articles and papers by Katja Kanzler
Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift, 2021
Open Access. The following article outlines a way to conceptualize invective form in popular cult... more Open Access. The following article outlines a way to conceptualize invective form in popular culture that is particularly interested in accommodating the range, fluidity, and slipperiness that define pop-cultural forms of disparagement. It is an approach that draws on one very well-established concept of formal criticism – that of mode – and one concept that has recently been brought to the fold of formalist inquiry – that of affordance. I will argue that conceiving of invective form in popular culture as a mode and as an affordance allows to address the diversity and range of external forms by which pop-cultural invectivity operates. In addition, it brings into focus the fluidity that marks the repertoire of invective popular culture, its paradoxical tendency to gravitate toward routinization in more set conventions, only to conspicuously push against these conventions’ boundaries. Finally, to conceive of the invective valence of the mode’s repertoire not as a fixed property but as an affordance helps talk about the volatility and dynamism of invective performances in popular culture, the way in which their invective effects are contingent on the social positionality from and for which they realized, and the way in which their invective valence is open for resignification.
Humanities, 2021
Open Acces. This article approaches cringe comedy through the lens of its affectivity, of the som... more Open Acces. This article approaches cringe comedy through the lens of its affectivity, of the somatic experiences through which it puts its audiences’ bodies, and it uses this as a point of departure to think about the genre’s cultural work. Based on the observation that no cringe comedy makes its viewers cringe for the whole duration of its storytelling, the article suggests that cringe comedies thrive on destabilizing and ambiguating the affective valence of their performances of embarrassment, constantly recalibrating or muddying the distance between viewer and characters. They are marked by tipping points at which schadenfreude and other types of humor tip into cringe, and reversely, at which cringe tips into something else. The article focuses on one of these other affective responses, which it proposes to describe as the sneer. It uses the HBO-series Veep as a case study to explore how cringe and sneer aesthetics are interlaced in an exemplary comedy, and how they fuel this particular comedy’s satiric work.
Open Access in: Uwe Israel/Jürgen Müller, eds. Körper-Kränkungen. Der menschliche Leib als Me... more Open Access in: Uwe Israel/Jürgen Müller, eds. Körper-Kränkungen. Der menschliche Leib als Medium der Herabsetzung. Campus, 2021, 400-413.
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2019
This article approaches HBO’s Veep through the lens of what Dan Hassler-Forest (2014) has describ... more This article approaches HBO’s Veep through the lens of what Dan Hassler-Forest (2014) has described as the meta-genre of ‘Quality TV.’ Against the backdrop of ‘Quality TV’s’ conspicuous investment in masculinity, I ask how Veep actualizes the meta-genre’s conventions of moral ambiguity and sensationalist storytelling around a female protagonist and in the genre of comedy. I focus on one key strategy I see the show employ in this actualization, a strategy I conceptualize as invective spectacle. In Veep, invective spectacle translates ‘Quality TV’s’ characteristic transgressiveness into the conventions of comedy and, in the process, constructs the figure of a morally ambiguous antiheroine. The dynamics of invective spectacle – as a poetics that appears to be booming in contemporary television culture – structure the show’s elaboration of a complex female protagonist as a morally flawed woman of power.
Taboo and Transgression: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Migration, Integration, and Diversity, 2019
This paper attends to popular culture as a venue in which ideas about social order are imaginativ... more 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'.
Vaeter allerlei Geschlechts, ed. by Anja Besand, Mark Arenhoevel, and Olaf Sanders. Springer VS, 2017.
This article proceeds from the observation that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—two politicians f... more This article proceeds from the observation that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—two politicians frequently correlated and compared since Trump’s bid for the Presidency—have been remarkably successful in mobilizing support for their politics and in seemingly immunizing their rhetorics against vernacular critique. To work toward an understanding of this phenomenon, we propose to look at how political communication by and around the two politicians draws on forms and venues of popular culture. Both contexts, we will argue, have developed new strategies for the instrumentalization of popular culture, strategies that, while actualized differently in the two settings, revolve around an ‘invective turn’ in political communication—a radicalization of the familiar nationalist rhetoric of ‘us versus them’ that seems specifically fueled by pop-cultural forms. To explore this traffic between pop and politics, this article puts into conversation two case studies: On the one hand, of Trump’s campaign speeches which, we contend, symbolically organize around the logic of agôn—of the competitive game—as it has coagulated in the reality-tv genre of the gamedoc. On the other hand, we look at (state-controlled) pop music in the Russian genre of Ėstrada which, thus our argument, advertises a distinct form of patriotism through the principle of ‘glamour.’ Glamour, in Putin’s Russia, operates simultaneously as a style and as an ideology of self-glorification. The article will outline how reality tv’s logic of agôn and patriotic pop music’s aesthetics of glamour each fuel a qualitatively new orientation of political discourse toward the aesthetically charged, affect-saturated denigration of others and valorization of self.
Author's manuscript. For citations, please use the pagination of the published version.
Author's manuscript. For citations, please use the pagination of the published version.
Author's Manuscript. For citations, please use the pagination of the published version.
This article is a modified version of the introduction to the edited volume Poetics of Politics: ... more This article is a modified version of the introduction to the edited volume Poetics of Politics: Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture, which appeared originally in 2015 with Universitätsverlag Winter as part of the series American Studies – A Monograph Series.
In this article, I use the tv-series Boston Legal to explore the civic didacticism of legal ficti... more 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.
The following essay discusses Herman Melville's " I and My Chimney " (1856) as a text that engage... more 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 read Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) against the background ... more 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.
books by Katja Kanzler
This book calls for an investigation of the ›borderlands of narrativity‹ — the complex and cultur... more This book calls for an investigation of the ›borderlands of narrativity‹ — the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the ›beyond‹ of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of »narrative liminality,« which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years.
This book asks for the cultural work that spaces of feminine labor do in antebellum texts from a ... more 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.
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articles and papers by Katja Kanzler
books by Katja Kanzler