Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS - E-Journal)
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Corporate Power and the Public Good in Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
Get PDFAbstract: This essay explores the relationship between the State, the economy, and the individual in Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit“ (1955). The novel’s depiction of the protagonist’s experience of the military, corporate culture, and the family suggests that a functioning democracy depends on the hetero-normative family. At the same time the novel draws attention to the negative impact of corporate philanthropy and public relations work on the public sphere
Postmodernism.com: A Polemic
Get PDFIntended to be food for thought and object of dispute, this brief article sketches the situation and dominating currents in the ongoing debate over a much (ab)used term. The argument follows the deviations and directions of “the postmodern“ through the fields of economics, society, and academic institutions towards a provocative diagnosis and an unsettling forecast beyond Y2K. 
Stuff That Happened To Me: Visuelle Verfahren in Jonathan Safran Foers Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005)
No full textThe essay is based on the manuscript for the presentation I gave at the symposium. It describes visual strategies in Jonathan Safran Foer\u27s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close“ (2005), connecting them with their tradition in literature, showing the selfreflexivity of the text and providing a, if not the only, useful approach to analyzing them: as visualizations of trauma and at the same time as attempts to overcome the trauma by binding it in a narrative
"Time-Based Paintings": Jeremy Blakes Winchester Trilogy (2001-2004)
No full textSarah Winchester, heiress of the rifle fortune, felt that she was cursed by the spirits of the ones who had been killed by the Winchester rifles. She sought out spiritualists who told her to move west and build a house: The sounds of construction should ward off the ghosts. Thus in 1884 she moved to San Jose, purchased a farm house and immediately began spending her $20 million inheritance on renovating the house, with work continuing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the next 38 years. Construction only stopped on the Winchester Mystery House upon her death in 1922, when the workers immediately stopped building. It is now a Disney-like tourist attraction with guided tours through the oddities of the 160-chamber-mansion built in victorian style.Jeremy Blake, a young american artist living in Los Angeles, was fascinated by this story and used it as the basis of one of his latest art works called The Winchester Trilogy“. The essay shows how Blake created a multimedia video-sound-installation, which equally enthralls and repells its audience with amazing colors and disturbing pictures. Blake dispensed with plot, instead he put emphasis on our visual memory, which is influenced by the many cowboy-, horror- and wild west Hollywood-movies. Thus the Winchester Trilogy“ not only is an amazing piece of contemporary art but it is also a statement about the american myth of freedom, which has to be protected by the power of weapons
Virtual Commuters? The American Transnational Academic Exchangee
No full textInternational student exchange in times of globalization faces numerous challenges. The Internet - making the world shrink to a global village - is often named one of them. How does the Internet affect the daily lives of American exchange students in Germany. Do they become virtual commuters
George Gustav Heye and the National Museum of the American Indian - Collecting the Collector
No full textOn September 21, 2004 the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) opened its doors to the public. This essay will look at the institution\u27s history, especially its collector, George Gustav Heye, and his representation inside the museum walls. Oscillating between honored patron and greedy businessman, the labels and objects explore his personality but conceal his relationship to the cultures he collected that remained extraordinarily superficial. The problem will be illustrated by using museum labels to explore their implicit rhetoric
How the Other Half Dies: Narrating Identities in Shelley Jackson’s Half Life (2006)
No full textShelley Jackson’s first novel Half Life “(2006) creates a complex parallel world that is populated by Siamese twins who coexist with one-headed people. Using Brian McHale’s distinction of modernist and postmodernist fiction, this essay argues that the narrative strategies employed in Half Life“ conflate the epistemological and ontological, and thereby indicate one way of moving beyond postmodernism
“Ruled By Fiction?” ‘Real’ Deception and Narrative Truth in Frank Rich’s The Greatest Story Ever Sold (2006)
No full textThe Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America“ is one representative of a series of highly popular, bestselling, creative non-fiction books that critique the Bush presidency. In his book, Frank Rich aims to unveil “the administration’s insidious efforts to blur the boundary between its“ reality and actual “reality“ (163, emphasis mine). This essay engages the book as a literary text and performs close readings to discuss the textual dynamics within Rich’s narrative project. More specifically, it will look at complexities and contradictions in the authentication strategies the text employs and at Rich’s attempts to tell a ‘true’ and credible narrative of the Bush administration’s deceit. 
Encountering the Familiarity of a Foreign Culture: Julie Dash\u27s Novel Daughters of the Dust
No full textThis essay analyzes Julie Dash’s 1997 novel Daughters of the Dust “with regard to its portrayal of the Gullah culture, its strategies of familiarizing an outsider readership with a foreign culture, and the way it depicts representations of culture in anthropology and literature. The analysis works on two levels: it examines how intercultural encounters are portrayed in the novel as well as how the novel itself functions as “entry point“ to the Gullah culture. It argues that Dash presents cultures as distinct though not disclosed entities where boundaries can be transgressed though not transcended
“They looked German, albeit with even tighter pants and uglier shoes, but there was something different about them”: The Function of East and West Germany and the Fall of the Berlin Wall in Paul Beatty’s Slumberland
No full textThe essay examines Paul Beatty’s novel Slumberland“ (2008) as representative for a still neglected field of American literary expression: American literary representations of Germany after 1989 which address issues of Germany’s former division into East and West, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and German reunification. It argues that the function of the German setting is not used to affirm a U.S. American identity through the othering of Germany but that it critically addresses controversial issues in the United States through the use of displacement