Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAAS)
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\u27But I\u27m not even in a wheelchair\u27: Dis/ability, Im/mobility, and Trauma in Hanya Yanagihara\u27s A Little Life
No full textEven after decades of disability rights activism, Americans with disabilities are restricted in both their geographical and social mobility. Access to mobility still depends overwhelmingly on monetary factors, thus linking disability, poverty, and restricted mobility, both in terms of education and employment, and everyday mobility. In my article, I examine the implications of this connection by discussing the representation of disability, trauma, and im/mobility in Hanya Yanagihara\u27s novel A Little Life (2015). I analyze how the decline of both the ambulatory mobility and mental health of the novel\u27s main protagonist, Jude St. Francis, is represented in A Little Life. In a second step, I connect these representations to the novel\u27s notion of upward social mobility as well as to its spatial organization. Furthermore, I discuss how Jude\u27s mobility is restricted by his trauma and the forced institutionalization that he experiences in spite of his financial and professional success as well as his social advancement. My analysis highlights how Hanya Yanagihara\u27s narrative of "a protagonist who never gets better" (as the author has put it) creates a highly problematic representation of disability that is linked to death and loss of humanity. This enables me to shed light on the way A Little Life also undermines American narratives of linear progress and continual improvement through its resistance to therapeutic resolutions and its representation of disability. Thereby, I show how American individualism obliterates stories of disability and poverty from its narratives of social and geographical mobility
Navigating Hostile Terrain with the Green Book: Race, Im/Mobility and a Travel Guide for African Americans during Segregation
No full textDrawing on a combination of literary, cultural and mobility studies, this article analyzes the narrative and rhetorical strategies of the Green Book travel guides (1936-1966) to illuminate the ways the guide encouraged black mobility and challenged the existing conditions that curtailed such travel. Examining different dimensions of mobility allows for a better understanding of the significance of the Green Book as not just a response to its time and a guide to keep African American traveler safe but also an understanding of its role in (re)shaping landscapes, representations and practices of black travel. The article argues that the Green Book mobilized African Americans, both in a physical way but also in the sense that it textually and visually created representations and narratives of black mobility that had the potential to change individual as well as societal perceptions of African American travelers. It deconstructs white conceptions of travel and integrates black travelers into tourist discourses that were dominated by images of white travelers. As such then, the Green Book rendered quotidian acts such as travel and vacation into political acts and forms of resistance
False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction. By Julie Rak (Montreal: McGill-Queen\u27s University Press, 2021), 268pp.
Full text linkThis is a review of Julie Rak\u27s monograph False Summit (2021)
Mountain Grand Hotels at the Fin de Siècle: Sites, Gazes, and Environments
Full text linkGrand hotels had been a metropolitan phenomenon before they emerged in remote regions of the Alps between the 1880s and the 1930s. This essay explores how these semi-public spaces and early places of modernity engaged with alpine scenery and shaped the very industry of mountain tourism. It analyzes the relationship between elite tourism and the natural and social environment of the Alps.
The success of mountain grand hotels was tied to increasing industrialization and a new understanding of travel. Their thoughtful detachment from space, time, and society was an expression of a business as much as of social philosophy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, mountains served as a backdrop for the narrative of the period\u27s scientific and technical progress and became subject to rational interpretation and economic exploitation. Mountain grand hotels were not only a key component of tourism infrastructure but also the bold expression of a presumptuous occupation of spaces set away for tourism. Natural space had widely been turned into social space for visual and leisurely consumption, raising questions of authority, priority, appropriation, and imposition.
By mapping the perception of mountains along the history of mountain grand hotels, this essay studies the sites, gazes, and environments of mountain tourism at the fin de siècle. It examines how the history of the mountain grand hotel conflates with the forces of nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism and showcases how these spaces reflect the socio-economic transformations that ultimately paved the way for mountain mass tourism
William Faulkner\u27s Go Down, Moses: A Chronicle of Im/Mobilities
No full text"William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) focuses on what the author calls the "earth\u27s long chronicle," a century-long story about an imaginary and truthful land of the American South. In this article, I show how this chronicle is built on the idea of "im/mobility," considered from different perspectives. First, the seven stories that form Go Down, Moses depict various forms of exploitation, the effects induced by time and human movements on fields, woods, and animals, underlying the contrast between an "immobile" wilderness and a "mobile" (tamed, exploited) plantation. Second, these stories follow the destiny of the im/mobile people who inhabit the land—like Ike McCaslin, the most prominent character, who is blamed precisely for his "immobility," i.e. his inability to take action and change the status quo, at the end of the story. Finally, the literary form of Go Down, Moses contains the idea of "im/mobility" in its hybrid and fragmented structure, halfway between a novel and a short story collection
Mountains and Waters of No-Mind: A Transcultural Approach to Moments of Heightened Awareness and Non-Substantialist Ontology in Henry David Thoreau, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder
Full text linkThis article explores the epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) by Gary Snyder and a Song/Chin dynasty Chinese landscape painting. I illustrate how the poem and the painting, together with Henry David Thoreau’s autobiographical narrative A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958), form a complex web of intertextual and intermedial references. All four works, I argue, tell similar narratives of spiritual journey and paths through mountain and river landscapes; all four speak of moments of heightened awareness in the sense of Buddhist “no-mind” (Chinese: wu-shin; Japanese: mushin). I show how they converge in exhibiting ontologies of non-substantiality, emptiness, and becoming. Taking the philosophies of Zen Buddhism and Taoism as a theoretical frame, I argue that the American transcendentalist and Beat works poetically and narratively convey relational rather than substantialist views of Being and life. They depict the world as a dynamic and open field of tension between two non-oppositional forces from which we as subjects are not essentially separate in a dualistic way. I substantiate my argument by drawing on the French sinologist and philosopher François Jullien, who refers to the Chinese understanding of landscape (“mountains and waters”) in his critical treatment of (European) philosophy’s centuries-long subject-centered epistemology and substantialist “ontology of Being.
Thereness: Video Game Mountains as Limits of Interactivity
Full text linkThis article theorizes the abstract quality of "thereness," or a challenging presence that both invites and resists being engaged by humans, which is central to the ludic and symbolic function of a number of related video games in recent years. I will discuss games that deliberately resist the mimetic approach of an ever-increasing "realism" in this popular medium but rather explore the allegorical aspects of the mountains, notably without turning them into "mere" metaphors but insisting on their own distinct existence as something beyond ourselves. As virtual mountains that are not really to be played with, they invite a philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic interpretation as human mediations of what resists both mediation and the human, as something always just beyond our full cognitive and epistemological grasp, a limit rather than an object of our consciousness. I will discuss how games such as Celeste (2018), Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017), and Mountain (2014) use their unique audiovisual, tactile, and ludic qualities to convey this elusive "thereness" of the mountain as something that both challenges and rejects human interaction. Instead of offering their players the fantasy of power and control that so often underlies contemporary video games, these games evoke the otherness of mountains to take their players to the limits of interactivity within a medium that is fundamentally defined by this very interactivity
Peak Pursuits: The Emergence of Mountaineering in the Nineteenth Century. By Caroline Schaumann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 365pp.
Full text linkThis is a review of Caroline Schaumann\u27s monograph Peak Pursuits (2020)
Mobility, Car Culture, and the Environment in John Steinbeck\u27s The Grapes of Wrath
Full text linkSet during the Great Depression, John Steinbeck\u27s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) focuses on an American family who are forced to leave their home in Oklahoma and travel to California in search for a better life. Apart from its authentic representations of the economic instability in the U.S. in the 1930s, industrial transformations that took place throughout the country, as well as the severe draught, the novel also comments on the issue of (auto)mobility that this articles analyzes from an eco-critical perspective. The major part of the novel takes place on the road, as the reader witnesses the family traveling west on Route 66. While the road turns into a symbol of freedom and, in a way, a means to pursue the American Dream, the truck that the family travels by makes one ponder the meaning of U.S. mobility and the nation\u27s fascination with, and dependence on, cars. Through its focus on the highway and car, The Grapes of Wrath also touches upon the issue of environment. Providing meticulous descriptions of the vehicle, commenting on its enormous size and the large amount of smoke that it exhausts, the novel introduces automobility as menacing to ecology and the environment.
Trans/Intifada: The Politics and Poetics of Intersectional Resistance. By Denijal Jegić (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019), 329pp.
Full text linkPhilipp Reisner reviews Denijal Jegi´c\u27s book Trans/Intifada: The Politics and Poetics of Intersectional Resistance (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019)