Sascha Pohlmann - Böcker

This volume introduces a new concept that boldly breaks through the traditional dichotomy of high and low culture while offering a fresh approach to both: unpopular culture. From the works of David Foster Wallace and Ernest Hemingway to fanfiction and The Simpsons, from natural disasters to 9/11 and beyond, the essays find the unpopular across media and genres, analysing the politics and aesthetics of a side to culture that has been overlooked by previous theories and methods in cultural studies.

An investigation of how American poetry since Whitman makes its beginnings, with what means and to which political and aesthetic ends, and how it addresses fundamental questions about what the future is and how it may be affectednow.Although issues of futurity have become more and more central to literary and cultural studies in recent years, especially in environmental criticism, no scholarly work has yet addressed the topic of beginnings in American poetryin sufficient scope or detail or with adequate theoretical background. This book is a study of how beginnings are made in American poetry, and to what ends. It borrows Walt Whitman's term "future-founding" to establish a theory ofpoetic beginnings that asks how poetry relates to notions of the future and how it imagines, constructs, and influences this future in the present. Furthermore, it seeks to change the way literary scholars think about futurity with regard to American poetry: they most often conceive of it in terms of newness alone, yet a deeper theorization of beginnings must open up new ways of understanding the complexities of this relation. With chapters on Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Allen Ginsberg, and future-founding poetry after 9/11, this book explains how American poetry makes its beginnings, with what means and to which political and aesthetic ends, and how it addresses fundamental questions about what the future is and how it may be affected now.Sascha Pöhlmann is Associate Professor of American Literary History at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich.

Conceptualizes the genre of American assassination fiction as a dramatization of the tension between individualism and mass society in US culture.Vote with a Bullet is the first systematic study of assassination in American fiction. It proffers not only a fundamental overview of the genre but also an argument about its larger cultural, aesthetic, and political significance in the present moment as well as in the respective historical contexts of the works themselves.The study argues that American assassination fiction is a symbolic condensation of the larger conflict between individual and society that is at the heart of modern democracy, and that has been especially contested in the democratic culture of the US. Starting with Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) and ending with Noah Hawley's The Good Father (2012), the chapters analyze twelve works ranging from canonical classics to popular genre fiction. A conclusion considers Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day (2006). The book describes the loose continuum of assassination fiction as an imaginary laboratory in which fantasies of individual empowerment and social unity play out in different ways, negotiating the tension between individualism and mass society in a democracy that is based on the former but must restrict it to preserve the latter. Furthermore, the study connects the imaginary of assassination with a variety of related themes such as hegemonic masculinity and whiteness, electoral and non-electoral political choice, agency panic, subjectivity, as well as conspiracies and conspiracy theory.

Explores modern and contemporary American literature's contribution to and critique of the newly emerging field of transparency studiesIn the twenty-first century, transparency has become an ambiguous buzzword both in the public and the private realms (e.g., Wikileaks and the Snowden affair; social media). This volume takes its cue from the emerging field of transparency studies, recent scholarly work in sociology, political theory, and cultural studies that identifies a hegemonic rhetoric of transparency in public and political life. While scholars in this new field routinely gesture toward literature as the realm where secrecy may be productive, they rarely engage with literature directly, and literary studies itself remains notably absent from their debates. This collection of essays seeks to redress that state of affairs by focusing on literary texts written in an American cultural tradition steeped in the interplay between transparency and exposure, fear and secrecy, security and surveillance, and information and disinformation.The essays draw on authors ranging from Whitman, James, and Ellison to Pynchon, Morrison, and Eggers to argue that American literature complicates theoretical assumptions about transparency made in other disciplines. They question the field's strong theoretical emphasis on present-day technopolitical practices and discourses as the location of hegemonic discourse on transparency, and instead historicize such phenomena and extend them to discursive spheres that have so far been neglected (such as issues of sexuality and race).Edited by Paula Martín-Salván and Sascha Pöhlmann. Contributors: Tomasz Basiuk, Jesús Blanco Hidalga, Cristina Chevereșan, Michel Feith, Julián Jiménez Heffernan, Tiina Käkelä, Juan L. Pérez-de-Luque, Umberto Rossi, Jelena Šesnić, Toon Staes, Julia Straub, Alice Sundman.

American Studies has only gradually turned its attention to video games in the twenty-first century, even though the medium has grown into a cultural industry that is arguably the most important force in American and global popular culture today. There is an urgent need for a substantial theoretical reflection on how the field and its object of study relate to each other. This anthology, the first of its kind, seeks to address this need by asking a dialectic question: first, how may American Studies apply its highly diverse theoretical and methodological tools to the analysis of video games, and second, how are these theories and methods in turn affected by the games? The eighteen essays offer exemplary approaches to video games from the perspective of American cultural and historical studies as they consider a broad variety of topics: the US-American games industry, Puritan rhetoric, cultural geography, mobility and race, urbanity and space, digital sports, ludic textuality, survival horror and the eighteenth-century novel, gamer culture and neoliberalism, terrorism and agency, algorithm culture, glitches, theme parks, historical guilt, visual art, sonic meaning-making, and nonverbal gameplay.