Laura Bieger - Böcker

Surveys the representations and constructions of the human being in American art.  Humans are organisms, but “the human being” is a term referring to a complicated, self-contradictory, and historically evolving set of concepts and practices. Humans explores competing versions, constructs, and ideas of the human being that have figured prominently in the arts of the United States. These essays consider a range of artworks from the colonial period to the present, examining how they have reflected, shaped, and modeled ideas of the human in American culture and politics. The book addresses to what extent artworks have conferred more humanity on some human beings than others, how art has shaped ideas about the relationships between humans and other beings and things, and in what ways different artistic constructions of the human being evolved, clashed, and intermingled over the course of American history. Humans both tells the history of a concept foundational to US civilization and proposes new means for its urgently needed rethinking.

The Imaginary and Its Worlds collects essays that boldly rethink the imaginary as a key concept for cultural criticism. Addressing both the emergence and the reproduction of the social, the imaginary is ideally suited to chart the consequences of the transnational turn in American studies. Leading scholars in the field from the United States and Europe address the literary, social, and political dimensions of the imaginary, providing a methodological and theoretical groundwork for American studies scholarship in the transnational era and opening new arenas for conceptualizing formations of imaginary belonging and subjectivity. This important state-of-the-field collection will appeal to a broad constituency of humanists working to overcome methodological nationalism.The Imaginary and Its Worlds: An Introduction• LITERARY IMAGINARIES • Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America - Ramón Saldívar • The Necessary Fragmentation of the (U.S.) Literary-Cultural Imaginary - Lawrence Buell • Imaginaries of American Modernism - Heinz Ickstadt • SOCIAL IMAGINARIES • William James versus Charles Taylor: Philosophy of Religion and the Confines of the Social and Cultural Imaginaries - Herwig Friedl • The Shaping of We-Group Identities in the African American Community: A Perspective of Figurational Sociology on the Cultural Imaginary - Christa Buschendorf • Russia's Californio Romance: The Other Shores of Whitman's Pacific - Lene Johannessen • Form Games: Staging Life in the Systems Epoch - Mark Seltzer • POLITICAL IMAGINARIES • Real Toads - Walter Benn Michaels • Obama Unwound: The Romanticism of Victory and the Defeat of Compromise - Christopher Newfield • Barack Obama's Orphic Mysteries - Donald E. Pease • Coda. The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer - Winfried Fluck • Contributors • Index

Is literature of political use, and if yes, how might this use be defined? “Reading for Democracy” addresses this question in a series of essays, with topics ranging from ‘reading as a political practice’ to ‘the relational aesthetics of literary engagement’, from ‘the public sphere as a space of appearance’ to ‘public intellectuals and the predicament of popularity’, from ‘Jesmyn Ward’s poetics of breathing while Black’ to ‘the art of the essay in the digital age’. In considering these topics, it engages with a range of philosophical, sociological, media and literary critical works by scholars including Jürgen Habermas, Michael Warner, John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno, Nicolas Bourriaud and Pierre Bourdieu. But the baseline of the essays collected in this volume is an understanding of literature as a social practice, a collective doing and making that involves a multiplicity of human and non-human actors (writers, readers, publishers, agents, book covers, prize committees, English departments, literary characters and styles, adaptations for stage and screen). In this framework, literary texts are not stable objects. They are bonding agents in a complex and shifting web of relations, and in this capacity they catalyze and channel the activities necessary to forge these relations (reading, writing, publishing, republishing, citing, reciting, reviewing, recommending). Moving back and forth between two shape-shifting actors—the reading public and a socially engaged literature—the assembled essays show how the political functions and uses of literature are defined from within this constellation; or, more precisely, through the collective and reflective forms of judgment, including aesthetic judgement, that are tried and institutionalized in practicing literature. And that are essential to negotiating the shape of the world. Which is what the political is all about.