The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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Vaccine Hesitancy and Individualism
No full textWhen Jennifer Reich’s Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines came out with New York University Press in 2016, vaccine hesitancy was just beginning to receive national attention. The Disneyland measles outbreak had occurred the year before, and an increasing number of parents were switching to charter schools and home schooling in order to avoid the vaccine requirements of the public-school system. Reich interviewed many of these parents and took their reasoning seriously. She discovered that although their decisions do not make sense from a public health perspective, they were actually privatizing the healthcare decisions relevant to their families in ways being promoted by corporations and the government. What the privatization of health care means for the public sphere was one topic of our conversation. At the end of the interview, Reich links privatization with the growing distrust of governmental and scientific expertise to describe a crisis of knowledge that extends far beyond current vaccine debates
Francis Augustus Silva - A Life
No full textA recent reviewer labelled Francis Augustus Silva a ‘minor league’ artist. It is true that although his works are still respected by experts, his is not a household name with the general public. Among the former he is best known for his careful attention to detail and his treatment of light; and yet, not much is known about him and his inner life. Born two years before Emerson’s American Scholar, Silva grew during one of the formative periods of a distinctive American cultural identity, and his art can be said to reflect this. In his later years, however, Silva witnessed the rise of a new generation of American painters again looking to Europe for inspiration. The years following the end of the Civil War had crushed the early optimism but Silva did not stray from the path. His art kept true to the influence of emotion and the search for harmony with Nature, not just as a manifestation of his convictions but also as an attempt to find a place of solace, and might be our best guide to learning more about him and his personal convictions. Nonetheless, a close reading of some of his life’s events and interactions allows some clarification and a better understanding of this painter
Spending Time in the Nineteenth Century
No full textThis special issue of New American Studies Journal: A Forum looks at nineteenth-century American literature and culture through the analytical lens of free time and leisure. This analytical framework affords a novel access point to American literary history—free time, as this special issue will explore, is a highly contested and politicized concept and resource of the nineteenth century, one that restructures temporalities and spaces. Nineteenth-century American culture and literature can be understood as an archive to explore free time as a significant social and economic innovation into the texture of individual life. The contributions to this special issue explore the rise of free time in the nineteenth century with particular attention toward temporal and spatial reconfigurations that free time afforded. Furthermore they explore the societal and cultural aspects of free time that grew around the logics and logistics of nineteenth-century capitalism—a social formation that made leisure, time off work, not merely possible, but that created entire industries and spaces for leisure and repose
Data, Maps, Networks – Digital Approaches to Reading (in) Nineteenth-Century Literature
No full textRecently, there has been a growing number of scholarly attempts to ‘read’ the 19th century either through digital methods or, more specifically as a precursor to contemporary digital culture. The practice of reading is a category through which the two dimensions of spending time in and with the nineteenth century can be thought together. A focus on reading, as a way to spend time in/with the nineteenth century makes us aware of both the knowledge systems and methodologies of accessing and processing information, both in literary texts of that period and simultaneously in our own work.
More specifically, my essay is interested in questions of ‘readability’ and the ‘crisis of reading’, as self-reflexively pronounced in two nineteenth century novels: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Frank Norris’s The Octopus. These novels, I argue, prefigure debates that are well-known to us and that materialize in the opposition between what Katherine Hayles has called “hyperreading” vs linear or immersive reading, between the New Critic’s formulation of close reading and what Franco Moretti has provocatively called “distant reading”, or the postcritical distinction between symptomatic and surface reading. By discussing different strategies of reading, the novels express the uncontrollability in view of increasing information environments. Yet, even if these webs of signification are elusive and at times dangerous, both novels, in a self-reflexive move, express a desire of writing the human reader into this web of signification and therefore to emphasize the significance of reading in an increasingly automated world
Nineteenth-Century American Short Stories
No full textGoethe-Universität FrankfurtSummer Term 2020Frankfur
Transnational Relations: Past Present and Future
No full textIn the 2021 Postgraduate Forum (PGF) Conference of the DGfA (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikanstudien), we are interested in contributions from graduate students exploring this transnational aspect of American Studies. Papers dealing with any aspect of the transnational in American Studies, past, present or future are welcome, as we attempt to re-evaluate American values, history, literature, culture, religion and people from a multi-faceted perspective. To that end, we are looking forward to discussions about a diverse group of projects, from those that work as chapters from dissertations, to papers that are works-in-progress of larger or ongoing projects, as well as papers that can stand alone as completed research projects.https://pgf2021.hypotheses.org
