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. My focus rests on the novel’s treatment of two pairs of characters that challenge the visual confidence of both realism and race, pairs that exemplify what Samira Kawash has called 'interracial twins:' sets of characters whose parties 'actually,' ostensibly belong to different 'races,' yet whom the text presents as strikingly similar in their appearance. In its characterization of and narratives surrounding these 'twins,' the novel exposes the techniques by which racial discourse naturalizes itself and unmasks race as a textual construct, generated by stories and documents that dangerously sustain a reality of their own. / Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG-geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.

The legal drama episode from which this dialogue is taken depicts an impossible case: a Sudanese immigrant, who lost most of his family to the violence in Darfur, wants to sue the U.S. government for failing to intervene in the face of obvious genocide. The case is unwinnable. Lori Colson’s construction of a legal basis for the case is more than shaky. But neither the client nor his lawyers expect to win the case. Their proclaimed objective – to “make noise” – pinpoints a significant cultural potential of litigation, of its “real” practice in the courtroom and, even more importantly, in its various forms of mass-medialization and fictionalization: to raise public awareness about instances of injustice, to educate the public and encourage civic debate.

Julie/Julia stands out in several ways. What had begun, in 2002/2003, as a highly popular blog, in which New Yorker Julie Powell tracks her experience of cooking all the recipes in Julia Child’s classic cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cookery, became one of the first notable, commercially successful "blooks"—a neologism that denotes blogs adapted into books. As a visible sign of this achievement, The Ju-lie/Julia Project was awarded with the inaugural “Blooker Prize” in 2006. A few years later, Julie/Julia again pioneered in being the first blog (or blook, for that matter) to be adapted into a Hollywood movie, Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia. In the following, I want to discuss Julie/Julia, and its adaptations from blog to book to film, as an instructive case study of life writing in the digital age.

Victorian women used strategies that allowed them to not only work as actresses but also as directors, producers, translators, and playwrights, thus transforming theatre at the cusp of the New Drama. Female friendships were particularly integral to these strategies as women employed secretiveness and anonymity, charm and shrewdness, networking and collaborating in small and large groups to meet their creative and professional goals. Through these means of sociability women enlarged their spheres of influence beyond the stage. Elizabeth Robins is a superb example of these strategies, particularly when theatrical realism was her primary focus. Though she also collaborated well with men, William Archer and Henry James among them, it was Robins’s female friends who helped her to establish a London career. This project shows how Robins and her women friends contributed to the New Drama in dynamic, critical, and often-secret ways. Marion Lea and Robins finagled the rights to Hedda Gabler in 1891. Lea and Florence Bell helped Robins to translate plays for production and to develop new acting techniques suited to realism. After Lea left England, Robins and Bell joined Grein’s Independent Theatre Society to present their anonymously written protest play Alan’s Wife. These efforts illustrate the adaptive functions of female friendships. Through closer examination of their relationships, particularly the one Robins and Bell called a sisterhood, we see the nurturing functions of female friendships. This project explains some of the reasons why, despite being famous in their day, these women disappeared from history. It was not just because of male control of the theatre, but was also a product of their own desires to protect themselves. Secrecy had served them well in the 1890s, but their fame faded as even friends forgot them. Yet, since female socialization taught them to be group-focused, these women’s stories are highly pertinent to the history of the theatre, an art form that is collaborative by its nature. Through study of their work and their relationships, we can fill some gaps in theatre history, women’s history, and nineteenth-century history, adding resonance to their voices that may carry to coming generations.

This thesis emerges out of a study of Thomas Pynchon’s work, from certain qualities and attributes that recur in his writing, notably the forces and hauntings of technology; the project is, further, alert to these phenomena as it is to Pynchon’s prose technique which exemplifies these aspects in its proliferative connections and modes of association. The study, whose title similarly derives from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, offers readings of literary, historical and visual texts, and examines the radioactive substance, as well as the cultural implications and material manifestations, of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and of its support mechanisms. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, the thesis focuses on the interface between geography and technology, and identifies how missile technology is expressed, developed and linked to already existing narratives of particular US states. It uses methods and interpretations drawn from the creative mythologies of Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Jefferson, the fields of cultural and military studies, theories of technology formulated by Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, Laurence Rickels and Paul N. Edwards, architectural and spatial theories developed by Henri Lefebvre and Anthony Vidler, and Cold War horror and science fiction movies, all of which frame the wider issues involved. The premise for the project is the representation of American power, or of the ‘American spirit’, in D.H Lawrence’s words, as a monster, a vampire which feeds on the subjects of the nation; this notion of vampirism is latent in the project’s four chapters, on Colorado, Kansas, Cape Canaveral and New York, which seek to address different aspects of the country’s flights into (nuclear) enclosures. The first chapter, ‘Excavation’, focuses on the state of Colorado and uranium mining, and examines the missile’s substance, its nuclear core, through close readings of Stephen King’s The Shining. The second chapter, ‘Preservation’, is concerned with the state of Kansas and the missile silo, and employs the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Allen Ginsberg, Thomas Pynchon, Frank Baum and a range of political and military studies to arrive at a consideration of the form of the missile silo as the epitome of an architecture of storage. The third chapter, ‘Evacuation’, homes in on Cape Canaveral, guided by J.G. Ballard’s Space Age short stories and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and utilises archival material from James E. Webb, NASA administrator from 1961–1967, to argue that narratives of progress and possibilities of movement are bound to the need to seek refuge in static enclosures. The fourth chapter, ‘Transmission’, zeroes in on New York, and is concerned with missile defence; it deploys analysis of the works of H.G Wells, Jonathan Schell, Nikola Tesla, Ronald Reagan and Elaine Scarry to discuss the transmission of rays, and of rumours.

The following essay addresses Alexandr Volko's adaption and appropriation of L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz". Exceedingly popular throughthout the Easern bloc, Volkov's novels have endeared a magical setting and cast of characters to readers who rarely knew of their American origins. I discuss the Wizard's 'travels' throught the Iron Curtain as an incidence of cultural exchange at once motivated by and subverting Cold War cultural politics. I suggest that it is not so much the changes to which Baum's narrative universe has been subjected on its way from West to East that makes this case study remarkable but the ways in wich the two Wizards have been interpreted to fit contestable notions of 'American' and 'Soviet' culture.

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. My focus rests on the novel’s treatment of two pairs of characters that challenge the visual confidence of both realism and race, pairs that exemplify what Samira Kawash has called 'interracial twins:' sets of characters whose parties 'actually,' ostensibly belong to different 'races,' yet whom the text presents as strikingly similar in their appearance. In its characterization of and narratives surrounding these 'twins,' the novel exposes the techniques by which racial discourse naturalizes itself and unmasks race as a textual construct, generated by stories and documents that dangerously sustain a reality of their own. / Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG-geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.

This thesis is the first full-length study of the fiction-of Kathy Acker, a radical and transgressive American female writer (1947-1997). The study maps the development of Acker's fiction by focusing on the political dimension of her aesthetic strategies. It explores the politics of plagiarism and appropriation; the subversive representation of gender and sexual politics; and the anarchistic impulse of Acker's work. The main theoretical and political approaches employed are: feminist theory, poststructuralism, abjection and anarchism. The study begins with an introduction to Acker's life, since there is a significant if problematic autobiographical impulse in her writing, and her socio-cultural context. It proceeds to a detailed critical exploration of work published between 1968 and 1986, drawing attention to Acker's affinities with a poststructuralist project. Acker's strategies of juxtaposition, paradox, and contradiction, alongside her fragmented, non-linear, digressive narratives, are read as a form of social critique. Her use and abuse of the white, male, Euro-centric canon is examined in light of the construction of female sexuality, and Acker's focus on phallocentric language as a source of subjugation is also considered. The study then argues for and interrogates Acker's move towards a more affirmative narrative strategy before looking in detail at her fiction of the 1990s - fiction which, until now, has received slight attention. Through close readings of her later novels, the study illustrates how Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject is fruitful for an examination of Acker's work, and examines cross-cultural intertextuality (from the horror film to the avant-garde). It also relates the trope of piracy that is present in Acker's later works to the political ideology of anarchism. The conclusion to the thesis argues that Acker's strength lies in her uncompromising belief in the avant-garde, and details her sustained attempt to make critically incisive political art.

This thesis explores the fiction of American author Richard Yates to propose that his work provides an insistent questioning and alternative vision of postwar American culture. Such an approach is informed by a revisionist account of four distinct yet interconnected areas of postwar culture: the role of the non-heroic soldier stepping in and out of World War II; suburbanisation and fashioning of anti-suburban performance; demarcation of gender roles and unraveling of sexual conservatism in the 1950s; consideration of what constituted the normative within postwar discourse and representations of mental illness in Yates’ work. These four spheres of interest form the backbone to this study in its combined aim of reclaiming Yates’ fiction in line with a more progressive historical framework while shaping a new critical appreciation of his fiction. Such analysis will be primed by an opening discussion that illustrates how Yates’ fiction has frequently been ensconced in a limited interpretative lens: an approach, that I argue, has kept Yates on the periphery of the canon and ultimately resulted in the neglect of an author who provided a rich, progressive and historically significant dialogue of postwar American life. This PhD arrives at a point when Yatesian scholarship is finally gaining momentum after the cumulative impact of a comprehensive biography, a faithful film adaptation of his seminal text Revolutionary Road (1961), plus the recent re-issue of his catalogue of work. An assessment as to why he remained on the margins of success for the duration of his career is therefore of pressing interest in light of this recent critical and commercial recognition.

Cette thèse se propose d’analyser les conditions de création et les modalités particulières du malaise définitoire de lafiction evensonienne. Ce mal-être caractérise d’abord une culture religieuse, celle du mormonisme, dont Evenson présente ce qu’il considère être la violence intrinsèque. Ainsi envisagé, le mormonisme sert de matrice aux délires des prophètes fous qui parcourent les textes, littéralisant le Verbe divin pour le pire. Ce malaise culturel et religieux trouve son pendant formel dans l’hybridation générique particulière de l’oeuvre. L’incongruité fondamentale des textes qui brassent des genres aussi divers que le gothique, le western, la fiction policère, et la sciencefiction, ouvre un espace de trouble herméneutique caractéristique du postmodernisme. En mettant en déroute nos horizons d’attente, le texte evensonien met en crise le partage entre réel et fiction, et nous confronte à l’angoisse terrifiante de la perte du sens. Ces textes qui défaillent sont le lieu de dissonances, signes de l’absurdité brutale du monde qui a perdu sa cohérence fragile. Les oeuvres nous invitent au coeur d’un désert moral dans lequel rougeoie l’effroi du sacré. Dans leur violence figurale, elles inaugurent une nouvelle relation au sensible en conditionnant une réception particulièrement affective du lecteur en proie à l’effondrement de ses repères moraux, herméneutiques, et existentiels / This dissertation wishes to analyze the conditions of creation and the particular modalities of the malaise defining of Evenson’s fiction. That feeling of uneasiness first characterizes Mormonism, a religious culture that Evenson presents asintrinsically violent. As such, Mormonism appears as a matrix to the delirium of the mad prophets found wandering in thetexts as they literalize the Word of God for the worst. This cultural and religious malaise finds its expression in the particulargeneric hybridization of the work. The fundamental incongruity of the text, cross-pollinating genres as diverse as the Gothic,the Western, detective fiction and Science-Fiction, opens a space of hermeneutical trouble defining of Postmodernism. Byunsettling our expectations, Evenson’s texts question the difference between reality and fiction, and thus shape a particularform of anxiety that emerges from the loss of meaning. Those works are the locus of dissonances that sign the brutal absurdity of a world whose fragile consistency has been shattered. They invite us at the heart of a moral desert, both sacredand dreadful. The figural violence of the texts programs a new kind of sensible, affective reception from the reader whosemoral, hermeneutical and existential bearings collaps