Developing Transnational American Studies

Edited by Nadja Gernalzick and Heike C. Spickermann. For Alfred Hornung on his seventieth birthday.

Transnational American Studies have been developed by international and internationally minded scholars to address the need for border-crossing awareness, knowledge and consciousness of difference. In a decisive change from the comparativist pattern of investigation between two or more assumed units, the transnational approach intends a further opening of cultural systems. With their transnational turn, the focus of American Studies has become relocated to increasingly international and global concerns of knowledge production and cultural transfer as well as to multi- and transnational discourses. This volume combines Transnational American Studies from diverse angles in the four general areas 'Repositioning the American South', 'Life, Literature, Ecocriticism', 'Life Writing and Medicine' and 'Critical Studies of the Nation'. Written by scholars disciplinarily and institutionally linked to American Studies departments mainly, the eleven contributions are, however, not restricted to American Studies as a nationally bound field, but extend and pertain to transnational and global discourses and their conceptual composition and processing. - Contents: Shelley Fisher Fishkin: Originally of the Missouri, Now of the Universe. Mark Twain and the World. - Manfred Siebald: Cultural Range Wars in R. Lynn Rigg's "Green Grow the Lilacs" and Rodger and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!". - Charles Reagan Wilson: Contesting the Southern Way of Life. Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin's Autobiography and the Progressive American South during the Interwar Years. - Zhang Longxi: Nature and Life Writing. A Comparative Study of Henry David Thoreau and Tao Qian. - Nadja Gernalzick: Humanimagic Relations. Cabeza de Vaca's Account (1542) and Posthumanism. - Hubert Zapf: Sustainability and Literature. - Rüdiger Kunow: Lives Without Memory. Alzheimer's Narratives. - Carmen Birkle: An Eye for an I. Autobiographical Representations, the Medical Gaze, and the Transnational 19th-Century America. - Birgit Däwes: Retinal Interfaces and Transparent Eyeballs. The Cultural Imaginary of Surveillance. - Nicole Waller: 'Nonsovereign Histories'. Circumventing the Nation in Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke". - Mita Banerjee: A Kaleidoscope of Color or the Agony of Race? Barack Obama's "Dreams from My Father". - 188 Seiten mit 7 Abb., gebunden (Intercultural Studies; Vol. 8/Universitätsverlag Winter 2019)