English

Firmly rooted in disability activism, the emergence of disability studies in the 1980s took place at a time that also witnessed several disabled comedians and activists climb the stage both in the US and the UK. Considering these coinciding developments, it seems perhaps little surprising that disability studies scholarship has been engaged in the complex relationship between disability and humor from its very beginnings. However, the interplay between cringe (as a cultural phenomenon closely related to comedy) and disability has not received much attention within the field. This paper takes a closer look at the functions that disability fulfils in cringe comedy. Reading Laurence Clark’s comedy live performances against a classic “disability scene” from The Office, I argue that while both shows humiliate the non-disabled for their reactions toward disabled people, the work they are doing differs on several accounts. While The Office does not give its disabled characters much of a vo...

Plenty has changed since the first COPAS issue was published twenty years ago. Yet we believe that despite or maybe because of these changes the journal remains true to its original goals of providing a platform for early career scholars to present and discuss their research, allowing for a critical while cooperative exchange among peers and beyond. Taking inventory of COPAS on the occasion of its twentieth year of existence, we have decided to address the issue of white supremacy as the topic of our anniversary thematic issue and introduce a very visible change to COPAS as well. In doing so, we hope to express the very spirit of the journal, which, as we understand it, is marked by critical self-reflection and the desire to make room for new voices and ideas.

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Challenging the idea that processes of ‘closure’ function as primary means by which comics
involve their readers, this article investigates how Chris Ware’s Building Stories uses spectacle
as a symbolic form that disrupts narrative as much as it depends on it to engage its readers.
My reading of Building Stories serves to illustrate that some comics offer a visual pleasure that
is not strictly based on narrative and the sequentiality of their images. Spectacle in Building
Stories, I argue, functions as both an element of disruption and of orientation. I propose that,
by using spectacle, the book not only guides its readers through a hardly navigable narrative
web but also allows them to participate in acts of staring. By inviting readers to stare, Building
Stories turns the disability of its protagonist into a highly visible and disruptive element while,
at the same time, narrativizing it as a part of ordinary, everyday life.

Through an analysis of various negotiations of disability in House, M.D. and Grey’s Anatomy, my paper discusses the narrative and non-narrative means that make the medical drama such an appealing genre to contemporary audience members. As the most successful medical dramas of the post-millennial era, House, M.D. and Grey’s Anatomy rely heavily on the exhibition of non-normative bodies, the humorous device of re-naming patients, and the narrative construction of disability as unbearable deviance. While Laura Backstrom locates the freak show in non-fictional television formats like the talk show and documentary, my paper illustrates how the medical drama, although at times highly self-reflexive, has become another pervasive relocation of the freak show into contemporary television. In a close reading of Grey’s Anatomy, I further demonstrate how the portrayal of a disabled doctor as a series regular both manifests and challenges some of the normative perceptions of the body that the ge...

Due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 was a challenging year that affected people's lives all over the world. It also changed the work in German American Studies and at COPAS. The annual conference of the Postgraduate Forum (PGF) of the German Association for American Studies (GAAS), scheduled to take place in the fall of 2020 in Stuttgart, Germany, was cancelled and with it the annual PGF proceedings that usually appear in COPAS early in the following summer. We hope that all scholars who had wished to attend the PGF 2020 will be able to do so this year; we can't wait to receive submissions from future presenters. More importantly, though, we hope that all of you are doing well as we continue to navigate life during the second year of the pandemic. Meanwhile, we at COPAS have had another timely project to focus our energies on: the thematic issue "Embracing the Loss of Nature: Searching for Responsibility in an Age of Crisis," guest edited by Jaime Hyatt and Florian Wagner. The issue's focus on current objectives in postgraduate ecocriticism was conceptualized before COVID-19 hit but took shape under its direct impact. In the current moment, the articles seem timelier than ever. We are delighted to be able to share this special issue with you and hope you enjoy reading the articles as much as we enjoyed working on them with Jaime, Florian, and the authors. We are also happy to hear that organization for the next PGF conference is underway. COPAS will certainly be there to bring its proceedings to you, our readers.

800x600 Over the last two decades, the ‘graphic novel’ has increasingly become of interest to literary scholars of trauma, who praise the form for its innovative approach to storytelling. This article critically examines Marianne Hirsch and Edward Brunner’s thesis that multimodal trauma narratives succeed in making the unspeakable visible and audible to the reader. By analyzing David Small’s graphic memoir Stitches , I shed light on the potential as well as on the limitations that the comics medium faces in its representation of trauma. In so doing, this paper aims to demonstrate the ambivalent effects that the negotiation of disability has on graphic trauma narratives.

The online journal Current Objectives in Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS), dedicated to publishing the work of early career researchers in American Studies in Germany and beyond, turns twenty in 2019. In 1999, when COPAS published its first issue, Gloria Anzaldúa was revising her article "The New Mestiza Nation," which opens with an observation that sounds all too familiar twenty years later:

It is time to “Stand up and move a little for one minute,” one of Apple’s latest gadgets will remind its sedentary clientel, or, in more urgent tones, send pop-up notifications alerting users that it “detected a heart rate that rose above 120 BPM while you appeared to be inactive.” Casting technological and digital affinities and big data collections on health and fitness aside, we all are increasingly subject to a discourse on health, in which we are (held) responsible for our physical and mental well-being in ways unimaginable just a decade ago. American society in particular, Disability Studies scholar Thomas Couser argues, is at once disease and health conscious (Recovering 9). While any mention of illness and health would have conjured images of doctors, nurses, hospitals, drugs, or first aid thirty years ago, these associations are now supplanted by a wide variety of ideas ranging from nutrition and vitamins, exercise equipment, biking, walking, and jogging, to health check-up...

Inklusion befähigt alle Angehörigen einer Universität, ihre Potenziale in Forschung, Lehre und Verwaltung in vollem Umfang zu entfalten. Somit ist gelingende Inklusion die Grundlage aller Bestrebungen um universitäre Exzellenz. An der TU Dresden wird dies durch ineinandergreifende Prozesse umgesetzt. Strategische "Top-down"-Prozesse werden nach Vorgabe der Universitätsleitung realisiert und "Bottom-up"-Prozesse, die alle Akteur*innen zu inklusivem Handeln motivieren und befähigen, werden gefördert. Um Inklusion in allen Bereichen des universitären Lebens und Handelns weiterzuentwickeln und umzusetzen, wird eine strategische inhaltliche Ausrichtung der Forschung angestrebt.