		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 2008, Amerikastudien / American Studies 2008 Vol. 53, No. 2

‘Declining’ the (American) Sublime: Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”

By Thomas Claviez
Literary scholars usually locate the work of Stephen Crane at the threshold between naturalism and modernism. In his story “The Open Boat,” however, Crane uses the concept of the sublime as the unrepresentable in a proto-postmodern fashion to ironically and self-reflectively juxtapose it to naturalism’s claim to depict life as authentic as possible. He thus ‘declines’ the sublime—in the double sense of the word as objecting to, and as grammatical declension of—as he dramatizes the different degrees and stages of distance and the resulting impossibility of representation, according to his dictum “A man is sure to fail at it [honesty], but there is something in the failure.” This echoes the conceptualization of the sublime of a philosopher who is at the threshold of modernity and postmodernity—that of Theodor W. Adorno.

Amy Lowell’s Peasant Dance: Transcribing Primitivism in “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces ‘Grotesques,’ for String Quartet”

By Regina Schober
Like many other modernist writers, American poet Amy Lowell turned to music as an inspirational source and aesthetic model for her writings. Her poem “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces ‘Grotesques’ for String Quartet” will serve here as a paradigmatic illustration of Lowell’s intermedial endeavor to transcribe a piece of music into the poetic medium. However, Lowell does not only transpose the sounds and rhythms of Stravinsky’s piece into her experimental poem. By applying a functionalist approach to intermedia studies, the essay reveals that Lowell’s poem also takes up cultural implications related to the concept of primitivism in Stravinsky’s work and translates this concept into the particular context of American modernism. Consequently, Lowell’s musicalized poem both imitates and interprets the original musical text it draws upon, transforming not only its semiotic material, but also its cultural connotations.

‘From Language to Life is Just Four Letters’ Self-Referentiality vs. the Reference of Self in Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2

By Jan Kucharzewski
This paper will read Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 (1995) as a self-reflexive autobiography that consciously examines the fundamental problems of life-writing. Additionally, it will demonstrate how this novel, although clearly a text that can be labeled ‘postmodern,’ nevertheless diverges from many postmodern theories on autobiographic texts by re-emphasizing the relevance of referentiality as a meaning-giving element. Powers initially reduces his autobiographic self to a purely textual subject, only to expose the limitations of such an act by contrasting his own textuality as an ‘author function’ with the dilemma of a disembodied computer network that is supposed to understand works of literature. Eventually, the novel articulates a complex critique of what Powers defines as “postmodern solipsism” and asks for a “reengagement with the world’s living concepts.” The concluding part of the paper will examine the narratological implications of this reengagement with referentiality for Powers’s entire oeuvre.

Urban Dwellers: Women Writers Who Left Eastern Europe Never to Arrive in the United States

By Sladja Blazan
A recurrent question in American literary studies remains unanswered: “Where are the Eastern European writers?” Women writers in particular seem to be missing. To use Thomas Gladsky’s words: “[E]ven to this date, no Yezierskas, Kingstons, Angelous, or Morrisons have emerged to capture the unique story of the Slavic woman” (6). Leaving the definition of the category “Slavic woman” to Gladsky, this article seeks to reach conclusions that will unveil reasons for the curious omission of Eastern European voices, in particular those of women writers, in current discussions on transnationalism, migration, and ethnic categories in the context of literature. At the same time it highlights the (lost) tradition of Eastern European women’s writing by reading Iva Pekárková’s Gimme the Money (2002) against the backdrop of turn-of-the-twentieth-century writers Anzia Yezierska, Mary Antin, and Elisabeth Stern in the first part and Ludmila Ulitskaya’s The Funeral Party (2001) and Dubravka Ugresic’s Thank You for Not Reading (2003)with reference to Cold-War dissident writing and the special position of Vladimir Nabokov’s oeuvre in the second part of the text. The article concludes with two examples of non-migrant American writers’ perspectives on Eastern Europe. Issues concerning post-socialist studies are discussed under the light of these predicaments.

Introduction to “Casting America’s Outcasts”

By Christa Buschendorf

Casting America’s Outcasts: Casting America’s Outcasts: A Dialogue between Russell Banks and Loïc Wacquant

By Russell Banks and Loïc Wacquant

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