American Studies in Austria

Petra Eckhard, Klaus Rieser, Silvia Schultermandl (Eds.)
ISBN 978-3-643-50434-0

What do tent cities, basketball courts, slave ships and facebook have in common? They are spaces of American culture where an idea of Americanness emerges through a concrete form of contact on the one hand and through its mediated representation on the other. This collection of essays examines these contact spaces and their myriad and complex configurations of culture along a spatial axis, highlighting the interconnectedness of the local and the global in concrete spaces of American culture, both inside and outside the United States, and in the World Wide Web.One line of inquiry studies metaphors of contact, the other one reads media texts as contact spaces and investigates the role of mediation.

Petra Eckhard, Michael Fuchs, Walter W. Hölbling (Eds.)
ISBN: 978-3-643-50201-8

In Landscapes of Postmodernity, a group of young scholars link key concepts of postmodern thought to our present everyday experience in which we change our identities on a regular basis. While many of the essays look at less conventional modes of aesthetic representation - computer games, graphic novels, telenovelas, queer and animated films - others analyze more canonical works following less conventional approaches. Either way, the cultural and literary cartographies presented in this book allow America to be conceived as polymorphous or transnational, celebrating a new American self that is aware and proud of its non-Anglo-Saxon origins.

Walter Hölbling, Justine Tally (Eds.)
ISBN: 978-3-8258-0809-9

Theories and Texts, a guide written by students for students, explores the critical ideas of twelve of the most influential philosophers of the last 150 years - Marx, Freud, Bakhtin, Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Bhaba, as well as a variety of feminist critics (Kristeva & the French feminists, black feminists, and theological feminists), New Historicists, and Postcolonialists. Carefully "digested" and then set out in lucid and easily accessible language, these essays explain major ideas of each critical approach and exemplify them through practical application to one or more literary texts. At a time when "theory" is on everybody's lips and yet is often more of a deterrent than an attraction for students of literature and culture, we believe that these essays show how theories can enrich our understanding of literature, facilitate our analysis of a particular text, elucidate the multiple layers of meaning, and thus significantly enhance the juissance in our acts of reading. Literary theory with a différance!

Walter W. Hölbling, Klaus Rieser, Susanne Rieser (Eds.)
ISBN: 978-3-8258-8669-7

This book investigates the ontology as well as the social and cultural impact of US icons. American Studies scholars from various nations have come together to explore origins, maintenance, and manipulation of icons and to trace their hegemonic as well as subversive impact. Icons experience mutation, modulation, adjustment, and diversification until they either fade or join the pantheon of core US icons, becoming almost eternal. Contributions include analyses of iconic figures such as Billy the Kid, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, they cover stereotypes from obese bodies via Aunt Jemima to iconic femmes, and they examine material icons such as the Dollar Bill, the Zapruder footage of the JFK assassination or iconic sites like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Walter W. Hölbling, Klaus Rieser (Eds.)
ISBN 3-8258-7734-5

Identity is one of the central cultural narratives of the US on which both dominant and resistant discourses draw. This critical anthology honors the topic's diversity while concentrating on one central aspect, that of newness. Construction of identities, their invention, reinvention and reformulation are discussed within four thematic categories: New Concepts and Reconsiderations, Migration and Multiple Identities, Individuation and Privatized Identity Construction, and (Re-) Inventions and Virtual Identities. Written by European as well as U. S. scholars, ranging from the 19th century to the utopian future, from mainstream canonized figures to transgender performers, from a critique of individualism to a celebration of loneliness, the articles present a cross-section of current research on U.S. identities.