Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAAS)
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The Future of US Education
Full text linkReview ofKill It to Save It: An Autopsy of Capitalism\u27s Triumph Over Democracy. By Corey Dolgon (Bristol: Policy Press, 2018, 320pp.)The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies. By Susan Jacoby (London: Vintage Books, 2018, 364pp.
"You know, I used to be a Jew": Groucho Marx, Max Reinhardt, and the Transformation of American Studies
Full text linkBeginning with the unlikely pairing of Max Reinhardt and Groucho Marx, this article unpacks an old, politically troubling Jewish joke as a way of tracing two trajectories that unfolded between Austria and the United States. The first follows the author\u27s family, the second the interdisciplinary field of American studies. The joke\u27s commentary on the dilemmas of assimilation, as played out in the family history, frames a more sustained examination of how national identity was understood by the American studies project consolidated in Salzburg and the US just after World War II. Focusing on how the new field\u27s ways of engaging and occluding problems of race, subordination, exploitation, and land-theft shaped an interpretation of American democracy\u27s history and prospects, the article puts these issues in the context of Donald Trump\u27s election as president and the urgency of understanding not only the ruptures but also the historical continuities his presidency represents. Against the backdrop of those reflections, the article considers how contemporary American studies does and might engage the continuities. The field must help shape a national narrative both accessible in idiom and able to reckon with the ongoing history of white supremacy and settler colonialism. Doing that entails not only moving beyond but also borrowing anew from that early, Salzburg-style formation of American studies. It may also benefit from the Jewish joke: the conclusion and two postscripts read the joke\u27s limitations in the light of recent social struggles yet also note its unnerving relevance to the Trump-era resurgence of antisemitism
First-Person Documentary Film and Self-Life Narration
Full text linkIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of this forum contribution:
My contribution to this forum on life writing contemplates life narrative practices in documentary film and proposes two theses that also bear relevance for other fields and media under discussion here. Firstly, it problematizes the concepts of autobiography and life writing for their applicability to (documentary) film, arguing with Alisa Lebow for a notion of "first person film."[1] Secondly, it contends that representations of the self in documentary film are more appropriately comprehended as a discourse rather than a genre
Outlook on Life Writing and American Studies
Full text linkIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of this contribution:
Having discussed five distinct areas of inquiry within life writing studies, we are acutely aware of the various interconnected themes. By way of a conclusion, we would like to sketch three particular aspects which merit extensive attention. First, the fact that all of the contributions highlight the constructedness of life writing can be seen as a call for enhancing our understanding of the mechanisms of self-representation and their implications for the represented autobiographical self and for the multi-genre phenomenon of life writing. The field of life writing studies has been instrumental in uncovering multiple phenotypes linked to medium-specific possibilities and to the contexts in which such content is generated, disseminated, and received. Thus, we will need to grapple further with researching competing and differing media selves, including the roles of curators and adapting generic forms like the scrapbook and the self-help manual as well as the economic backdrop and impact of production and distribution
The Cold War and New Sacred Poetry: Li-Young Lee, Suji Kwock Kim, and Kathleen Ossip
Full text linkContrary to what one might expect, many poets who engage with the Cold War adopt not primarily a political but rather a religious voice. Indeed, poets such as Li-Young Lee, Suji Kwock Kim, and Kathleen Ossip examine the Cold War in light of theological questions. Their poems bear witness not to personal suffering inflicted by political and societal circumstances but instead to human resilience bolstered by faith in the face of traumatic experience. Their writings are not best captured by the frequently invoked "Poetry of Witness," understood as witness to injustice, but rather "new sacred poetry": colored by individual experience of trauma, their poetry serves as a vehicle for expressing spiritual and mystical experience. They thereby innovate not only poetry but also contemporary theology. The Cold War becomes the backdrop for the struggle between faith and suffering brought about by political, societal, and personal circumstances
A Book of American Martyrs. By Joyce Carol Oates (London: Fourth Estate, 2017), 736pp.
Full text linkThis is a review of A Book of American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oate
Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. By Alexa Weik von Mossner (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017), 269pp.
Full text linkThis is a review of Alexa Weik von Mossner\u27s Affective Ecologies (2017
The Feminist Futures of American Studies: Addressing the Post-Weinstein Media and Cultural Landscape
Full text linkThis article reflects on the long-term and recent developments in the interdisciplinary field of American studies and its imbrications with its cultural and political contexts. Pushing back against premature assertions of feminism\u27s obsolescence, I argue that scholars and teachers of American studies and media studies must take the popular seriously―popular film and television as well as popular political movements. Given the growing demand from students for a deeper and more sustained engagement with intersectional feminism, the article works through some short case studies to urge even the confirmed feminists to rethink and refresh their approaches to teaching and performing scholarship to best provide students with the theoretical tools to strengthen and define their feminism as a discipline as well as an attitude. Inspired by the popular 2014 movement, "The Year of Reading Women," the #metoo and #timesup phenomena, and the popularity of and backlash against celebrity feminism of Beyoncé and others, this article weaves together academic and pop-cultural sources such as Sara Ahmed and Roxane Gay to underscore our responsibility to maintain, nurture, and contribute to the progress made by previous generations of feminists
What We Imagine Knowledge to Be: Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Seventy Years of American Studies
Full text linkThis essay looks back to 1947, the year that the Salzburg seminar was inaugurated, as well as looking at contemporary issues in American studies to chart where we have come from to date and where the field is heading. Its main argument examines the poems "Ésthetique du Mal" by Wallace Stevens from his 1947 collection Transport to Summer and "At the Fishhouses" by Elizabeth Bishop, first published in 1947, and explores common themes of knowledge, pain, loss, and history. As the Western world experiences again a moment of political and cultural uncertainty brought to the center stage of US and European discourse in 2016 by the election of Donald Trump and the UK vote to leave the European Union, Stevens and Bishop offer routes forward through such moments of heightened politicization. American studies, as a field of interconnected disciplines, continually confronts the difficult aspects of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. As the rise of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have indicated, the open ruptures within American society will continue to pour forth debates requiring urgent critical attention and discussion. Incidents of racial hatred, of right-wing extremism, and of abusive misogynistic sexism, dormant to varying degrees prior to Trump\u27s election, have come to the surface of a nation increasingly riven by what the reality of his Presidency means for America. Our job, as researchers and teachers, is to engage each and every aspect of this moment in history, however contested or controversial they may be
Postcolonial and Transoceanic Life Writing
Full text linkIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of this forum contribution:
The study of life writing and postcolonial theory have had a long, intimate, and mutually constitutive relationship. The desire to more comprehensively understand the (human) subjectivities of the (formerly) colonized through (their own) cultural self-expression has driven life-writing scholars to significantly expand their canon and their scholarly methods. The human and the non-human are onto-social conditions imposed on colonized and enslaved peoples. In the context of transoceanic studies, various conditions of unfreedom can be found which call attention to the prevalence of lives deemed non-human within the parameters of European Enlightenment. Substantial advances notwithstanding, the field is still grappling with what Lisa Lowe describes as the “economy of affirmation and forgetting that structures and formalizes the archives of liberalism.”[1] This short piece contends that recently emerging (trans-)oceanic approaches hold great potential for taking the study of life writing an important step further on its way beyond the liberal economy of affirmation and forgetting