articles by Sebastian M Herrmann
In an unlikely interdisciplinary dialog, this paper uses professional wrestling's concept of 'kay... more In an unlikely interdisciplinary dialog, this paper uses professional wrestling's concept of 'kayfabe' to discuss the 'realism' of two different symbolic practices, journalism and politics, as portrayed in the 2008 feature film Frost/Nixon. It argues that questions of realism, understood not as a mode or epoch but as a semiotic problem, constitute a focal point of contemporary discussions on the politics of representation, discussions that are led with particular urgency in journalism and in politics, and it reads Frost/Nixon as an artistic engagement with these debates. Dialoging this configuration with scholarship on wrestling then brings to the fore a distinct (and distinctly American) genealogy of negotiating and theorizing realism, it perspectivizes the realisms of journalism and of politics, respectively, and it throws into relief the film's cultural work—its ability to offer a mass audience an intellectual toolkit by way of which the binarisms that underlie realist representation get destabilized in the very moment of being affirmed.
book chapters by Sebastian M Herrmann
Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies, 2019
Over the past years and across a broad swath of national political cultures, ‘narrative’ has emer... more Over the past years and across a broad swath of national political cultures, ‘narrative’ has emerged as a key concept for understanding and discussing politics. Scholars and pundits alike use the term to explain the persuasive force of political positions in general, and the appeal of populist movements in particular, as they are marked, presumably, by simple narratives. Looking at the transnational rise of new right-wing populisms, this article proposes to amend this focus on narrative. Both the German PEGIDA marches and the election of Donald Trump, it argues, are marked by symbolic strategies that are only insufficiently captured by the category of narrative. Instead, the new right populism on both sides of the Atlantic embraces incoherence and discontinuity to an extent that tests (and transgresses) the boundaries of narrative as a symbolic form and that is better understood by attending to the liminal areas it shares with other forms, such as play or database.
“Post-Truth = Post-Narrative?: Reading the Narrative Liminality of Transnational Right-Wing Populism.” The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies, edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, and Takayuki Tatsumi, Routledge, 2019, pp. 288-96.
Revisiting Walt Whitman: On the Occasion of His 200th Birthday, 2019
This essay takes as its point of departure a conceptual impasse that Whitman’s oeuvre, and much o... more This essay takes as its point of departure a conceptual impasse that Whitman’s oeuvre, and much of his reception, has returned to again and again and that neither has been able to fully resolve, the problem of bringing into harmony the economies of literary value and notions of democratic literature. It engages this problem in the context of recent Whitman scholarship that has drawn attention to the affinity between Whitman’s work and the symbolic form of data. By placing Whitman’s poetic catalogs in the historical context of the rise of a ‘data imaginary’ in nineteenth-century US culture, and by reperspectivizing the concept of symbolic forms as liminal rather than binary, it argues that the difficulty of imagining “first-rate” democratic literature is tied to a historically contingent conceptualization of literature and data as fundamentally, categorically different forms of expression.
Unpopular Culture, 2016
This paper discusses a genre of essay writing that advises students not to pursue a career in aca... more This paper discusses a genre of essay writing that advises students not to pursue a career in academia and that has recently enjoyed increased popularity. Focusing on one such “Thesis Hatement,” it argues that these texts are marked by inner contradictions and that these contradictions are indicative of the cultural work they do. Emphatically rejecting academia, these texts typically fail to convince their audience and, in a curious split between denotation and pragmatics, open up a position from which to embrace a graduate career. After briefly delineating the genre and discussing its politics, I trace this textual dynamic in two places: in thesis hatements’ use of a limited set of metaphors, and in the contradictions of their pragmatic effect. As a deeply conflicted and contradictory genre, thesis hatements speak strongly of the conflicted and contradictory role and of the precarious un/popularity of academia in contemporary US culture.
Participating Audiences, Imagined Public Spheres, 2012
Joe McGinniss’s immensely successful 1969 bestseller The Selling of the President 1968 is often c... more Joe McGinniss’s immensely successful 1969 bestseller The Selling of the President 1968 is often considered an early documentary piece on an increasing mediatization and commercialization of American politics. Reading the book for its narrative strategies and contextualizing it in the discursive heritage of (anti-)advertising literature, this paper suggests an alternative perspective: It reads the book as a text that is, on several levels, concerned with the difficulties of constructing and maintaining the public sphere as a textual space and that, ultimately, uses the arena of politics as a site for this project. By dialoguing McGinniss’s text with two pieces from this discourse, John G. Schneider’s The Golden Kazoo and Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, I will thus explore the ways in which Selling uses the description of Richard M. Nixon’s campaign for the presidency to extend and explore this discursive heritage’s concern about the public sphere as well as the narrative difficulties the book encounters in its attempts to use this tradition to construct the public sphere as a textual space.
Poetics of Politics: Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture, 2015
books by Sebastian M Herrmann
This volume explores the ‘Americanization’ of Central and Eastern Europe during and after the Col... more This volume explores the ‘Americanization’ of Central and Eastern Europe during and after the Cold War. It seeks to revisit and expand this critical concept by investigating previously overlooked perspectives and new comparative constellations.
The Iron Curtain has frequently been seen as a tightly sealed border between East and West. However, as the contributions to this collection illustrate, it proved remarkably permeable for American goods and lifestyles which generated and gratified a range of often ambivalent desires and fantasies.
This book attends to the ensuing ‘messiness’ of cultural transfer and mixing, as well as to the role ‘America’ has played in these processes. In twelve case studies, a broad spectrum of disciplinary angles and diverse geo-biographical horizons come together to examine the elusive dynamics of ambivalent Americanizations in areas such as music, television, and material culture.
Papers by Sebastian M Herrmann
aspeers: emerging voices in american studies
hen you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you're don... more hen you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you're done, you have to step back and look at the forest" (King 201). Stephen King's metaphor for the writing process might as well illustrate the experience of editing. In our first semester in the American Studies MA program at Leipzig University, we were assigned the challenging and immensely enriching task of preparing the eighth issue of aspeers for publication. The doubleblind review process involved a substantial amount of (re-)reading, analyzing arguments, discussing strengths and overall academic value of each submission, weighing its potential contribution to the final issue, selecting, writing back to authors, and editing their resubmissions. All this work cultivated a set of valuable skills for the editors' academic lives; for the authors, it provided an opportunity to have their articles critically examined, receive constructive peer feedback, and finally see their work published in a journal of increasing reputation and international reach. Following an intense period of almost "day after day scanning and identifying" the roots and core ideas of this year's contributions as well as pruning sentences for more fruitful results, we now "step back" to look at the diversity of perspectives offered in the present edition and to explore some of those areas where our papers intersect and where they speak to each other.
Akademisches Lesen
Zusammenfassung Dieser Beitrag untersucht akademisches Lesen als soziale (und digitale) Netzwerkp... more Zusammenfassung Dieser Beitrag untersucht akademisches Lesen als soziale (und digitale) Netzwerkpraxis aus medientheoretisch-didaktischer Perspektive. Am Beispiel eines mit Erstsemesterstudierenden an der Universität Leipzig erprobtenSocial Hypertext Readers (SHRIMP) diskutieren wir die Potenziale und Herausforderungen eines so verstandenen Lesens. Zunächst stellt der Beitrag akademisches Lesen als Netzwerkpraxis vor, um dann zweitens Intertextualität als didaktisches Prinzip zu beleuchten und drittens akademische Lese-, Aneignungs-und Interaktionspraktiken der Studierenden anhand gewonnener empirischer Daten zu analysieren. Aufgezeigt werden aufschlussreiche Spannungsfelder zwischen der inhärenten Präsentialität des Lesens in Netzen und Bedürfnissen der Autorisierung und Kanonisierung.
SHRIMP http://www.shrimpp.de ist ein Lehr-Lern-Experiment, das im Rahmen von Lehrpraxis im Transf... more SHRIMP http://www.shrimpp.de ist ein Lehr-Lern-Experiment, das im Rahmen von Lehrpraxis im Transfer am Institut für Amerikanistik der Universität Leipzig https:// americanstudies.uni-leipzig.de und an der Professur für Literatur Nordamerikas der TU Dresden https://tu-dresden.de/gsw/slk/ anglistik_amerikanistik/na-literatur durchgeführt wurde: Das Lehrmaterial von Seminaren an beiden Standorten wurde als gemeinsames Social Hypertext Universum umgesetzt und über eine digitale Online-Plattform in das Lehrangebot integriert. Anstatt als traditionelle, lose Blattsammlung, lesen die Studierenden die Seminartexte online auf einer Social- Media-Plattform. Dort können sie die Inhalte entdecken, annotieren, individuell erschließen und für den eigenen Lernerfolg aktivieren, indem sie die den meisten Studierenden wohlvertrauten Interaktionsformen der Social Media (likes, Kommentare) verwenden. Das zugrundeliegende Modell wurde in Leipzig entwickelt, durch den Transfer mit Dresden aber sowohl in...
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articles by Sebastian M Herrmann
book chapters by Sebastian M Herrmann
“Post-Truth = Post-Narrative?: Reading the Narrative Liminality of Transnational Right-Wing Populism.” The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies, edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, and Takayuki Tatsumi, Routledge, 2019, pp. 288-96.
books by Sebastian M Herrmann
The Iron Curtain has frequently been seen as a tightly sealed border between East and West. However, as the contributions to this collection illustrate, it proved remarkably permeable for American goods and lifestyles which generated and gratified a range of often ambivalent desires and fantasies.
This book attends to the ensuing ‘messiness’ of cultural transfer and mixing, as well as to the role ‘America’ has played in these processes. In twelve case studies, a broad spectrum of disciplinary angles and diverse geo-biographical horizons come together to examine the elusive dynamics of ambivalent Americanizations in areas such as music, television, and material culture.
Papers by Sebastian M Herrmann
“Post-Truth = Post-Narrative?: Reading the Narrative Liminality of Transnational Right-Wing Populism.” The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies, edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, and Takayuki Tatsumi, Routledge, 2019, pp. 288-96.
The Iron Curtain has frequently been seen as a tightly sealed border between East and West. However, as the contributions to this collection illustrate, it proved remarkably permeable for American goods and lifestyles which generated and gratified a range of often ambivalent desires and fantasies.
This book attends to the ensuing ‘messiness’ of cultural transfer and mixing, as well as to the role ‘America’ has played in these processes. In twelve case studies, a broad spectrum of disciplinary angles and diverse geo-biographical horizons come together to examine the elusive dynamics of ambivalent Americanizations in areas such as music, television, and material culture.
The paper has been accepted for publication in a volume on "The United States and the Question of Rights" to be published with Universitätsverlag Winter.