		1956
		quarterly
		English, German

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

		0340-2827

		Winter


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

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

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

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Amerikastudien / American Studies 2012 - Conceptions of Collectivity in Contemporary American Literature, Vol. 57, No. 2

Introduction: Conceptions of Collectivity in Contemporary American Literature

By Clemens Spahr, Philipp Löffler

Love Is Not a Game: Waning American Power and the End of Neoliberalism in Peter Mountford's A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

By Leerom Medovoi
This essay considers Peter Mountford's novel A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism as a recent work of 'world-system literature' focused on the subjective implications of new hemispheric relations in the Americas. In particular, it argues that the limits of neoliberal rational-choice subjectivity explored in this novel are inextricable from its representation of declining U.S. hegemony in Latin American since September 11, 2001. The novel brings these themes together by pitting a maternal oedipal narrative against the demands of rational choice theory. Despite its appearance as a superficial rationalism, the protagonist's game theory logic reveals itself as a symptomatic effect of past trauma, a reference to the shock therapy that was applied to Chile in particular, and Latin America more generally, in the U.S. backed dictatorships of the seventies. Mountford's novel, read in this light, reveals itself as a global allegory about the rise and fall of U.S. power, and the squandering of opportunities for new kinds of political solidarity that are perhaps associated with this historical juncture.

After 9/11: The Fate of Strangers

By David Simpson
The commonplace self-image of the United States is one of openness and hospitality: "Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." But post-9/11 America seems to have radically curtailed its welcome to strangers. This essay argues that far from being a complete change of heart, this situation emphasizes one element of a tradition that had always been deeply ambivalent about immigrants and foreign visitors, who have often been welcomed precisely as objects of suspicion. It looks at a sampling of post-9/11 film and fiction that expresses and analyses the double-edged predicament of those arriving in America. Emma Lazarus's famous poem itself invokes the "wretched refuse" of foreign shores in a voice that supposedly contrasts with that of the inhospitable nations of the earth but reflexively suggests a counternarrative in the homeland itself. Among the various films and novels discussed in this essay, Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows and Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor figure prominently.

Fables of American Collectivity Circa 2005: Chris Bachelder's U.S.!, Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, and George Saunders's The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

By Samuel Cohen
This essay reads three novels from 2005 and 2006 as responses to a long history in the United States of collective social action and of resistance to it. In particular, it reads them as responses to their time's hostility to Left politics. The essay argues that a common feature of these novels, the turn away from realism, narrowly conceived, and toward the use of the fantastic in constructing alternative or non-realist histories -- what it calls the transhistorical fantastic -- is a response to this hostility and to the fatalism of the Left in the face of it. Reading this turn from half a decade later, in the light of collective action in the Arab Spring's Middle East, Wisconsin's Middle West, and the U.S.-born Occupy Wall Street movement, the essay also sees, in the optimistic insistence in these novels on the possibility of positive social change, a turn toward the future that will emerge as characteristic of very contemporary U.S. fiction.

Teaching and Editing at Worlds' End: Collective Trauma and Individual Witness in American Holocaust Poetry

By Cary Nelson
American poetry movements have regularly sought to solidify their collective self-image and public face as aesthetic and political communities by producing movement anthologies. Later generations often seek to codify the past in the same way. Such anthologies are inherently topical, but one topic -- the Holocaust -- has not served well to instantiate a literary community. It was in the nature of the death camps to obliterate all human meaning and all vestiges of community. As a result, a collection of Holocaust poetry cannot embody contemporary community; if anything, it represents a kind of anti-community. Teaching Holocaust poetry consequently presents severe challenges to the humanistic expectations of students and faculty alike -- and defines the humanities at their most fierce.

Collectivity in Trouble: Writing on HIV/AIDS by Susan Sontag and Sarah Schulman

By Paula Treichler
The HIV/AIDS epidemic has generated literary and artistic works on a scale not far short of that produced by the two world wars. Like war, the epidemic has created alliances, friendships, sexual connections, political and emotional bonding, communities of suffering and death, collaborative art and science, and collective action. In this essay, I explore notions of collectivity and related social formations in the AIDS writings of two American women: Susan Sontag and Sarah Schulman. I argue that their contrasting fictional representations of collectivity and different experiences of collectivity as writers illuminate several problematic aspects of collectivity as a concept and help explain why it remains elusive and often fragile in the realities of everyday life

"To Meet a Broader and Wiser Revolution": Notions of Collectivity in Contemporary Mexican American Drama

By Frank Obenland
This essay discusses the interventions of Cherríe Moraga's dramatic and essayistic work in Chicano/a discourse on collectivity. In her dramatic and essayistic writings, Moraga moves beyond a feminist and queer critique of the patriarchal and heterosexual premises inherent in traditional Chicano cultural nationalism. In Heroes and Saints and Watsonville, Moraga questions a narrow, individualistic definition of cultural identity and emphasizes the importance of collective action for social change. Read from the viewpoint of a Lacanian notion of the tragic, Heroes and Saints argues in favor of both the need for violent resistance to economic exploitation and for a more inclusive definition of Chicano/a collectivity. Exploring the social and economic conflicts between a local Hispanic community and white factory owners, Moraga's Watsonville employs Mexican folk religion and indigenous spirituality in order to introduce a revisionist mythology of communal belonging. Against the background of Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy of community, Moraga's dramatic vision can be seen to articulate an idiosyncratic communitarian vision that questions and complicates existing accounts of Mexican American collectivity.

Pynchon's Dustbin of History: Collecting, Collectivity, and Care for the Past

By Roger Bellin
The almost endless profusion of historically specific detail is central to the historical consciousness enacted in Thomas Pynchon's long novels. With particular attention to Against the Day, Pynchon's longest novel, considered both in the context of his other works and against other American writing of the early 2000s, this paper argues that we should read collecting both as a topos within the novel and as a description of the novel itself -- as Pynchon's way of creating or imagining collectivity. Reading Pynchon's collections as collectivities is a way of foregrounding the historical politics of the novelistic imagination -- reading for the pluralism and the radical-democratic imagination at the core of Pynchon's distinctive narrative form.

Review Symposium: Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (2009)

By Christa Buschendorf (Ed.)
Reviews by Christa Buschendorf, Susanne Krasmann, Erwin Riedmann, Fritz Sack, and Michael Hirsch

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