		1956
		quarterly
		English, German

		literature, cultural studies, history, political science, linguistics, critical theory, teaching of American Studies

		0340-2827


Manuscripts and books for review should be submitted to the editorial office in Regensburg. There is no obligation to review unsolicited books. Amerikastudien / American Studies Prof. Dr. Udo Hebel Department of English and American Studies University of Regensburg 93040 Regensburg, Germany Phone: +49 941 943 3477 Fax: +49 941 943 3590 Email: redaktion@amerikastudien.de In view of the computerized production of the journal, manuscripts of articles and reviews can only be accepted if submitted as computer files (preferably MS Word) and accompanied by a printout. Please note the following formal requirements: – All articles must be preceded by an abstract in English of no more than 200 words. – Since Amerikastudien / American Studies follows a blind-review system, articles should contain no references to the author. – An Amerikastudien / American Studies style sheet is available under http://www.amerikastudien.de/quarterly/ The editorial team gladly provides a MS Word document template file (DOT) that is used for pre-typesetting (preflighting).

Amerikastudien / American Studies

Amerikastudien / American Studies is the journal of the German Association for American Studies. It started as the annual Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien in 1956 and has since developed into a quarterly with some 1200 subscriptions in Europe and the United States. The journal is dedicated to interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives and embraces the diversity and dynamics of a dialogic and comparatist understanding of American Studies. It covers all areas of American Studies from literary and cultural criticism, history, political science, and linguistics to the teaching of American Studies. Thematic issues alternate with regular ones. Reviews, forums, and annual bibliographies support the international circulation of German and European scholarship in American Studies.
(www.amerikastudien.de/quarterly/)
Editor: Udo Hebel
Address: Amerikastudien/American Studies
Department of English and American Studies
University of Regensburg
93040 Regensburg, Germany
Phone: +49 941 943 3477
Fax: +49 941 943 3590
Email: redaktion@amerikastudien.de

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Amerikastudien / American Studies 2007, Vol. 52, No. 2

'The American Democrat' Reads Democracy in America: Cooper and Tocqueville in the Transatlantic Hall of Mirrors

By Nobert Campagna
Tocqueville and Cooper have traditionally been seen as ideological brothers in arms, but the relationship between their political theories is far more complex. Both proceed from the problem of preserving liberty by containing the excesses of mass democracy, but their positions within Atlantic and national discourses on liberty and equality engender diverging definitions, perceptions, and solutions concerning American government and democracy. From a postcolonial perspective, Cooper rejects Tocqueville and his authority as a representation of the European imperial gaze as well as the colonized American mind. As a classical republican Cooper defines democracy as a society based on the natural principles of equal rights and social inequality, in which order is contingent upon the deference of the many to a natural aristocracy of virtue and talent. This model collides with Tocqueville's understanding of democracy as homogenous equality, which requires completely new means of checking the threat of majority tyranny. While Cooper's assessment of American inequality was empirically more accurate, Tocqueville had a better understanding of the implications of democratic modernity, though his popularity with Americans, as Cooper partly understood, resulted from the possibility of reading his study as a long-awaited European endorsement of American democracy.

'Kindred Spirits' in Romantic Walks: Durand's Kindred Spirits compared to Friedrich's Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

By Thomas Clark
Asher B. Durand's painting Kindred Spirits (1849) is probably his most well-known work. As the embodiment of the artistic principles of the nineteenth-century American landscapists, much has been made of this painterly tribute to Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School. Yet, if we insert it into the peripatetic tradition, it yields fruitful results in that it more fully illuminates the simultaneously depicted peripatetic stations of "Knowledge" and "Arrival," as well as the nineteenth-century dialogue between the sister arts of writing and painting. It is also most remarkable for the size of the portrayed protagonists in the painting. In fact, it is one of the few canvases of the Hudson River School that can vie in its figures' size with C. David Friedrich's famous Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (ca. 1817), its European counterpart, as to the walk in painting. A brief summary about the peripatetic tradition, its poetic stations, and the iconography of the act of walking in painting will precede the comparison of the two canvases. Underlying the exploration of the parallels and differences of the walk in the New and the Old World are the questions as to the relationship between man and nature as well as the inherent landscape aesthetics.

'Try Not to Love such a Country': The Americanization of Sholom Aleichem's Yiddish Text

By Galia Benziman
Mottel the Cantor's Son (1907, 1916), one of the most popular Yiddish novels of the twentieth century, is a story of emigration. As such, it is preoccupied with cross-cultural, cross-national, inter-religious, and inter-lingual relations. Aspiring to move from one geographical and cultural setting to another -- from the poverty-stricken Eastern-European Jewish town to the promisingly rich and excitingly modern "New World" of North America -- the characters, and to some extent also their author, Sholom Aleichem, are busy disparaging their former world and idealizing the new. The translation of the novel into English by Tamara Kahana (published 1953) augments this dynamics in its attempt to assimilate the work to the American canon and reduce its Jewishness. Kahana, being both a Jewish immigrant herself and the author's grandchild, is an involved translator. Rather than an act of mediation and communication, her strategy of translation appears to be an act of appropriation, a rewriting whereby the otherness of the source text is erased. At issue here -- for all three agencies that deliver Mottel's story to us (the narrator Mottel, the authorial voice, and the translator) -- is an ideal of identity that involves a break with the past. For Mottel and for Sholom Aleichem this ideal is America and the formation of an assimilated American identity; for Kahana it is a perfectly accessible Americanized story. However, in both the original text and in its translation, this ideal is continually, subtly subverted even as it is strenuously articulated and sought.

The Other West Side Story: Urbanization and the Arts Meet at Lincoln Center

By Julia Foulkes
When discussions began about a new performing arts center in Manhattan in the mid-1950s, philanthropists, impresarios, artistic directors, and educators welcomed the opportunity to broaden the audience for the arts. The idea was to go from "class" to "mass," as Edgar B. Young, the overseer of the project, put it. But most agree that Lincoln Center fell far short of that goal and, instead, re-inscribed the elitism of the high arts in its monumental architecture, conventional programming, and international rather than local gaze. This paper seeks to explore fissures in the monumentality of Lincoln Center by aligning indoor spaces alongside outdoor ones, particularly by adding an attention to spatial patterns and the performances inside the theaters to the more often viewed architecture and demographic changes of the neighborhood. It is an attempt to tie these stages -- the setting of some of the grandest performances in the world -- to the surrounding streets to reveal the defining features of the intertwining of the arts and urbanization in the post-World War II era that re-made American cities into "culture cities."

The Other West Side Story: Urbanization and the Arts Meet at Lincoln Center

By Katharina Erhard and Karsten Fitz
When discussions began about a new performing arts center in Manhattan in the mid-1950s, philanthropists, impresarios, artistic directors, and educators welcomed the opportunity to broaden the audience for the arts. The idea was to go from "class" to "mass," as Edgar B. Young, the overseer of the project, put it. But most agree that Lincoln Center fell far short of that goal and, instead, re-inscribed the elitism of the high arts in its monumental architecture, conventional programming, and international rather than local gaze. This paper seeks to explore fissures in the monumentality of Lincoln Center by aligning indoor spaces alongside outdoor ones, particularly by adding an attention to spatial patterns and the performances inside the theaters to the more often viewed architecture and demographic changes of the neighborhood. It is an attempt to tie these stages -- the setting of some of the grandest performances in the world -- to the surrounding streets to reveal the defining features of the intertwining of the arts and urbanization in the post-World War II era that re-made American cities into "culture cities."

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