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 2015, Double Issue, Vol. 60, No. 2/3

The Turn Toward the Indigenous: Knowledge Systems and Practices in the Academy


Since the late 1990s, Indigenous scholars have called for an 'indigenizing of the academy' (Mihesuha and Wilson 2004), integrating Indigenous knowledges into discourses and practices of institutions of higher education worldwide. The calls to integrate Indigenous and Western knowledge discourses and practices mainly come from Indigenous researchers throughout the world. They indict the 'self-evident' primacy of Western knowledges and presumptuous disregard for Indigenous knowledges in universities that re-produce colonial dominance and epistemic violence. This article analyzes the relationship between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems and practices.It also discusses the Indigenous concepts of Saytk'ilhl Wo'osim' (resource-sharing), Enowkinwixw (consensus-finding), Tsawalk, and Haḥuułism (a synthesis of Indigenous and Western philosophies articulating the unity of creation) and suggests their applications in the political and social sciences, economics, and environmental studies.

The Implied Reader and Depressive Experience in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris


This essay examines the role of mental illness in contemporary poetics, arguing that it is often overlooked through denial or repressed through misunderstanding. Specifically, it argues that what Wolfgang Iser called the "implied reader" is, in the case of Louise Glück's The Wild Iris , constructed as depressed. The essay offers close readings of her poems, which demonstrate the way a depressed implied reader leads the speaker of the poems to a moment of transformation. The second half of the essay looks at how most contemporary theories of reader-response inadequaely describe the disability Glück's work references. It offers a critique of the phobia of mental illness in contemporary apologies for literary reading, and argues that even work that acknowledges readers as potentially mentally disabled might benefit from the concept of the "implied reader" in overcoming ableism.

American Punk: The Relations between Punk Rock, Hardcore, and American Culture


The punk culture has its roots on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite continuous cross-fertilization, the British and the American punk traditions exhibit distinct features. There are notable aesthetic and lyrical differences, for instance. The causes for these dissimilarities stem from the different cultural, social, and economic preconditions that gave rise to punk in these places in the mid-1970s. In the U.K., punk was mainly a movement of frustrated working-class youths who occupied London's high-rise blocks and whose families' livelihoods were threatened by a declining economy and rising unemployment. Conversely, in America, punk emerged as a middle-class phenomenon and a reaction to feelings of social and cultural alienation in the context of suburban life. Even city slickers such as the Ramones, New York's counterpart to London's Sex Pistols and the United States' first 'official' well-known punk rock group, made reference to the mythology of suburbia (not just as a place but as a state of mind, and an ideal, as well), advancing a subversive critique of American culture as a whole. Engaging critically with mainstream U.S. culture, American punk's constitutive other, punk developed an alternative sense of Americanness.

Phenomenal Woman: Michelle Obama's Embodied Rhetoric and the Cultural Work of Fashion Biographies


Michelle Obama's role as the first black First Lady of the U.S. is contextualized in discourses of feminism and race, in the historical meaning of the First Lady, and in the world of fashion and celebrity. Her strategy in engaging these discourses is described here as an 'embodied rhetoric,' in which she caters to media attention but refuses to comment on her fashion choices, thereby creating a void for interpretation that is filled by a plethora of readings. Drawing from biography and iconicity theory as well as fashion and First Lady Studies, this article discusses three iconic appearances of Obama that demonstrate her stances on the First Lady's role, black female stereotypes, and fashion as empowerment, respectively. It examines the cultural work of two genres of celebrity texts, biographies and fashion biographies, in order to extrapolate her 'real' character and historical meaning for American womanhood. Obama's case illustrates the interdependence between iconic persona and public mythmaking: The First Lady 'office' serves as a template for the creation of an American fashion icon. As a consequence, the Presidency is no longer a solitary office, but one occupied by a First Couple ruling by political and fashion power. This article discusses three iconic appearances of Obama that comment on her First Lady role, on black female stereotypes, and on fashion as empowerment, respectively. It examines how biographies and fashion biographies interpret these appearances in order to extrapolate her 'real' character and historical meaning for American womanhood.

Displaced Desires: The Dislocated Self and Melancholic Desire in Chuang Hua's Crossings and Fae Myenne Ng's Steer Toward Rock


This essay investigates two aesthetically innovative Chinese American prose narratives, Crossings (1968) by Chuang Hua and Steer Toward Rock (2008) by Fae Myenne Ng, which have so far inspired relatively few scholarly readings. Although published forty years apart, both texts convey a melancholic image of displaced desires - loved ones who are lost, beyond reach, or unresponsive - that is echoed by their complex narrative structure and rich stylistic repertoire. Drawing from the psychoanalytically informed notion of racial melancholia, this essay argues that in Chuang's Crossings and in Ng's Steer Toward Rock, the dynamics of melancholia manifest most prominently in the ways their dislocated characters negotiate between a melancholic desire to preserve a lost object of love, on one hand, and a persistent quest for an integrated sense of self, on the other. By examining their dislocated Asian American subjects, transnational love affairs, and melancholic desire, this essay suggests that both writers contribute to a particular aesthetics and ethics of melancholia, in which identificatory and narrative boundaries alike are contested and transgressed. It further argues that melancholia is present in these two narratives not only as an ethical or political construct, but equally as an aesthetic element that significantly adds to the ethical import of Chuang's and Ng's fiction.

The Role of Indefinite Pronouns in Modeling Wholeness: Gertrude Stein's Everybody's Autobiography


This article contends that Everybody's Autobiography (EA) was part of Gertrude Stein's lifelong project to represent the wholeness of humanity. According to Stein, "Everybody's Autobiography [was] to be the Autobiography of every one" (EA 99). I propose to take this audacious claim literally, but not in the politicized sense of Stein writing "for everybody," "like everybody," or "in the name of everybody." Instead, I focus on the formal conditions of representing infinity to argue that the key to Stein's experiment lies in the possibility of neutralized ascription offered by indefinite pronouns. Indefinite pronouns such as "someone," "each one," and "anyone" express degrees of unspecificity, distributability, and variability. By neutralizing ascription, these pronouns open up a space where the autobiographical "I" can expand towards the totality of "everyone," without losing the intimacy and authority of the "one." Indefinite pronouns thus create a space of intimate indefiniteness, which challenges our notions of autobiographical unsubstitutability.

Christian Jacob Hütter's Washington: An Introduction, Commentary, and Translation of the Work


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: 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 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