Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS - E-Journal)
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Der Körper im Spannungsfeld der Blicke: Eakins und seine Betrachter in The Gross Clinic (1875)
No full textThe presentation that was part of the student symposium \u27American Visual Culture-Images and Interpretations\u27 approaches Thomas Eakins\u27 painting with an interest in the manifold modes of viewing that are inherent within the realm of the work itself-and which imply and address the viewer in a peculiar manner. A further aim is to disentangle the powerful and painful relationship of the view and the body as its object that is established in The Gross Clinic“. 
"Yo-ho, A Pirates Life For Me" – Queer Positionalities, Heteronormativity, and Piracy in Pirates of the Caribbean. A Queer Reading.
No full textAt first sight Walt Disney\u27s box office hit Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl“ (2003) appears as a product of Hollywood\u27s (hetero)normative blockbuster industry. It is a film that apparently caters for the needs of contemporary western mainstream audiences. Yet, as this paper will argue, the movie is fused with potentially queer elements, moments, and signifiers. Drawing on a broad working definition of \u27queer,\u27 this paper will present a \u27queer reading\u27 of the film. It will elucidate how Pirates of the Caribbean“ lends itself to such a reading not only due to the ambivalent and campy figure of Captain Jack Sparrow, but also due to the film\u27s only seemingly classical narrative structure and protagonists. Moreover, it will analyze the figure of the pirate in the light of Foucauldian heterotopias
An Event “Like a Movie”? Hollywood and 9/11
No full textFootage of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 provoked a wide spectrum of viewers to state that what they were witnessing was “like a movie.“ In a first part, this essay discusses the salience of such a simile by comparing the aesthetics and content of 9/11-footage to the one of Hollywood disaster films. In a second part, Hollywood’s immediate reactions as well as its recent movie representations of 9/11 are analyzed
In a Time-Warp: The Issue of Chronology in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold
No full textThe complexities of both the narrative situation and the time structure of Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold“ have, so far, been neglected in secondary literature. This essay makes an attempt at restoring the novel’s chronology as far as possible. In a second step, I will then try to interpret the significance of the anachronic way of rendering the plot and deduce certain implications for the novel’s ontology using post-structuralist and postmodernist approaches as well as neurological and astrophysical research findings
“I won’t always ask”: Complicating Agency in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling
No full textThis study reads Octavia Butler’s Fledgling“ as a narrative of agency. Critically engaging previous scholarly tendencies to focus solely on the main protagonist’s successful struggle for self-determination, this essay investigates the ways in which Fledgling complicates and irritates simplistic notions of agency, as the novel questions both the possibility and desirability of a high level of agency
“I was a stuffed toucan”: Poetic Self-Positioning in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies“
Get PDFThis paper addresses identity construction in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies“. I argue that references to family, history and other poets indirectly inform the presented self image and call this process poetic self-positioning. In contrast to earlier psychoanalytical and biographical readings, this interpretation is based on the notion of narrative identity. Additionally, I stress the relevance of the concept of ‘emotion’ to identity constructions
"Criticizing Americanness in 3D": Paul McCarthys F-Fort
No full textThis essay investigates and documents the particularities of Paul McCarthy\u27s installation F-Fort with respect to the methods of visualisation applied. Thus, the analysis of prefabricated symbols and concepts of heroes leads to a change of perspectives and a deconstruction of classical myths unfolds. At the end of the paper visitors\u27 reactions towards McCarthy\u27s work of art are presented
Das doppelt verwundene ödipale Dreieck in David Lynchs Lost Highway
No full textFolgender Artikel beschäftigt sich mit der an sich in jeder Erzählung konventionellen Liebesbeziehung, die jedoch bei Lynchs Lost Highway“ schnell zum Unkonventionellen führt. Eine psychoanalytische Lesart des Filmes macht in diesem Zusammenhang ein doppelt verwundenes ödipales Dreieck möglich, innerhalb dessen Struktur u.a. ein anachronistischer zeitlicher Aufbau und die Transformation von Figuren stattfinden
Pro-abstinence Discourses and the Definition of the Conservative Christian Identity in the Contemporary United States
No full textThis article argues that pro-abstinence discourses play a key role in the definition of the conservative Christian identity in contemporary United States. Using conservative Christian authors coming from various perspectives in the pro-abstinence movements I explain how they, in my view, use abstinence to reinforce and reassert concepts which play a crucial role in the definition of their community\u27s identity
Members of the Tribe: Jewish-Amerindian Theory and the Making of a Modern American Consciousness
No full textThis paper examines how seventeenth century Jewish-Indian theory may have contributed to later forms of racial representation in America. The belief that the Amerindians were of Israelite origin had been in circulation since the late fifteenth century. However, only in the seventeenth century did this claim develop into a full-fledged social and political phenomenon. While most of the critical discussions of Jewish-Indian racial theories have related to the "Lost Tribe" theory, I would rather focus on the role these earlier texts played in scripting later cultural forms of identity and how they impacted later American traditions of perceiving the other. I argue that these texts prefigure a larger, more complex symbolic tradition in American cultural forms. These texts initiate a system of otherness, using rhetorical techniques of simultaneous appropriation and disassociation with the other that are manifested in later traditions such as blackface and minstrelsy in the United States. This paper, however, will focus on the period of nativist America (mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century), and how this era uncannily echoes the Puritan sentiments asserted in the Jewish-Indian theory. Although appropriation of the Indian prevailed throughout American letters, these two periods feature a similar racial configuration of Anglo-American, Indian and Jew. However, an intriguing reversal occurs: as the English Puritans distanced themselves from the Indians through the figure of the Jew, in contrast, the nativists separated themselves from the immigrants, as represented by the Jew, through the figure of the Indian