		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 2005, Vol. 50, No. 4

Texts, Commodities, and Genteel Factory Girls: The Textile Mill as a Feminine Space in Antebellum American Literature

By Katja Kanzler
This essay proposes to intervene in ongoing debates about the productivity of the ‘separate spheres’-paradigm for the study of antebellum culture by probing into the writing of a ‘feminine’ space that resists easy categorization as ‘home’: the textile m ill of the 1820s-40s. Despite—or possibly because of—the marginality of the textile mill on the map of gendered spaces in antebellum America, its writings claim it to be highly significant for literature, for women, and for the nation. I will focus my inquiry on the Lowell Offering, a literary magazine (1840-45) produced by female workers at the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, as an effort of Northeastern, rural women to claim their experience of the factory as a basis for both literary creativity and citizenship. In discussing some of the Offering’s texts, and the discursive contexts out of which they evolved, I suggest that reading the factory sheds light on the central way in which mobility and metaphorization characterize antebellum discourses of ‘home.’ On a second note, it draws attention to the material dimension of antebellum gender discourses and to the ambivalent repercussions this materiality holds for women writing out of different social settings other than the bourgeois home.

Consuming Illusion, Illusions of Consumability: American Movie Palaces of the 1920s

By Maria A. Slowinska
This essay discusses the American Movie Palace of the 1920s as a historical, cultural, and aesthetic phenomenon. The Movie Palace is a particularly interesting subject for cultural analysis because it is a conspicuous marker of its specific sociohistorical context, while at the same time condensing developments that have come to define present-day culture. I will argue that the Movie Palace as a building type and as a practice of film consumption is an exceptionally illustrative expression of the fusion of the culture of consumption with the culture of performance as it occurred in the early decades of the twentieth century. In this fusion, we can find an instance and even a source of the distinct dynamic that set and still keeps in motion the development of present-day popular culture. I will conceptualize this fusion in the term ‘performative consumption,’ meaning a performative, corporeal, and highly elusive act and an influential early expression of the currently much discussed performativization of culture with its propensity toward immediacy, sensuality, corporeality. Thus, the Movie Palace illustrates an early stage of a core aspect of present-day popular culture.

Hearing, Seeing, and Writing Thelonious Monk: Toward a Theory of Changing Iconotexts

By Daniel Stein
This essay on the American jazz pianist Thelonious Monk situates the player and his music within a series of shifting written representations that inscribe music and performance with changing and conflicting cultural meanings. All forms of representing jazz are understood not merely as reference s to music in, or attempted translations into, another medium, but as acts that take part in ‘sounding the music,’ acts that allow Monk’s music to emerge as a particular form of artistic expression. Any serious musical analysis must account for the visual, textual, and contextual processes of signification through which jazz communicates, and is made to communicate, beyond its sonic surface. Approaching Monk’s jazz as an intermedial phenomenon that combines sound and sight (“hearing and seeing Thelonious Monk”), the essay investigates journalistic responses to this phenomenon (“writing Thelonious Monk”) and argues that discursive shifts in jazz criticism coproduce musical meaning through changing iconotexts, defined as the realm of signification where musical sound, the visual element of performance, and textual interpretation meet and compete for cultural influence.

The Presidential Election of 2004 in Financial Retrospective

By Matthias S. Fifka
The 2004 presidential and congressional elections were once again the most expensive in history, despite major campaign finance reform enacted in 2002. Especially in the presidential election, “soft money” banned by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act reappeared in spending by independent advocacy groups, the so-called “527s.” They largely contributed to a rise of overall election costs compared to the 2000 race between Bush and Gore. However, a dramatic increase of “hard money” contributions to candidates and par ties can also be recorded. The following paper examines the different financial dimensions of the 2004 presidential election and analyzes changes and shifts between them with respect to the previous election. For that purpose, a close look at candidate campaign finance as well as financial involvement of parties and independent organizations is taken, before conclusions about further developments, including possible campaign finance reform, are drawn.

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