Department of English and American Studies

In this article, I read Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) against the background of realism to unravel the novel's distinct critique of racial discourse. I argue that realism's characteristic technique of appealing to the visible to establish the reality and realness of its fictions enables the novel to trace a similar operation in the discourse of race.

The following essay discusses Herman Melville's " I and My Chimney " (1856) as a text that engages architecture and writing as interrelated systems of signification. Fueled by a variety of historical developments, domestic architecture emerges as a powerful purveyor of meaning in the antebellum decades. Architecture, in this cultural context, is construed in analogy to writing (and, to some extent, vice versa), as creating houses-as-texts that tell stories about their inhabitants in terms of their individual, familial, and national identities. Thus conceived, domestic architecture is characteristically enlisted in the articulation and stabilization of hegemonic narratives of, e. g., gender and nationhood. Melville's text invokes this cultural convention to cast the signifying function that architecture and writing perform as being vulnerable and in crisis. This crisis is narrated by an idiosyncratic narrator for whom the semiotic instability documented by his narrative resonates with the social and cultural vulnerability that he experiences—his authority as master of his house and family is challenged in the course of the tale, along with the structural integrity of his chimney with which he wants to symbolically reinforce his authority. I argue that this crisis of signification performs double work in the text. On the one hand, it serves to articulate the anxiety of mid-nineteenth-century cultural elites about what they perceive as a cultural decline. On the other hand, allegedly dysfunctional signification unfolds a critical potential, bringing to light things which 'functional' signification had worked to conceal and thereby unlocking hermetic narratives of self, family, and nation.

In this article, I use the tv-series Boston Legal to explore the civic didacticism of legal fictions. I argue that this didacticism specifically exploits the performativity of the legal process that courtroom dramas represent. Performativity figures as a central yet ambiguous aspect of the law, an aspect that has played an instrumental role in the formation of media genres organized around (more or less) fictional representations of the law. While classical legal drama tames this performativity by way of a realist aesthetic, Boston Legal unleashes the law’s theatricality by amending legal drama with legal comedy. The article discusses how this affects the series’s self-consciously didactic work.

This book asks for the cultural work that spaces of feminine labor do in antebellum texts from a variety of literary and 'para-literary' contexts. Singling out the kitchen and the factory, it argues that sites of women's work serve as key textual microcosms in which antebellum culture negotiates the discourses of social difference whose relevance skyrockets in this period, especially the discourses of gender, class, 'race,' and nationhood. Because of their ostensible marginality on the map of the national imaginary, and because they are associated with social subjects multiply marked as marginal-women of the 'working class' and slave women-the kitchen and the factory enable the rehearsal of ideas that are difficult to articulate within the core narratives of nationhood: ideas about the forms and meanings of social inequality, and their relationship to the promises of equality that suffuse the nation's mythology.

This paper attends to popular culture as a venue in which ideas about social order are imaginatively negotiated. Zooming in on the genre of televisual comedy-the sitcom-it specifically asks how mass-mediated practices of mockery resonate with and circulate ideas about social hierarchies. The paper approaches mass-mediated mockery from a Cultural Studies perspective, as a signifying practice with its own poetics and politics, whose operations revolve around the ambiguous play with taboo and transgression. Proceeding from a set of conceptual remarks, the paper outlines a case study of the US-American sitcom Two Broke Girls, tracing how the show uses the humour of mockery in ways that critically challenge dominant discourses of femininity and class while reinforcing oppressive discourses of 'race'.

The scientific book series Disability Studies: Body -Power -Difference examines disability as an historical, social and cultural construction; it deals with the interrelation between power and symbolic meanings. The series intends to open up new perspectives to disability, thus correcting and extending traditional approaches in medicine, special education and rehabilitation sciences. It views disability as a phenomenon of embodied difference. Fundamental cultural concepts of »putting things into order«, for instance normality and deviance, health and illness, physical integrity and subjective identity are thereby discussed from a critical point of view. The book series Disability Studies aims to contribute to the study of central themes of the Modern age: reason, human rights, equality, autonomy and solidarity in relation to social and cultural developments.

This article highlights an intersection between the science fiction of
Neal Stephenson and the science philosophy of Michel Serres. As
two of the most prolific contemporary advocates of the
communication between literature and science, Serres and
Stephenson employ permutations of the trickster figure as a
potent lens on the epistemological transformations that occur
when boundaries are crossed and static systems perturbed.
Allegorizing the birth of science and rational consciousness as the
intervention of a trickster, Stephenson finds in hackers and
couriers the same generative force that Serres associates with the
Greek god Hermes and the figure of the parasite. With particular
attention to Stephenson’s postcyberpunk novel Snow Crash (1992)
and Serres’ Hermes series (1969–1980), the concept of the trickster
will be explored as both a personification of the kinship between
creation mythologies, information theory, anthropology, and
modern physics and as the template for a productive
transdisciplinary mode of cultural inquiry.

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This paper offers a discussion of J. G. Ballard's first four novels, The Wind From Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965), and The Crystal World (1966) that centers on their portrayal of environmental transformation. Drawing on revised conceptualizations of the second law of thermodynamics and recent materialist scholarship, I illustrate how Ballard invokes material transformations that are ambivalently coded as terminal stasis and morphogenesis. In anticipations of the paradigm of the Anthropocene and ecocritical approaches to global climate change, Ballard's novels re-embed the human in an ecology of inhuman forces and modes of self-organization that radically challenge entrenched ontological divisions and systemic boundaries. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which emergent structures, such as hurricanes and crystals identify his landscapes as dissipative systems far from equilibrium and rife with potential for the spontaneous generation of form. This resonance with scientific frameworks reveals itself in poetic registers that parallelize metaphors of life and death, and hinge on an estrangement of not only landscape, but also temporality, thus literalizing what it might mean to understand the human as a geological subject in the age of the Anthropocene.

Im Jahr 2002 rief der Meteorologe Paul J. Crutzen die Epoche des Anthropozäns aus und erklärte damit den Menschen zum geologischen Subjekt, dessen Spuren sich spätestens seit dem Beginn der industriellen Moderne tief in das klimatologische Gedächtnis der Erde eingeschrieben haben. Fällt der Begriff des Anthropozäns in aktuellen kulturwissenschaftlichen Debatten, geht damit oft eine Kritik der Vorstellung von Natur als passives Objekt in klarer Abgrenzung zum Menschen einher. Die Klimakrise zeigt, dass Mensch und Umwelt untrennbar miteinander verschränkt sind. Versuche das vermeintliche Natürliche vom vermeintlich Künstlichen zu trennen werden zusehends obsolet. Wie reagieren die Künste auf diese Verschränkung von Mensch und Umwelt? Was bedeutet es in diesem Kontext von der Umwelt als Medium zu sprechen? Wie sind Medienpraktiken in neue ökologische Paradigmen involviert? Welche Fragen ergeben sich hieraus für das menschliche Selbstverständnis? In diesem Seminar betrachten wir, wie künstlerische Produktion dazu beitragen kann, wandelnde Beziehungen zwischen Mensch und Umwelt sichtbar zu machen. Anhand von kulturtheoretischen Texten der Ecocriticism, Systemtheorie, und Medienökologie soll diskutiert werden, welche ethischen, politischen, und aesthetischen Konsequenzen sich ergeben, wenn tradierte Spaltungen zwischen Natur und Kultur aufgelöst werden. Ob in literarischen Visionen des Ecohorrors, photographischen Dokumentationen dystopischer Industrielandschaften, oder theoretischen Überlegungen zu nichtmenschlichem Leben, die Umwelten im Zeitalter des Anthropozäns erscheinen fremd und vertraut zugleich; sie lassen die Grenzen zwischen innen und aussen verschwimmen und erschüttern tradierte anthropozentrische Raumansprüche.

Synopsis Max Weber famously described Western modernity as the "disenchantment of the world" (die Entzauberung der Welt). Throughout the course of the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, reason and rationality became the preeminent markers that distinguished the human from the nonhuman (which included machines, animals, plants, minerals, and dehumanized colonized others). Animistic worldviews (based on the idea that elements of the nonhuman world may also be sentient or animate) were dispelled and dismissed as premodern, primitive, or irrational. A result of this purging of nonhuman agency, was the consolidation of a divide between nature and culture with a clear hierarchy-the world of inanimate objects and resources on the one hand, and the world of autonomous human subjects on the other. In this course we will problematize this narrative by examining how modernity is, in fact, teeming with scenes of nonhuman animation and life, from early visions of electricity, automata, and film, to haunted natures, nonhuman personhood in Indigenous ontologies, and artificial intelligence. Especially in the second half of the 20th century, considerations of animism experienced a renaissance in ecological frameworks and speculations about artificial intelligence, which introduced challenging questions about what it means to be human, a person, a sentient being, or an autonomous actor.-How have the arts contributed to the reenchantment of modernity?-What can Western accounts learn from opening up to Indigenous philosophies?-What does it mean to consider the agency of things?-How can artistic practice negotiate a decentering of anthropocentric concepts of subjectivity? In dialogue with a wide range of surreal, amusing, and unsettling examples from art, literature, and technology, we will read key theoretical texts in the evolution of nonhumanist modern thinking that complicate the nature/culture divide. Course texts will include works