Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS - E-Journal)
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The Organization Man Still Matters: Sinclair Lewis\u27s Babbitt
No full textEver since its publication Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt “(1922) has been a thorn in the side of many businessmen and organizations. Debates ranging from its literary merit to its content caused a stir during the ‘Roaring Twenties.’ However, the novel could also be read as a starting point in a series of writings about the evolution of modern business and businessmen. The paper argues that Babbitt traces developments of the contemporary organization man and his estrangement from his personal culture due to a boosting consumer culture. Lewis’s Babbitt “thus is an early predecessor of sociologist William H. Whyte’s organization man and of the yuppie of the 1980s
Greeting and Opening Address by the President of the German Association for American Studies (GAAS / DGfA)
No full textCamping with the Stars: Queer Perfomativity, Pop Intertextuality, and Camp in the Pop Art of Lady Gaga
No full textThe article is concerned with the possibility of employing countercultural and subversive strategies in U.S. mainstream media. The concept in question is camp, historically rooted in gay subculture, as performed by pop artist Lady Gaga. She is presented as challenging gender as well as aesthetic norms in her performances via the employment of camp—thus opening her public persona to queer readings
Inherent Defeatism in Barry Hannah’s “The Agony of T. Bandini” and “Uncle High Lonesome”
No full textWilliam Faulkner’s themes and motifs are topical for the (literary) South to the present day, expressed by an inherent defeatism and structural pessimism. This reading of Barry Hannah’s short stories “The Agony of T. Bandini“ and “Uncle High Lonesome“ traces this heritage by identifying Hannah’s settings and psychological environment as ones of anticipated failure and lethargic acceptance of fate
\u27Black Magic\u27 and Diasporic Imagination
No full textWithin a colonial framework black diasporan thinking became most evident in the slaves\u27 religious practices. Diasporic Imagination was displayed in terms of rituals of remembrance, social bonding across racial diversity, worship of African Gods, and imagined return to the homeland. These diasporic elements in African-Carribean slave religion, however, challenged white authority and conceptions of white superiority. A closer look at British colonial discourse of the late 18th century illustrates the colonialist\u27s obsession with the slaves\u27 display of their Africaness in religious ceremonies and the struggle to come to terms with the unsettling implications of slave magic. Moreover, these literary productions reflect white anxieties as to the stability of the imperial situation and reveal the white man\u27s growing awareness regarding the limitations of imperial power
Die Auslöschung der Welt: Steven Millhausers Martin Dressler und die Architektur des amerikanischen Traums
No full textCritics such as Douglas Fowler have suggested that the work of Steven Millhauser deviates from current mainstream American fiction by daring to be "art for art\u27s sake." At the same time, Millhauser\u27s acclaimed 1996 novel Martin Dressler“ directly addresses and skillfully assesses the ideology of the "American dream." The essay shows how Millhauser\u27s text - which paradoxically constitutes a fantastical novel of manners - uses the metaphor of architecture to integrate ideological concerns and aesthetic experimentation. Eventually, Martin Dressler “turns out to be a versatile critique of the cliché that capitalist enterprise realizes an excess of creative individualism. 
"Children aren’t everything": Maternal Ambivalences in Nella Larsen’s Fiction
No full textFocusing on the portrayal of motherhood in black women’s speculative fiction, this essay discusses Jewelle Gomez’s short story “Louisiana 1850“ (1991) and explores how Gomez establishes an egalitarian interracial maternal relationship between a white woman and a slave child. I will demonstrate how the trope of a maternal vampire in particular not only functions in the story to make a mothering relationship plausible, but ultimately challenges and dismantles normative maternal categories, both white and black