		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

» Visit Journal Web Site

Amerikastudien / American Studies 2017, Vol. 62, No. 3

A Reverence for Untrendy Human Troubles: David Foster Wallace's "Good People," Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," and American Minimalist Narration

By Robert C. Clark
David Foster Wallace is best known for writing what has in recent years been theorized as Maximalist, but he also produced several Minimalistic works that, perhaps surprisingly, reflect his admiration for Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. Wallace's view of Minimalism was rather complex, and based on his fiction, reading, essays, and statements in interviews, his perception of the tendency changed over time. While he in many ways mastered the techniques central to the mode, he did not ultimately embrace the model of the self-effacing, amoral narrator. Even in his most elliptical stories, the speaker maintains a firm, subjective presence. In "Good People," Wallace's protagonist Lane Dean, Jr., a character closely attuned to the speaker, embodies the tension between Wallace's appreciation for the movement and his sense that it lacked ethical boldness, a characteristic he advocates for in his non-fiction. "Good People" includes a number of overt parallels to Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," a tale that is an exemplar of a style that Wallace seems to both admire and reject.

"CRIME Ov two CENturies:" Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory as a Narrative Arc in Ezra Pound's Cantos

By James Dowthwaite
Ezra Pound's Cantos are as notorious for the difficulty of both their politics and their form as they are famous for their lyrical beauty. Pound's long poem, which is about nothing less than the history of humanity, follows a cyclical structure and logic in which chronology is disrupted, making the narrative fluency of the text difficult to discern. Furthermore, Fascist politics and an anti-Semitic worldview lie at the heart of the poem's political and historical visions. In this article, I explore the ways in which Pound uses an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to form a historical narrative structure in which the progress of humanity has been arrested by the supposed insidious actions of Jewish international capitalists. While there have been many critical engagements with Pound's alleged anti-Semitism, the exact affect that it had on his long poem is yet to be determined. I argue that throughout Pound's middle period (1920-1945), the theory that a cabal of Jewish figures were corrupting geopolitics is the central narrative thrust of The Cantos. That such a theory lies at the heart of a determined attempt to delineate a vision of human history remains of crucial importance to literary studies.

The Terror of Robert Frost

By Brian Brodhead Glaser
I have set out to make an original response to the enduring question critics have engaged with in the decades since Lionel Trilling called Frost terrifying. Clarifying in the first section some of the key terms of trauma theory, and describing its potential relevance to Frost, I seek in the second section to offer readings of five poems that show how changing focalizations create a sense of an implied author who has been traumatized. But the question is suggested: what was Frost traumatized by? So, in the third section I offer biographical, theoretical, and textual evidence that he was traumatized by a special kind of alienation as it it understood by Marxist theory -- to wit, the death of a sense of species-being. Frost, I argue, is terrifying because he is so persuasively in denial, as a poet and a cultural figure, about the wounding effects on him of capitalist culture.

No Rebel Chambermaids: Meridel Le Sueur's 1930s Labor Imaginary

By Laura Hapke
The tribune of American proletarian writing in the "red" 1930s, Mike Gold, created editorials such as "Write for Us!" in the Communist Party's literary organ, The New Masses. In these allegedly gender-neutral manifestos, women were maids and men real workers. His colleague Meridel Le Sueur destabilized such stereotyping. Her New Masses sketches and pieces in other leftist periodicals recast her comrades' commodification of female wage earners. At the same time, she dramatized the very Party forces denying agency to subaltern women. Attempting with some success to reconcile feminism and communism, she upended the association of red literature with manliness. Her coded subtexts critiqued the contradictions in Gold's notion of "rebel chambermaids." To that end, she generated a labor imaginary of women's incarceration to interrogate the Communist Party's promise of equality after the revolution. Redefining the conditions for emancipation, she disrupted male-defined social realism both stylistically and substantively.

Participant Observance: Crane, Finitude, Anthropologism

By Anthony Splendora
Confronting unrejoined critical challenges regarding Stephen Crane's impeti while acknowledging his ambiguous mens auctoris and other difficulties, this paper illuminates Crane's fictions as direct rational-aesthetic witnessing to his intrasubjective conditions and milieu. Focused personalizations, his originary linguistic declarations, invariably actualized in significant monologic speech, manifest as logoi, projective performatives (conferred substantialities) bearing autonomous metalinguistic sentence in a myth-toned (stripped of specifics) art both persistent and interdictively rebellious with humanistic meaning. Shown impending pervasively and indicatively in an age of objectified alterities are Crane's melodramatic portrayals of relative time, both as suspensively crystallized quasi-mythically and as expent preciously in evanescent, living theater, especially in crucial, allegorizing, Modernistic self-dramatization. Essayed here are not granular textual exegeses, not analyses of internal forms, but a partial mapping of Crane's critically unique historical and psychological situatedness, an adverbial reading proffering a narratological "how," "why" and "wherefore" of his fiction by functioning in the rhetorical- analytical speech-performative plane of inference whereupon, as touchstone, Shakespeare's avatar Prospero (pro + spes = "according to hope," "as desired," "I profit"), epilogically addressing Tempest audiences metadramatically, discharges.

An Interview with Richard Rodriguez

By Daniel Schreiner
In fall 2016, I undertook a research trip to the United States for a comparative- literature project on Turkish-German and Mexican-American Literature. I interviewed several writers like Alejandro Morales and Demetria Martinez to discuss their views on politics and their literary responses to them. After reaching out for over a year, and, with the help of other writers and colleagues in the field of Chicano Studies, I finally got in contact with Richard Rodriguez in San Francisco. Rodriguez was raised in Sacramento, where he went to a Catholic school, and attended universities in the U.S. and UK. He became a journalist and writer. His first memoir Hunger of Memory was published in the early 80s.1 During that time, American conservatives referred to him regularly as a model of how immigrant integration should work. In the following years Rodriguez published three more memoirs discussing his own life in relation to American history.2 I arrived in San Francisco during the pre-elections debates between Clinton and Trump and found my way to Rodriguez. I had read all his books and had repeatedly stumbled onto essays and articles on his works. From the beginning, his opinions had been notably distinct from writers within the Chicano movement in the 70s and feminist Mexican-American authors. His conservative advocacy against programs of affirmative action and his support for the mantra "English Only" made him an outcast in the Mexican-American writing community. Labeled a "coconut" and "sellout" and being a strong individualist, Richard Rodriguez stayed away from "La Causa." I was curious to meet this excellent stylist and writer who later in his career had a public coming out, admitting to his homosexuality, and who left politics behind in his writing and started exploreing matters of religion and interfaith. In our interview, Rodriguez provides his personal insights on aging, writing, religion, the rise of xenophobia in the United States, and explains why he is not interested in politics anymore.

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