North American Studies – serie

Contemplating the aesthetic and narrative forms of material life in American fiction as well as theoretical concepts of materiality, The Literary Life of Things looks at renewed attention to the physical world within the humanities and social sciences, variously designated as new materialism or the material turn. Setting out from the observation that objects have a much-neglected life in fiction, Babette Barbel Tischleder aims to bring scenes of animation to the forefront and, by focusing on the trajectories of inanimate things, to ask how human aspirations, fantasies, practices, memories, and self-concepts rely upon the object world in American literature and culture.

This book reexamines the trope of the machine in the garden first laid out by Leo Marx fifty years ago. Contributors explore the lasting influence of this concept on American culture and the arts, rereading it as a dialectic wherein nature is as much technologized as technology is naturalized. Extending the relevance of Marx's theory from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, they examine filmic and literary representations of industrial, bureaucratic, and digital gardens; explore its role in the aftermath of the Civil War and of rural electrification during the New Deal; its significance in landscape art as well as in ethnic literatures; and discuss the historical premises and continued impact of Marx's study.

American studies has changed drastically over the past few decades, as a new wave of scholars - armed with groundbreaking ideas and more extensive methods of research - flocked to the relatively young field. This focus on scholarship, though necessary to the advancement of the discipline, has left pedagogy largely ignored. In "American Studies in Dialogue", Matthias Oppermann consciously resists the traditional academic split between scholarship and classroom practice. His study calls for a radical reconstruction of American studies grounded in an understanding of cultural analysis and critique as genuinely dialogic processes of research and pedagogy. Drawing on case studies ranging from courses in early American civilization to recent multimedia projects, "American Studies in Dialogue" will be required reading for American studies scholars and teachers.

The Fiction of America juxtaposes classic literature of the American Renaissance with twentieth-century popular culture-pairing, for instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Finding Nemo, Walt Whitman with Spider-man, and Hester Prynne with Madonna - to investigate how the "Americanness" of American culture constitutes itself in the interplay of the cultural imaginary and performance. Conceptualizing "America" as a transhistorical practice, Susanne Hamscha reveals disruptive, spectral moments in the narrative of "America" that confront American culture with its inherent inconsistencies.