Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS - E-Journal)
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"England Hath Seene Her Best Dayes, and Now Evill Dayes are Befalling Us." Nostalgia in Puritan Culture
Full text linkTo examine Puritan nostalgia in the context of the Great Migration (1630s-40s), this paper analyzes the spiritual autobiography of the English tailor John Dane, in which he recollects his memories of leaving his family and wandering through Hertfordshire, as well as his return home and subsequent move to New England. By investigating how Dane employs nostalgia to make sense of and emotionally cope with his separation from home, his conversion experience, and his decision to leave for New England, this paper argues that nostalgia was decisive in how early modern Puritans understood, experienced, and practiced their daily lives
Transnational Performances of Native American and African American Cultures at the German–American Institute Regensburg
Full text linkIn this article I analyze two events the former German–American Institute Regensburg hosted as performances. By examining the exhibition “Native American Traditions” and a week-long series of events titled “The Status of the African American in the Development of American Culture,” I contend that transnational cultural performances can both engage with stereotypical and appropriated knowledge about cultures while also leading to a problematization and diversification of the intricacies of the struggles the members of these groups go through in other situations
Salvage Watery Memory: Water and Memory in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones
Full text linkIn this article, I will investigate the entanglement of water and memory in Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (2011). To analyze the multiplicity of literal and figurative references to water, I will refer to posthumanist and new materialist water scholarship as well as Black Studies. I argue that the narrated water scales up the time and space of the story and thereby situates Hurricane Katrina in the history of transatlantic slavery and the Middle Passage. By functioning as a keeper of memory and archive in the novel, water evolves as a substance that enables the concurrent examination of racialized histories and contemporary environmental disasters
Indigenous Readings: Ethics, Politics, and Method in Indigenous Studies on Turtle Island and Beyond
Full text linkReading has been at the center of ongoing debates among scholars of Native American, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit literatures for decades. In the context of these debates, my paper seeks to address the difficulties and challenges of reading Indigenous literatures from the standpoint of emerging non-Indigenous scholars educated in a Euro-American framework. For this purpose, the paper provides a toolbox of questions and strategies—organized around the five broad and interrelated topics of positionality, relationality, ethics, context, and incomplete readings—that can help students and early-career scholars to critically question their reading practices. To this end, my paper synthesizes a variety of scholarly perspectives on politics, ethics, and methods in Indigenous studies and applies the resulting framework to Leslie Marmon Silko’s opening of her novel Ceremony “(1977)
The Affects of Reading
Full text linkThere has been a renewed interest in methods in literary studies over the past two decades. This article identifies a tendency towards binarism—paranoid vs. reparative, depth vs. surface, close vs. distant, against the grain vs. with the grain, critique vs. description, content vs. form—in literary studies and promotes a non-dualistic approach to reading. Such a reading does not see reading as a matter of “taking sides” or following strictly defined methods; instead, it works toward disentangling established methodological binaries. This reading is speculative and embraces speculative potentials of literary texts without subscribing to a method at the expense of the rest, without limiting itself to pre-defined methodologies. To move beyond such binarism, the article offers an affective close reading“ of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation“ (2018) and examines the potentials of bringing together close reading and affects to re-entangle interpretation, description, enchantments, affect, and form
Trauma at the Movies: Cinematic Memories of Columbine
Full text linkThe Columbine High School shooting of 1999 has become a cultural icon for school shootings in the United States and beyond. Still, there are only a few cinematic adaptations of it. This article addresses how these movies nonetheless impact the culture of remembering Columbine. It argues that films about Columbine use different strategies to mediate the trauma of the shooting that are closely related to framing or recreating trauma. In addition, as traumatic events such as Columbine often lack clear causes and effects, this article will argue that film is particularly effective in mediating trauma
Remembering and Forgetting Wars: Memorialization of the Global War on Terrorism in the US
Full text linkThis paper offers an insight into the efforts made by war memorial organizations to remember those who served in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) and how the war is manifested in US cultural memory. To exemplify the ways the war is already being remembered by smaller communities and what upcoming plans to memorialize the GWOT in a nation-wide context look like, several memorials are analyzed according to the emotions they elicit and how these influence the memorials’ narratives. The article is concluded by examining which elements of the memorials’ war narratives are highlighted, and which are omitted
(Pod)casting a Bridge: Lolita Podcast and Its Reading Practices
Full text linkTaking Jamie Loftus’s Lolita Podcast“ (2020-21) as an example, this article investigates negotiations of reading in the podcast as a digital medium—a topic that has not received a lot of scholarly attention so far. Expanding on the theoretical concept of the podcast as a bridging medium, the article examines the reading practices Lolita Podcast uses and reproduces in its discussion of Vladimir Nabokov’s famous and controversial novel Lolita“ (1955). The article studies how the podcast negotiates boundaries and builds bridges between reading practices traditionally seen as separate, such as critical and uncritical reading
Reading (with) Bateman: Mapping Potentiality of/in Reading
Full text linkStarting from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critique of paranoid reading and her call for reparative reading, this article proposes two experimental readings of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho“ (1991). Drawing on the writings of Roland Barthes and Eugenie Brinkema, we consider the text’s affective possibilities and potentialities as well as moments when it may surprise its readers, in order to ask what a reparative reading can look like in the case of American Psycho“. First, we read the novel for its potentialities of different affective modes—in this case, boredom and disgust—by looking closely at its syntactic structure. Second, we impose formal constraints on our reading itself, reading the novel as if it was a comedy. Through these modes of reading, our approach opens up new possibilities for parallel interpretations, instead of positing another master reading of the text