Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS - E-Journal)
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The Heroine and the Meme: Participating in Feminist Discourses Online
Get PDFThis article examines the relationship between feminist participatory culture and online ativism. I argue that Internet users participate in feminist discourses online by creating memes that present popular fictional female heroes such as Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games“), Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer“), or the Disney Princess Merida (Brave“). Emphasizing specific characteristics and plot points of the respective stories, memes project, spread, and celebrate feminist ideas such as female empowerment, agency, and equality
Psychosis and Capture: Lacanian Individuation in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man
Get PDFThis essay explores mechanisms of individuation in Don Delillo’s Falling Man“, placing it in conversation with Jacques Lacan’s ideas of ego-formation. It argues that the difference in Falling Man“’s two protagonists’ individuations holds the key to understanding Falling Man“’s critique of the post-9/11 subject condition
A ‘Return’ of the Subject in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
Get PDFIn postmodernist fiction, subjects are typically portrayed as fragmented. While subjective agency in postmodernism is possible, it occurs only at the price of self-fragmentation or even self-dissolution, as famously exemplified in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight“’s Children “(1981). Now, as I suggest here, after decades of postmodernist irony and insecurity, contemporary literature is again focusing on portrayals of stable forms of subjectivity within a social community. To describe this new kind of subject, I draw on Jean-Luc Marion’s concept of the subject as ‘receiver’ and show how Zadie Smith’s White Teeth “engages with these ideas
Crusade for Justice and the Question of Authenticity in African American Autobiography
Get PDFThis article aims at throwing light on the concept of racial authenticity and on its connections with the discourses around authority and cultural dominance. In particular it looks at the concept of authenticity – conceived as documentations, preoccupation with factuality and credibility – in Ida B. Wells´s Crusade for Justice“, which I consider as a work of transition between slave narratives and post-Emancipation political memoirs
Breaking Dichotomies: Counter-Narratives in the Spoken Word Poetry of Suheir Hammad
Get PDFThis article analyzes the spoken word poetry of the Palestinian-American author, Suheir Hammad, who attempts to deconstruct dichotomies between Arabs and Americans and to create a concept of transnational humanness. Through cultural criticism, Hammad reverses the process of Othering when she humanizes Palestinians and detaches suffering from national belonging. Her creative resistance represents a renegotiation of Americaness and its relation to Islam and Arabs, and opens up de-nationalized spaces of comparison
Political Power in the Mirror of Mass Media Constructions: The Function of Televised Debates in the U.S. Presidential Election
Get PDFThe article examines the impact of mass media coverage in the U.S. presidential election using the example of the televised presidential debates within the context of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. It focuses on the functional interactions of the structurally coupled social systems of politics and mass media with respect to the representation of public opinion and political power. The article outlines how the debate broadcast constructions are part of the respective operations of both systems and considers alterations caused by social media communication
Seeing Through the End Time: From Lord Byron’s “Darkness” to The Dark Mountain Project
Get PDFThis essay contends with the dark side of environmental literature by examining Lord Byron’s apocalyptic poem “Darkness“ (1816) ecocritically, drawing on Timothy Morton’s concepts of dark ecology “and ecological thought“ to ask how darkness functions in Byron’s literary depiction of the end of days. Arguing that the poem moves beyond an elegy for nature to instead mourn the loss of community in crisis time, this essay points towards the unimaginable feminized future that the poem reaches blindly towards and concludes with a reference to contemporary ex-environmentalists The Dark Mountain Project who consider darkness the primary ecoaesthetic of their “uncivilized writing.
The End as Enjambment: Critical Inquiries Beyond the End…
Get PDFThis introduction investigates the proliferation of ends in late 20th century and early 21st century fiction, theory, and culture. By investigating some characteristics of ‘ends’ I reflect upon some of the aporias of the concept of the end. I conclude by analyzing Colson Whitehead’s Zone One “(2013) for its discussion of the end of the world and the end of race and show that the novel conceives of a critical form of post-apocalypticism in a racialized context
Barack Obama, Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship: From the World’s White Knight to the Spy that Came in from the Cold? – A German Perspective
Get PDFReading assessments of the transatlantic relationship omnipresent in the German media in 2014, one could easily assume that the so-called “Obamania“ that had swept over Europe six years ago, has not significantly improved transatlantic relations since the Bush years. While Barack Obama was celebrated in the German media in 2008 as the presidential candidate with the “Messiah-Factor,“ only six years later he was disparagingly dubbed the “Drone Warrior.“ Examining the German media’s evaluation of the transatlantic relationship, one can observe an almost seamless transition from the celebration of a Obamanite age of multilateralism to the declaration of a new “transatlantic Ice Age.“ Considering this circumstance, the following paper aims at giving this shift in transatlantic perceptions closer attention. It will be looking at how the perception of transatlantic relations under Barack Obama has been reflected and interpreted in German media discourse over the course of his presidency and which role President Obama plays as imaginative projection surface in the negotiation of a “Eurotopian“ narrative of self in this context