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 2012, Vol. 57, Vol. 1

'Capturing' Immigrant Children: The Issue of Americanization in Photographs by Augustus F. Sherman and Lewis W. Hine


At the beginning of the twentieth century, the emergence of mass immigration to the United States turned the question of how to integrate newcomers to American society into a major national concern. Different societal groups suggested various models of integration, such as assimilation, the 'melting-pot,' or pluralism. Particular significance was ascribed to immigrant children, who were assumed to play the crucial role of linguistic and cultural mediators between their Old-World homes and the supposedly distinct 'American way of life.' As various groups in American society struggled to promote their response to mass immigration as well as their views on immigrant children, the diverse positions were also reflected in the photography of the period. Indeed, the contrary ways in which photographers as different as Augustus F. Sherman and Lewis W. Hine 'captured' immigrant children is not only an expression of their respective political stances but also of their notions of photography as a medium and as an art form. The motif of immigrant children on the Ellis Island roof playground as pictured by Sherman and Hine shall serve as a case study to support this claim.

Marcuse Among the Technocrats: America, Automation, and Postcapitalist Utopias, 1900-1941


The dominant narrative about the Frankfurt School during the 1930s and 1940s portrays the group as "permanent exiles," their cultural, conceptual, and linguistic differences from their American hosts perhaps equally as vast as their geographical distance from Germany. This essay seeks to revise this narrative through a historically contextualized reading of Herbert Marcuse's critical theory. Building on new histories of critical theory's American period, as well as on Howard Brick's recent work on the transatlantic postcapitalist vision, I show that early critical theory, Second International European Marxism, and American progressive thinkers such as Thorstein Veblen and the Technocrats shared a discourse on the utopian potential of systemic shifts in early twentieth-century capitalism. While Marcuse's colleagues saw their postcapitalist vision of rational economic planning perversely realized in the state capitalisms of Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, and Roosevelt's America, Marcuse instead took inspiration from Technocracy's left wing, especially Lewis Mumford's vision of automatism in Technics and Civilization. By helping him imagine the possibility of full automation, of the abolition of (alienated) labor, and of a post-scarcity world, Left Technocracy contributed to making Marcuse one of the most remarkable utopian thinkers in modern America.

Nobody Loves a Fat Man: Fatty Arbuckle and Conspicuous Consumption in Nineteen Twenties America


The article examines the career of silent film comedian Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle in the light of early twentieth century concerns with weight, appetite and conspicuous consumption in American culture. It examines the appeal of Arbuckle's films in terms of their 'willed regression' and indulgence in infantile play, and then examines the backlash against Arbuckle (including, most obviously, the infamous court case of 1921) as an exploration of wider cultural anxieties regarding feminization, infantilization and the masculine body. The essay thus explores the dieting craze of the early 1920's, youth-culture's disdain for the corpulent, and fears regarding unchecked consumption and over-abundance as contributing factors in Arbuckle's spectacular fall from grace, arguing that Roscoe's real misfortune was to embody a comic persona who made the key components of consumerism (regression, materialism, uninhibited carvings) simply too conspicuous for a popular audience to accept.

Transnational and Transethnic Textures; or, "Intricate Interdependencies" in Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo


The debate about transnational American Studies has been closely linked to the evolving relationship between American and Ethnic Studies. Promoters acclaim the transnational approach as offering new ways of researching identity formation in hemispheric and transcontinental contexts. Critics fear that transnational American Studies might discount the ongoing influence of national categories, and that it might obliterate the academic study of specific ethnicities and geographical regions by incorporating hitherto independent fields into an all-encompassing American Studies. In this essay, I intend to illustrate how my reading of Sandra Cisneros's novel Caramelo benefits from negotiating insights provided by Chicano/a and transnational American Studies. Through my analysis of food and fabric as two major tropes for identity formation, I propose that Cisneros both posits mestizo/a identity as a way of transcending dualisms and antagonisms (thus following Gloria Anzaldúa's Chicana feminist thinking), and that she expands this outlook through a transnational, transgender, and transgenerational perspective on her narrator-protagonist's identity formation and process of becoming a writer.

Facing Problems of Representation in Robert Olen Butler's "Open Arms" and "Letters from My Father"


Robert Olen Butler carries out a postmodern critique of representation in the short stories "Open Arms" and "Letters from My Father" from his collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992). He depicts Vietnamese nationals and émigrés reacting against the limits of linguistic and graphic expression as they wrestle with instruments of communication. Signifying objects such as letters, photos, and film images participate in dramas of desire and loss, emphasizing rupture and distance rather than the meaningful contact they ostensibly promise. In turn, Butler's two narrators reflect the author's activity as they participate in acts of fictionalizing and interpreting other individuals. The characters analyze persons as objects, mediating their descriptions through the effects of narrative focalization and reflexive modes of storytelling. Butler's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection demands careful attention as a work of American orientalist literature and demonstrates the way fiction writing has become politicized in the United States. These stories present an allegory of the late twentieth-century crisis of signification and open a space to explore the consequences of literary ethnographic colonization. Both the subaltern subject and Western imperialism haunt Butler's fictions and, by extension, destabilize monolithic conceptualizations of the U.S. literary canon.

American Studies as Media and Visual Culture Studies: Observations on a Revitalized Research Tradition


This essay explores the development of media and visual culture studies in the larger context of American Studies in Germany. Even though research on media related topics and on visuality has proliferated in the past two decades, I argue there is need for further discussion about its place and practice within American Studies. In the following remarks I touch upon questions of institutional networks, the relation between the concept of culture and media technologies, canon revisions, the pedagogy of media and visual culture topics, and the competing claims of empirical and interpretative approaches. I wish to suggest that further theoretical and methodological debate could strengthen and diversify the growing interest in visual and media studies.

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. 3,
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 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