GUNTER H. LENZ (1940 2012) was one of the leading scholars of American Studies in Europe and one of the founders of Transnational American Studies. Trained in the famed Frankfurt School he was professor of American literary and cultural studies at Humboldt University in Berlin.

• Introduction -- Critical Theories of Society -- Social Theory in the United States: The Legacy of the Decade 1960–70 -- The Concept of Alienation Reconsidered -- The Challenge to Progress* -- Neocorporatism vs. Representative Democracy -- Why Is There No Corporatism in the USA? -- The Political Processing of Urban Grassroots Demands: A Comparative Exploration of Shifts in the Pattern of Citizen Interest Intermediation (*) -- Mass Media and Mass Culture -- Cheap Stories: Popular Fiction and Working Class Culture in Nineteenth Century America -- The Symbolic Universe of American Forces Television in Germany -- Radical Criticism and Cultural Studies -- A Note on "Myth and Symbol" as Cultural Criticism -- Criticism as an Institution (*) -- The New Radical Criticism and the Limits of Transcendence -- Tradition, Discontinuity, and Counterdiscourse: Some Problems in American Radical Cultural Criticism since the 1960s -- Deconstruction and Postmodernism -- Mapping the Postmodern (*) -- Demarcations: Deconstruction, Institutionalization and Ambivalence -- Psychoanalysis as Deconstruction and Myth: On Gender, Narcissism and Modernity's Discontents (*) -- "The Invisible Hand": Regression, Deconstruction and the Hazards of an "Ecological" Hermeneutics (1)