Founded In    2007
Published   annually
Language(s)   English
     

Fields of Interest

 

interdisciplinary american studies scholarship

     
ISSN   1865-8768
     
Editorial Board

rotating

Submission Guidelines and Editorial Policies

Detailed submission guidelines are available at: www.aspeers.com/submit
- Articles should not exceed 10,000 words in length (including notes, abstract and works cited) and must be written in English.
- Contributors must be enrolled in an MA(equivalent) program at a European University at the time of submitting.

     
Mailing Address
     

aspeers.
American Studies Leipzig
Beethovenstr. 15
04107 Leipzig

aspeers: emerging voices in american studies

The editors at aspeers recognize the quality and importance of work being done at the graduate level in European American Studies Institutions.
Advanced students all over Europe produce outstanding and innovative American Studies scholarship. However, many excellent student theses, essays, and papers are not receiving the attention they deserve.

Therefore, aspeers seeks to give emerging scholars a voice: A platform to showcase their work beyond the graduate classroom and a forum for discussion and exchange. We believe that such wider circulation of graduate scholarship has great potential to further energize the field of American Studies. At the same time, aspeers offers emerging scholars the unique opportunity to publish and get recognition for their research at an early point in their careers.

For more information please reference our call for papers (www.aspeers.com/cfp), or visit our website at www.aspeers.com.

aspeers is a project within the American Studies MA Program at the University of Leipzig, Germany. With most members of the reviewing editorial staff being MA candidates, it currently is the only peer-reviewed publication channel for graduate students in European American Studies programs.

 

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aspeers 6 (2013) - American Memories, 6

The discipline of memory studies in all its diversity has steadily gained importance within American studies and has increasingly proven to be an enriching addition to the field. aspeers, recognizing the growing significance of memory studies, therefore decided on the topical focus of American memories for its sixth issue.

Foreword


Introduction: Memories in American Studies


Painting: Decolonizing the Minds


Remembering the Beginning: “All Electrons Are (Not) Alike” by Rosmarie Waldrop


Through a close reading of "All Electrons Are (Not) Alike," the opening poem of Rosmarie Waldrop's latest collection of prose poetry, Driven to Abstraction (2010), this paper shows how the poem deconstructs history and memory through criticism of language. Retelling the narration of the conquest of the Americas, "All Electrons Are (Not) Alike" calls into question the beginning of what was to become US American national identity. Putting Waldrop's poem in the broader context of transnational criticism, I argue that its deconstructive poetic and philosophical use of language contributes to the transnational turn, helping to create the room that transnational criticism needs in order to come up with new, more appropriate ways of structuring literary studies.

Short Story: Opossum


Interview: Professorial Voice


Painting: ... denn es war Krieg [... because it was War]


The Anti-Experience as Cultural Memory: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and the Vietnam War


Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of trauma studies and of memory studies as well as on prominent postwar discourses, this paper investigates the position and function of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now with regard to a materializing collective memory of this war. The paper starts out by establishing the theoretical framework of memory studies as well as those intratextual and intertextual criteria through which a respective cultural product may enter the realm of cultural memory. It contextualizes the film within the interrelated history of Hollywood war cinema, the reintegration of Vietnam veterans into US society, and the political and medical discourses surrounding the conceptualization of PTSD. The close reading of the film reveals that the functional unity of an intratextually generated "experiential mode" (Erll 390), which enables a mass audience's experience of Benjamin Willard's 'anti-experience,' actualizes Apocalypse Now's potential through the use of intertextual generic and contextual references to become part of an active cultural memory of the Vietnam War.

Photography: Colonial Ain’t Dead


Poem: Cameras


Mosaic of Ashes: Poetic Responses to 9/11


By challenging and problematizing the definition of 9/11 as 'the event,' the article examines the extent to which the official discourse on the attacks, exemplified in speeches given by government representatives and based on preestablished binary symbolism, shaped poetic representations of 9/11. This article, by focusing on three anthologies of poetry, analyzes the diversity of poetic responses to 9/11 and the ways in which they engage with and respond to the government's interpretation of the event and its impact on the redefinition of the sense of belonging to the national collective. The poetic heterogeneity testifies to the multiplicity of nonconsensual interpretations of the event, demonstrates its impact, and unveils the impossibility of providing any stable and shared definition of 'the national collective.' The attacks do not contribute to the creation of one uniting national narrative but signify multiple subjective experiences and, thus, elicit numerous distinct and discordant responses and memories of them.

Photography: What Happened in Vegas


Jacqueline Kennedy’s White House Tour: The Political Dimensions of a First Lady


The office of the First Lady of the United States is not inscribed in the Constitution. Nevertheless, as an institution it plays a significant role for the President of the United States (Stooksbury and Edgemon 97). This article examines A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy (1962), the documentary about First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy's restoration project, analyzing it as a cultural text. It seems controversial that -- despite her major appearances in national media -- Jacqueline Kennedy lacked political action during her first ladyship (Caroli 226; cf. Frey 179). The analysis exposes direct as well as indirect allusions that can be related to her husband's administration's domestic political agenda. Therefore, the CBS program about First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy's supposedly apolitical cultural project of restoring the White House appears to be a platform for subtle social, cultural, and historical argumentation, supporting the president's domestic policies and reinforcing the political importance of the first ladyship in the United States.

Short Story: The Old Man’s Rocking Chair Is Moving Slower, Boy


Other Issues

aspeers 11 (2018), 11
aspeers 9 (2016) - American Youth, 9
aspeers 10 (2017), 10
aspeers 8 (2015) - American Health, 8
aspeers 7 (2014) - American Anxieties, 7
aspeers 5 (2012) - American Food Cultures, 5
aspeers 4 (2011) - Nature and Technology, Revisited, 4
aspeers 3 (2010) - Crime and America, 3
aspeers 2 (2009) - Migration and Mobility, 2
aspeers 1 (2008), 1
aspeers 14 (2021), 14
aspeers 13 (2020), 13
aspeers 12 (2019), 12