intend to influence society's opinion-forming processes. In a synchronic approach, the two national discourses, which are inextricably intertwined, are then compared to reveal the ways in which they adopt the other's rhetoric and line of argument, without disregarding the specificity of each literary tradition. This thesis thus aims at examining the literary access to political topics in fictional texts through a comparative approach, paving the way for further interdisciplinary radical right studies, which, in an age of ever-increasing right-wing violence, is needed in order to properly assess, deconstruct, and counteract this discriminatory discourse.
Samuel Beckett's Media Art Research Project | 1 Project MembersOver the past decade critics have increasingly recognized Beckett's significance as a media artist, but the contours of this designation have remained rather vague. Just how innovative and how radical was Samuel Beckett as a media artist? What scientific developments and technological blueprints inspired Beckett's media aesthetic? And how urgently does its increasing technological obsoleteness call for a reassessment of this work that has nevertheless lost none of its power to fascinate scholars, to enthral audiences, and to influence new generations of media artists? The project is driven by the conviction that the coexistence of Beckett's literary production, his output in radio and TV, and his experimentation with machine language, coding, and digitality is an essential characteristic of this work that shouldn't be played down in favour of a compartmentalized analysis of these fields, but that cannot be narrativized into a logical sequence of formal experiments either. Insightful as they are, accounts that trace interart influences within the 'oeuvre', the third approach dominating the critical discourse, have also left this particular question unanswered. A series of case studies will serve to test and nuance the hypothesis that Beckett's work represents, among other things, a uniquely subtle artistic negotiation of three successive technological and cultural paradigms: literary culture and the humanist tradition, analogue media and the age of telecommunications, and cybernetics and digitality. The analyses will explore the array of aesthetic strategies, not least textual operations, that produce entanglements between these three different models of signification. With a special focus on the theatrical scripts, the project aims to reconceptualize the Beckettian 'media play', a term conventionally - and perhaps unreflectingly - reserved for the pieces Beckett wrote for radio, film, television, and video. Somewhat provocatively, then, the project addresses the problem of Beckett's 'media art' in the singular, arguing that its generative tensions cannot be neatly mapped onto its radiophonic, filmic, televisual, literary, and theatrical instantiations. Drawing on genetic criticism (facilitated by the ongoing Beckett Digital Manuscript Project), production history, and the recently published letters, the project also looks at the interaction between this work and a changing media ecology, tracing, to give just one particularly intriguing example, Beckett's ingenuity in manipulating various media channels in order to control the reception of his work.
A Farewell to Anthropocentrism in American Postbellum Prose from 1850-1970 Research Project | 2 Project MembersIn the age of the Anthropocene, the inseparability of nature and culture has become an undeniable fact. According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Anthropocene denotes "a new geological era", in which "humans [...] have become a geological agent on the planet" (209). Thus, it is inevitable that we reassess our understanding of the world and our relation to the non-human. It is crucial, especially in this time and age, that we promote the kind of thought that allows us to revaluate how we relate to the world around us, no longer seeing ourselves as "the pinnacle of creation" (Shaviro 1) but as one type of actor or agent in a larger network. I propose a move away from anthropological difference towards a more, yet not completely naturalist stance. Among the various media and fields of study that reflect and revaluate the relationship between human beings and nature in this way are literature and literary studies. Bringing the discussion of this relationship into the focus of literary criticism is the main focus of the literary-critical school of Ecocriticsm. In my dissertation project, the focus will lie on six postbellum novels from three different postbellum periods that will function as the fundamental base of a reassessment and revaluation of the man-nature-relationship. The novels chosen for this purpose are A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway and Company K (1933) by William March, two decidedly different modernist depictions, and The Naked and the Dead (1948) by Norman Mailer and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut as examples of postmodernist postbellum literature and Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien as well as one more text from the post-Vietnam War era that is to be determined.
Transcendental Poetics and the Futures of American Romanticism Research Project | 1 Project MembersTranscendental Poetics and the Futures of American Romanticism builds on the premise that "romanticism [...] is a living, as yet unrealized possibility," as Nikolas Kompridis has put it. Accordingly, it traces the romantic project from its inception in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries through the twentieth century to today. In order to do so, the book sets in with American transcendentalism, particularly the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, which it understands as the distillation and poignant expression of romanticism as it incorporates and builds on the earlier European romantic discourse. Scrutiny of this original phase of romanticism in the first part of the book yields the following definition of the romantic project: Romanticism emerges as the attempt to draw up a comprehensive and accurate account apt to reconcile the human (thought) and nonhuman (nature) worlds decisively divorced by Kant's critical project. In order to do so without sliding back into dogmatic metaphysics, that is, without relinquishing Kant's critical insights, it needs to come up with a genetic theory (that is, a theory of creation) able to ground thought in nature without reducing thought to mere mechanism. Such a project remains very much a transcendental project, but "transcendental" now comes to signify a real ground in nature, the romantic Absolute, rather than the mere conditions of thought. To comply with Kant's critical project, this Absolute needs to be located beyond the limits of thought. That is, the Absolute has to remain inaccessible by means of rational, conceptual thought. If this is the case, the only remaining option is aisthesis or aesthetic intuition. It is precisely this wager on aisthesis that makes the project of the reconciliation of thought and nature romantic. Since works of art in general and literary works in particular (due to their linguistic constitution) amount to the material manifestation of aesthetic intuition, art and literature attain central importance in romantic discourse-they become the royal road to truth, to the Absolute. This is why romanticism is a genuine literary-philosophical project (with literary-philosophical to be understood as a compound here). The remainder of the book traces this project by focusing on two paradigmatic moments each in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thus, in its second part the book reads Gilles Deleuze as a twentieth-century romantic philosopher and the major late-modernist poet Charles Olson as his literary counterpart. Close readings of their works show how these writers extend the romantic project. Deleuze's two singular achievements in this respect are his thorough immanentization of the transcendental (that is, his extrication of any remnants of transcendence) and a strong account of ontological univocity, two steps already prefigured in the Spinozism of the original eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romantic discourse. Similarly, Olson's poetic as well as theoretical program emphasizes the metaphysical underpinnings of human experience. In a truly romantic spirit Olson's poetry attempts to make tangible the grounding of human experience in nonhuman nature. In the third and final part, the book turns to contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind. Taking its cue from what David Chalmers has called the "hard problem of consciousness," it shows how this debate takes up and extends the romantic discourse on the relation between human and nature or mind and matter in its attempts to explain the relation between non-physical thought and physical matter, a conundrum that was already at the heart of the original romantic movement. Of particular interest here is what analytic philosophers call dual-aspect monism, the analytic counterpart to Deleuze's continental theorizations of immanence and univocity. As to the realm of literature, the final part scrutinizes how contemporary literary works take up this very conundrum thematically and express it formally, thus providing an aesthetic complement to scientific discursivity. The main focus will be on a close reading of E.L. Doctorow's last novel Andrew's Brain (2014). As is the case throughout the book, the respective chapter is not merely interested in the novel's thematic appropriation of neuroscience; rather, in the wake of Emerson's insistence on experimentation and Olson's significant poetic as well as poetological innovations, it brings to the fore the very interrelation of content and form the novel displays. In order to do so, the chapter traces how the novel's flaunting of cognitive and narrative coherence in and through literary language constitutes a genuinely aesthetic exploration of the "hard problem." The book concludes by recapitulating the trajectory it has drawn and by risking a glimpse into the future. The funding served to conduct research at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies to produce first drafts of parts of the manuscript.
Beckett's Media System: A Comparative Study in Multimediality Research Project | 2 Project Members"Beckett's Media System: A Comparative Study in Multimediality" is a 3-year project that aims to explore and describe the dynamics of Beckett's media system. Technology shapes Beckett's output in crucial ways on three levels: it plays a pivotal role in the production of his work, appears prominently on the diegetic plane of his plays, and shapes the textual and medial organization of his texts and productions. Yet it has only recently been recognized that Beckett is a pre-eminent multimedia artist whose innovations influence media art to the present day. The excitement of this recognition is coupled with a challenge posed by the realization that much of the technology, which the aesthetics of Beckett's media works depend on, belongs to the past. Since the reflection on the effects of media technologies on culturally established norms of representation define Beckett's work in fundamental ways, this historical distance creates the need for technologically informed re-readings of a representative cross-section of Beckett's work in several media. At the same time, the significance of the project can be understood in broader terms. For Beckett is a privileged observer of a medial transition whose subtle artistic negotiations of newly emerging systems of cultural exchange, which also define our present, offer unique insights into how the epistemological and anthropological parameters of culture change. Our project applies a comprehensive multimedial perspective to Beckett's work, combining media archaeology with close reading, transformational analysis, and media- and genre-historical contextualization. Our main analytical focus is on Beckett's creative combination of varying medial configurations and communication paradigms, including writing, electromagnetic sound recording, radio transmission, cinematography, and audiovisual broadcasting. In staging these combinations, Beckett reflects upon and enacts the radical impact that medial and technological developments had on basic human activities such as reading, speaking, listening, seeing, and remembering. In Beckett's plays, dismembered organs (Mouth), disembodied human faculties (Voice), media fields (Music, Word), and apparatuses (Tape) are dramatic characters that attain a status equal to human beings. Beckett not only thematizes technology and uses it in the production of his work; he also abuses apparatuses in the sense that he disrupts their functioning by staging processes of interference (remediation, mimicry, hybridization) between them to expose how they shape perception and cognition. In the framework of our project, we analyze a range of materials available in The Samuel Beckett Collection of the University of Reading Library, some of which have not been discussed by scholars, while this body of material has not been researched from a sustained media-theoretical perspective yet. Much of the project's innovative thrust stems from its sustained effort to bring together some of the most powerful voices in contemporary anglophone Beckett scholarship and German media analysis (especially media archaeology but also Luhmannian systems theory and historical epistemology) to think anew the interplay between media, materiality, aisthesis, and the discursive processes in Beckett's work. Our ultimate aim is to rethink Beckett's oeuvre as a complex, dynamic media system.
Radiophonie, Störung und Erkenntnis. Zur Epistemologie der Radiokunst am Beispiel der Katastrophenhörspiele von Andreas Ammer und FM Einheit. Research Project | 2 Project MembersDie besonders geräusch reichen drei Katastrophenhörspiele von Andreas Ammer und FM Einheit stehen in einem auffälligen Kontrast zur überwiegend besonders geräusch armen Hörspielgeschichte. Dies kann vor allem auf den Wandel des Mediums Radio im Digitalzeitalter zurückgeführt werden, der an ihnen exemplarisch untersucht wird, da in jedem der drei Hörspiele die Störgeräusche die Aufmerksamkeit auf einen anderen zentralen Aspekt des Übergangs vom analogen zum digitalen Radio lenken: In Apocalypse Live (1994) auf den Wandel des Hörspielstudios als exklusivem Produktionsmittel und einstigem Monopol der Rundfunkanstalten, in Deutsche Krieger I - III (1995/97) auf die analogen und digitalen Maschinen und den Wandel ihrer ästhetischen Verfahren und in Crashing Aeroplanes (2001) auf die elektrifizierte Stimme als "archimedischer Punkt des Hörspiels" (Kippert) und Mensch/Maschine-Schnittstelle. Die Kategorie der 'Störung' ist dabei vierfach von Bedeutung: Die 'Störung' als Rauschen und Geräusch, die Katastrophe als 'Störung' einer etablierten Ordnung, die Katastrophe als ästhetische Kategorie des Erhabenen und die Digitaltechnologie als 'Störung' des analogen Radios. Die Forschungsfrage des Projektes lautet: Welche ästhetischen, semantischen und epistemologischen Bedeutungen haben diese 'Störungen'? Die forschungsleitende Hypothese lautet: Das Werk von Andreas Ammer und FM Einheit stellt per se eine 'Störung' dar. Nach dem sog. 'Neuen Hörspiel' seit 1965 markiert es einen weiteren, noch tiefergehenden Bruch mit der Tradition des realistisch-literarischen Hörspiels. Es ist dessen Überwindung und zugleich die Einlösung einer 'absoluten Radiokunst', wie sie von Kurt Weill bereits 1925 konzipiert wurde. Dieses zeitgemäße Beispiel für 'absoluten Radiokunst' ertönt jedoch just in dem Moment, als das Radio in seiner traditionellen Form verschwindet und mit ihm im Zuge der Digitalisierung auch seine charakteristischen Geräusche zum Verstummen gebracht werden. Folgt man der Philosophie der Störung von Michel Serres und seiner These, dass "noise always remains part of the equation" (Philipp Schweighauser), dass also das Rauschen immer Teil der Gleichung bleibt, kann die von Andreas Ammer und FM Einheit künstlerisch mittels Störgeräuschen ausgestellte Materialität der akustischen Medien der Radiogeschichte als Reaktion auf den vermeintlichen technologischen Fortschritt verstanden werden. Dies lässt sich eindrücklich am Beispiel der Katastrophenhörspiele des Künstlerduos aufzeigen.
Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives (SANAS Biannual Conference 2014) Research Project | 2 Project MembersIf we follow Jürgen Habermas in glossing ethics as the theory of the good life and morality as a guide to right conduct, then literary texts are neither ethical nor moral in any straightforward sense. Many twenty-first-century literary scholars would also chafe at the idea that literature serves specific moral purposes. Yet the earliest American novelists regularly dedicated their prefaces to assert their novels' truthfulness, social utility, moral rectitude, and didactic value. Later texts as diverse as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and Dave Eggers' What Is the What (2006) were also written with the intent of sensitizing their readers to social ills and alerting them to their responsibilities toward disadvantaged ethnic, social, and cultural others. The controversy surrounding conservative pundit and erstwhile U.S. Secretary of State William J. Bennett's publication of The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories in 1993 further testifies both to the fact that readers do ascribe great moral force to storytelling and that the intersection of literature, ethics, and morality is highly contested ground. This conference is dedicated to surveying that ground from American Studies perspectives. We invite abstracts that propose to close-read literary texts from moral and/or ethical perspectives, develop historical perspectives on literary negotiations of moral issues as well as more theoretically inclined proposals on current contributions to ethics, be they from the Wittgensteinian wing exemplified by the work of Stanley Cavell, the Aristotelian wing for which Martha C. Nussbaum stands, the deconstructive wing influenced by thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, the Spinozist wing most prominently expounded by Gilles Deleuze, or yet to be determined further camps. Possi ble topics include, but are not limited to The writer's and the reader's responsibility U.S. literary narratives and their impacts on readers' lives Literature and the good life Literature as a resource for moral philosophy Literary didacticism The ethics of literary and cultural criticism Cognitive and affective functions of literary texts Are "ethics and aesthetics ... one and the same" (Wittgenstein)? Can literature foster moral understanding? Understanding others through literature Immoral books/censorship Is "[e]thics...a typology of immanent modes of existence" (Deleuze)? Literature's relation to concerns beyond the strictly human: ecology and/or cosmology
Of Cultural, Poetic, and Medial Alterity: The Scholarship, Poetry, Photographs, and Films of Edward Sapir, Ruth Fulton Benedict, and Margaret Mead Research Project | 5 Project Members"Of Cultural, Poetic, and Medial Alterity: The Scholarship, Poetry, Photographs, and Films of Edward Sapir, Ruth Fulton Benedict, and Margaret Mead" is a 3-year research project that brings together literary scholars and cultural anthropologists to explore convergences between three types of alterity: cultural alterity (the otherness of the cultures anthropologists study), poetic alterity (the use of poetry in anthropological investigation), and medial alterity (the use of then non-conventional media such as photographs and films in anthropological investigation) in the work of three preeminent cultural anthropologists: Sapir, Benedict, and Mead, who conceptualized 'culture' and 'cultural relativism,' two of the most influential concepts in the 20 th c. social sciences. Out of the three, it is Mead who has become famous for experimenting with media other than the standard ethnographic text already in the 1930s, particularly photography and film. What is less known is that, together, our three anthropologists wrote over 500 poems, dedicated poems to one another, and published a good number of them in renowned literary magazines such as The Dial and Poetry . This prolific, collaborative poetic output, much of which engages with the objects of the writers' anthropological investigations, makes them a unique group in the history of 20 th -century Cultural Anthropology: they were the only anthropologists of the era that left a sizeable (yet sorely understudied) body of poetry. Along with their ethnographic writings and relevant selections from Mead's ethnographic films and photographs, these texts and (audio)visual media form the corpus of our research project. To date, neither our anthropologists' poems nor Mead's photographs and films have been the subjects of a sustained study: previous literary scholarship has analyzed but a fraction of the poems, largely from biographical perspectives that are in danger of reducing the poems to their authors' personal lives, and most of Mead's photographs and films still linger unexamined in the Library of Congress (LoC). The current project proposes to close this gap by asking what difference it makes whether one evokes the cultural Other in standard expository ethnographic prose, in poetic language, or in (what used to be) non-conventional media of ethnographic representation such as celluloid and photographic prints. In tackling this question, we present the first sustained study of Sapir's, Benedict's, and Mead's poetic oeuvres; make an important, canon-revising intervention in the history of US modernism as well as the 20 th -century history of anthropology; and propose a reassessment of Mead's role in the development of visual anthropology that takes into account the aesthetic/aisthetic nature of her work.
History, Critique, Utopia: Experimental Writing in the Context of Contemporary Anglophone Literature Research Project | 2 Project MembersMeine Arbeit setzt sich mit Fragen der zeitgenössischen anglophonen Literatur auseinander: mit dem Status der Literatur in der heutigen Kultur, ihren möglichen Zwecken und, entsprechend, ihren möglichen Formen. Im Fokus ist dabei die experimentelle Literatur. Besonders in den englischen und amerikanischen Kulturräumen wurde in den letzten 15 Jahren eine rege Debatte über die experimentelle Literatur geführt. Einige Kritikerinnen und Kritiker verstehen experimentelle literarische Formen als eine veraltete künstlerische Praxis und halten fest, dass wir heute eine Hinwendung zu traditionellen Formen des Schreibens benötigen; andere betonen, dass eine experimentelle Literatur gerade in unserer Zeit mehr denn je gefordert werden muss, da sich eben diese traditionellen Formen des Schreibens immer wie mehr ausbreiten und in dieser Vorherrschaft die Möglichkeit einer alternativen Schreibpraxis immer wie mehr zu verschwinden droht. Die Einleitung meiner Arbeit stellt einen Überblick der verschiedenen Positionen in dieser Debatte dar. Ausgehend von einer Bestandsaufnahme dieser Debatte versuche ich im ersten Kapitel meiner Arbeit sowohl einen genaueren Begriff der experimentellen Literatur als auch ein umfangreiches Argument für ihre heutige Relevanz zu etablieren. Diesem Vorhaben dienen die Werke Theodor W. Adornos als Orientierungspunkt. Adornos Ästhetische Theorie ist die wohl letzte großangelegte Ästhetik des 20. Jahrhunderts und dabei eine Ästhetik, die ein umfassendes Argument für eine experimentelle Kunst entwickelt. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Adornos Ästhetische Theorie (und weiteren seiner Schriften zur Kunst) ermöglicht die Ausarbeitung eines differenzierten Begriffs der experimentellen Literatur in ihren philosophischen, historischen und politischen Implikationen, sowie eine Begründung ihrer Bedeutung für unsere heutige Kultur. Durch den Bezug einer aktuellen Debatte auf die Ästhetik Adornos bringt die Dissertation gleichzeitig auch diese Ästhetik in einen aktuellen Zusammenhang und stellt dadurch eine Revaluation ihrer Prämissen und Forderungen dar. In den drei folgenden Kapiteln wird der in der Arbeit entwickelte Begriff der experimentellen Literatur durch die Interpretation dreier zeitgenössischer literarischer Texte praktisch ausgeführt. Bei den Texten handelt es sich um Lydia Davis' Collected Stories , Tom McCarthys Remainder und Jonathan Lethems The Fortress of Solitude . Im Schlusswort der Arbeit wird nach einer Rekapitulation der Hauptargumente kurz die mögliche Relevanz der experimentellen Literatur für ein Verständnis der ästhetischen Erfahrung (und umgekehrt) angesprochen. Dieser Zusammenhang könnte in einer anschliessenden Studie genauer untersucht werden.
