Founded In    1956
Published   quarterly
Language(s)   English, German
     

Fields of Interest

 

literature, cultural studies, history, political science, linguistics, critical theory, teaching of American Studies

     
ISSN   0340-2827
     
Publisher   Winter
     
Editorial Board

General Editors:
Carmen Birkle
Birgit Däwes

Review Editor:
Anke Ortlepp

Editorial Board:
Christa Buschendorf
Ingrid Gessner
Anke Ortlepp
Heike Paul
Marc Priewe
Boris Vormann

Associate Editors:
Cedric Essi
Johanna Heil
Kathleen Loock
Connor Pitetti

Submission Guidelines and Editorial Policies

For our full submission guidelines, please visit
https://dgfa.de/american-studies-a-quarterly-2/submitting/
For manuscripts and books for review, please contact our review editors at reviews@dgfa.de. There is no obligation to review unsolicited books.
Amerikastudien / American Studies
E-Mail: amst@dgfa.de
In view of the computerized production of the journal, manuscripts of articles and reviews can only be accepted if submitted as computer files (preferably MS Word) and accompanied by a printout. Please note the following formal requirements:
– Article manuscripts - manuscript text, abstract, notes, list of works cited - should not exceed 60,000 to 70,000 characters (including spaces).
– All articles must be preceded by an abstract in English of no more than 200 words.
– Since Amerikastudien / American Studies follows a double blind-peer review system, articles should contain no references to the author.
– An Amerikastudien / American Studies style sheet is available under https://dgfa.de/american-studies-a-quarterly-2/article-style-sheet/
The editorial team gladly provides a MS Word document template file (DOT) that is used for pre-typesetting (preflighting).

     

Amerikastudien / American Studies

ALTTEXT

Amerikastudien / American Studies is the journal of the German Association for American Studies. It started as the annual Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien in 1956 and has since developed into a quarterly with some 1200 subscriptions in Europe and the United States. The journal is dedicated to interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives and embraces the diversity and dynamics of a dialogic and comparatist understanding of American Studies. It covers all areas of American Studies from literary and cultural criticism, history, political science, and linguistics to the teaching of American Studies. Special-topics issues alternate with regular ones. Reviews, forums, and annual bibliographies support the international circulation of German and European scholarship in American Studies.
(https://amst.winter-verlag.de/)
Editors: Carmen Birkle and Birgit Däwes
Review Editor: Anke Ortlepp
Address: Amerikastudien/American Studies
Prof. Dr. Carmen Birkle
Philipps-Universität Marburg
FB 10 Department of English and American Studies
Wilhelm-Röpke-Str. 6f
35032 Marburg, Germany
Phone: +49 6421-2824-345
E-Mail: amst@dgfa.de
or
Prof. Dr. Birgit Däwes
Europa-Universität Flensburg
Department of English and American Studies
Auf dem Campus 1
24943 Flensburg, Germany
E-Mail: amst@dgfa.de

 

» Visit Journal Web Site

Amerikastudien / American Studies 2014, Vol. 59, No. 3,

"To Bind in Admiration All Who Gaze": Lydia Sigourney's Sentimental Ekphrasis


This paper examines some of Lydia Sigourney's poetic descriptions of artworks to argue that her work is concerned with the changing place of the visual arts in Americans' lives in the middle of the nineteenth century. Sigourney's ekphrastic poems guide the reader through a process of emulating the visual forms that they describe, encouraging readers to embody the emotional experience of the works. Such experience trained Americans to approach the increasing number of reprinted art images in books and periodicals, as well as preparing the ground a growing gallery culture later in the century.

"Of childhoods and other ferocious times": Traumatic Reverberation in Don DeLillo's Underworld


Don DeLillo's Underworld is often read as a fresco of the Cold War era. These critical readings tend to minimize the attention paid to the psychological portrait of Nick Shay, the character whose existential path is the main narrative vehicle of the novel. The correspondence between the private and public levels of the story is usually taken for granted. In this essay, I contend that there is no direct narrative or causal connection between Nick's personal history and America's Cold War history. In fact, Nick is conspicuously absent from most of the key historical events portrayed in the novel. I propose a reading of Underworld that brings Nick Shay's personal history to the forefront. My main aim is to analyze the narrative devices deployed by DeLillo to depict this character in order to determine how the interweaving of the individual and historical dimensions takes place in the text through a stylistic pattern of equivalence known in trauma studies as "traumatic reverberation." The homologous reverberation at both levels -- individual and historical -- produces the textual illusion of a continuity between them, which, I contend, is not causal or thematic, but structural. This pattern articulates a parallelism between the two dimensions of the text, emphasizing the paradoxical nature of traumatic memory: an absent core around which the text gravitates, persistently signaling a point of origin that is never fully realized.

A Medieval Crusader in Twentieth-Century New Orleans: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces


After a survey of the unusual publication history and the polarizing critical reception of A Confederacy of Dunces, it is shown that the novel's picaresque surface hides an artfully designed structure that tells about the hilarious encounters of programmatically named characters who represent New Orleans' ethnic diversity. This article investigates the character of Ignatius J. Reilly and the opposition between his medieval world view and that of his twentieth-century antagonists and its reflection in the subversive contrast between Ignatius's reliance on Boethius and his rejection of Mark Twain. It shows how Ignatius's rude behavior contradicts his pious beliefs and makes him a satirist satirized, discusses his fascination with the movies as intertextual play with Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Percy's The Movie-Goer, explains Toole's strategies for creating both situational and verbal comedy, and shows that Ignatius's linguistic flights of fancy go back to his creator's academic work on Lyly's Euphues (whereas the other characters' ways of speaking represent New Orleans' linguistic variety). This article outlines the unsavory, partly Swiftian traits of Ignatius's repellent corporeality and reveals the easily overlooked reasons for his distasteful behavior. It reads the novel's open ending as the double-pronged result of the medieval notion of the arbitrary workings of the rota Fortunae and the twentieth-century ethics of reward and punishment. It also points out the weaknesses of Toole's overambitious novel and concludes that, despite these shortcomings, it is an accomplished example of narrative art.

Who needs American Studies? Globalization, Nationalism, and the Future of Area Studies


Since the mid-1970s the United States and other North Atlantic nation-states have been undergoing complex processes of state restructuring. In this context, many authors have predicted the 'end of the nation,' the 'end of territory,' even the 'end of history.' What is the future of area studies such as American Studies -- which have traditionally been premised on the assumption of national societies -- in an emerging, allegedly postnational world? This article contends that both nations and nation-states have by no means been overcome, despite pervasive arguments to the contrary. While nations and nation-states might have changed in form, they have gained importance in facilitating seemingly detached flows of globalization, providing a rich and largely understudied field of research. Area studies can serve as a research strategy to challenge existing, methodologically nationalistic perspectives without falling into the extreme of ignoring the category of the national altogether -- as American Studies after the transnational turn has tended to do. I argue that American Studies will remain relevant in the future, not only because the nation and the nation-state continue to be important categories worthy of more intense study, but also because critical area studies, if they take a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, can serve as a remedy against one often neglected form of methodological nationalism that has consequences beyond the immediate concerns of American Studies and area studies, namely academic specialization.

The Specter of the Center or ‘Post-Americanization’ America


This article revisits the perennial question of American influences on national cultures through a reading of a Swedish military recruitment commercial that pitches stock images associated with American popular culture against images meant to express 'Swedishness.' Structured by an array of enticing visual, logical, and ideological loops, the commercial constructs 'America' as a (benign) specter and turns it into a glocal phenomenon. At first sight a banal -- if witty -- specimen of Americanization, the commercial, I argue, ingeniously builds on the target audience's familiarity with and shrewd recognition of American influences and, troubling the emotional charge conventionally ascribed to the processes of Americanization, posits a 'post-Americanization' America.

Consider Afro-Pessimism


Responses by Christopher M. Tinson, Rinaldo Walcott and Elizabeth J. West

Other Issues

Boasian Aesthetics: American Poetry, Visual Culture, and Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 63, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2018, Vol. 63, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2018: Digital Scholarship in American Studies, Vol. 63, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2018, Vol. 63, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2017: Marx and the United States, Vol. 62, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2017, Vol. 62, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2017: Poetry and Law, Vol. 62, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2017, Vol. 62, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2016: Environmental Imaginaries on the Move: Nature and Mobility in American Literature and Culture, Vol. 61, No.4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2016, Vol. 61, No.3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2016: Turkish-American Literature, Vol. 61, No.2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2016, Vol. 61, No.1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2015: Risk, Security: Approaches to Uncertainty in American Literature, Vol. 60, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2015, Double Issue, Vol. 60, No. 2/3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2015: Network Theory and American Studies, Vol. 60, No.1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2014: South Africa and the United States in Transnational American Studies, Vol. 59, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2014, Vol. 59, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2014, Vol. 59, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2013: Iconographies of the Calamitous in American Visual Culture, Vol. 58, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2013, Vol. 58, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2013: Pragmatism's Promise, Vol. 58, No. 2
Amerika Studien / American Studies 2013, Vol. 58, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2012: Tocqueville's Legacy: Towards a Cultural History of Recognition in American Studies , Vol. 57, No.4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2012, 57.3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2012 - Conceptions of Collectivity in Contemporary American Literature, Vol. 57, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2012, Vol. 57, Vol. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2011: American Comic Books and Graphic Novels, Vol. 56, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2011, Vol. 56, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2011, Vol. 56, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2011, Vol. 56, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2010: African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges , Vol. 55, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2010: Trauma's Continuum -- September 11th Reconsidered, Vol. 55, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2010, Vol. 55, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2010: Poverty and the Culturalization of Class , Vol. 55, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2009, Vol. 54, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2009: American History/ies in Germany: Assessments, Transformations, Perspectives, Vol. 54, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2009, Vol. 54, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2009: Appropriating Vision(s): Visual Practices in American Women's Writing, Vol. 54, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2008, Vol. 53, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2008: Die Bush-Administration: Eine erste Bilanz, Vol. 53, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2008, Vol. 53, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2008: Inter-American Studies and Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 53, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2007, Vol. 52, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2007 - Teaching American Studies in the Twenty-First Century, Vol. 52, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2007, Vol. 52, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2007 - Transatlantic Perspectives on American Visual Culture, Vol. 52, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2006, Vol. 51, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2006 - Asian American Studies in Europe, Vol. 51, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2006, Vol. 51, No. 2
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2006 - Multilingualism and American Studies , Vol. 51, No. 1
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2005, Vol. 50, No. 4
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2005 - Early American Visual Culture, Vol. 50, No. 3
Amerikastudien / American Studies 2005 - American Studies at 50, Vol. 50, Nos. 1/2