"The legal drama – a staple of American popular culture – has evolved as one of the "masculine" genres in the gendered landscape of television culture. A type of workplace drama focusing on professional settings historically dominated by men, it traditionally dramatizes "a world where men played the only important parts and where male bonding and inter-male conflict were dominant elements in the narrative," to adapt Kenneth MacKinnon’s general observations about "masculine" tv (69). Yet the gendering of the (traditional) legal drama goes well beyond the ubiquity of male characters: It is deeply ingrained in the figuration of the lawyer that classic instances of the genre established..." / "Der vorliegende Beitrag ist die pre-print Version. Bitte nutzen Sie für Zitate die Seitenzahl der Original-Version." (siehe Quellenangabe)

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG-geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich. / The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq initiated a surge of texts by US soldiers who utilized recent Web 2.0 technology to forge new types of war narratives, such as the so-called "milblogs." Milblogs merge letter and journal writing with journalistic reporting, and they maintain contact between soldiers and their social environment. They are at once public and private communication. Military psychology since Vietnam has referred to warrior traditions of Native American communities to discuss public narration and ceremonial acknowledgment of a soldier’s war experience as vital elements for veteran readjustment and trauma recovery. This article analyzes an exemplary milblog to argue that the interaction between blogger and audience does similar cultural work and has comparable ceremonial and, therefore, therapeutic functions: Soldiers publicly share their experience, reflect on it with their audience, receive appreciation and support, and thus mutually (re-)negotiate group identity

In this article, I investigate the video game BioShock for its political and cultural work and argue that it offers a popular platform to discuss the politically charged question of choice, both inside and outside the realm of video games. In a first section, I introduce the game’s basic plot and setting, propose a way to study how video games operate narratively, and briefly discuss the ‘political’ dimension of games in general. Afterwards, I look at how BioShock is influenced by Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of individual choice and self-interest, and I trace this influence specifically in the game’s main antagonist, Andrew Ryan, and its setting, the underwater city of Rapture. With these elements as a basis, I analyze how BioShock engages with the politics of choice, focusing on a major twist scene in the game to demonstrate how BioShock deals with the question of choice on a metatextual level. Reading this scene in the context of the game’s overall narrative, specifically of moral choices in the game that lead to different endings, I argue that the game metatextually connects the political question of choice inherent in objectivism to the narrative and the playing of the game, pointing to the ambivalences inherent in questions of choice, agency, and free will.

Whether invoking the noble—or the cruel—savage, the image of Native Americans has always included notions of war and fighting. Non-Natives have attributed character traits to them such as cunning, stealth, endurance, and bravery; and they have used these im ages to denounce or to idealize Native Americans. In the U.S., a prolon ged history of frontier conflict, multiplied by popular frontier myths, has resulted in a collective memory of Indians as fighters. While images of fighting Indians have entered American everyday language, Germans have had no significant collective history of American frontier settlement and conflicts with Native Americans. Nevertheless, they have acquired a number of idioms and figures of speech relating to Indian images due to the romanticized euphoria for Native themes, spurred by popular nove ls and Wild West shows.

Als Ferdinand Pettrich im September 1835 in den USA eintraf, waren Vorstellungen vom Wesen amerikanischer Ureinwohner in den deutschen Staaten bereits ausgeprägt und folgten bestimmten Mustern. Die Zeit der Indianerbegeisterung als Massenphänomen, die Karl May zum meistgelesenen deutschsprachigen Schriftsteller machte und Hunderttausende in die Vorstellungen amerikanischer und deutscher Wild-West-Shows trieb, lag damals zwar noch etliche Jahrzehnte in der Zukunft, und die bildlichen Vorstellungen vom berittenen Krieger der Prärien als dem ‚Standardindianer' würden sich erst ab Ende der 1830er- und während der 1840er-Jahre mit den Illustrationen von Bodmer und Catlin entwickeln. Jedoch war ‚der Indianer' bereits ein fester Bestandteil in der Vorstellungswelt von Amerika wie auch der eigenen Gruppenidentität. Bereits an den ersten transatlantischen Erkundungsreisen waren Deutsche beteiligt, frühe Berichte über die Bewohner dieser ‚neuen Welt' verbreiteten sich Dank der Entwicklung des Buchdrucks schnell durch Mitteleuropa. Beim Eintreffen Pettrichs in Amerika war Coopers Letzter Mohikaner bereits in der deutschen Übersetzung erschienen und zum Verkaufsschlager geworden. / When Ferdinand Pettrich arrived in the United States in September 1835, perceptions about the nature of Native Americans had already become established and followed certain patterns. The era of Indian enthusiasm as a mass phenomenon—which made Karl May the most-read writer in the German-speaking world and drove hundreds of thousands to American and German Wild West shows—at that time still lay a number of decades in the future. Pictorial representations of mounted warriors of the prairie, which became the ‘standard Indian,’ were first developed through the illustrations of Karl Bodmer and George Catlin around the end of the 1830s and during the 1840s. Nevertheless, 'the Indian' was already a standard part of the vocabulary of perception for America—as well as of the Germans’ self-perception as a group. Germans took part in the fi rst transatlantic explorations, and early reports about the inhabitants of this ‘new world’ spread across Central Europe thanks to the quick development of the printing press. Upon Pettrich’s arrival in America, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last Mohican had already been translated into German, becoming a bestseller there.

The German fascination with Native Americans has been a tradition of several centuries, beginning with the first reports about the New World and its peoples. The main features of German Indian imagery have evolved since the early nineteenth century and have evoked the phenomenon of mass euphoria for Indians in the late 1800s, a euphoria which lasted for more than one hundred years. This fascination has been a source of curiosity for both Native peoples and scholars.

David Mamet's Race is overdetermined by the paratexts hovering around it, most notably the essays in which he publicizes his conservative turn. This textual environment accentuates the text's participation in a contemporary political discourse that social scientists have theorized as post-racialism. But Race accommodates more complex and conflicted meanings: I read the play not so much as an advertisement of post-race ideology but as a text that exposes and deconstructs this ideology. I argue that this layer of meaning is primarily an effect of the legal drama genre on which the text draws. The conventions of the legal drama that Race invokes activate meanings in the text that cannot be fully controlled by the backlash-agenda articulated in the author's essays. / "Der vorliegende Beitrag ist die pre-print Version. Bitte nutzen Sie für Zitate die Seitenzahl der Original-Version." (siehe Quellenangabe)

New Historicist scholarship has left a major impact on the study of mid-19th century notions of gender and nationhood. It has effectively challenged an all but consensual reliance on the paradigm of separate spheres as appropriate interpretive framework for this pivotal period in US history—a period in which the geographical as well as discursive boundaries of the nation were subject to intense debate and conflict. ...

This paper reads Larry Beinhart’s novel The Librarian (2004) and its nonfiction companion Fog Facts (2005) as a double attempt at writing that is politically invested in representing reality but that nevertheless is openly aware of the postmodern crisis of representation. In this sense, I read both books as indicative of a broad cultural search for forms of writing that engage their readers’ reality without simply attempting to return to a less complicated moment before postmodernism. The paper situates both books within crucial textual contexts: a broad ‘epistemic panic’ about the facts and reality at the time, a surge of political nonfiction published in response to George W. Bush’s Presidency, and a longer tradition of political fiction. Tracing how the novel struggles with its nonfiction aspects and how the nonfiction book relies on fiction to make its point, I then look at how the two books evoke political affect to have a realist appeal of sorts despite their insistence on the precarious nature of all realist representation. Reading both books as distinctly popular, mass-market products and thus bringing together the debate around post-postmodernism from literary studies with an interest in reading pleasures informed by popular culture studies, I argue that the two books constitute decidedly popular attempts at a new, meta-aware yet politically engaged textuality.

This essay brings a fundamentally Americanist question to bear on Leo Marx’s fundamental piece of Americanist scholarship: What cultural work does the machine-in-the-garden trope perform in literary texts, texts that—as Marx highlighted—emphatically invoke the socio-economic upheavals of industrialization? Rather than asking what the trope means, I am interested in what it does in textual environments that, literally or metaphorically, navigate a protean discourse of class.1 I want to pursue this question in a reading of two texts that directly engage with industrialization and its machinery, two pieces of literature written in markedly different circumstances—one by an eminently canonical writer of the American Renaissance, Herman Melville, the other by a woman who worked in the factories of Lowell, the period’s model industrial town. My reading of these texts aims to draw attention to the ways in which representations of the machine in the garden are perspectivized: While engaging with the juxtaposition of nature and technology, these representations always also work on negotiating social subjectivities—on defining, contrasting, authorizing, critiquing subject positions in the rapidly shifting social matrix of an industrializing USA. In other words, I propose to not only attend to the texts’ images of the machine in the garden but also to the imaging that they depict. The texts with which I will be concerned dramatize this imaging as work that is deeply situated and entangled in other practices of selffashioning, practices which resonate with industrialism’s new regimes of social difference. Herman Melville’s short-story "The Tartarus of Maids" (1855) constructs a narrator who renders his encounter with industrialism in a rhetoric greatly informed by the machine-in-the-garden trope. By correlating this figurative practice with the notably limited and biased perspective of its narrator—a perspective whose marking laminates class and gender—the text exposes the work of socio-economic self-fashioning enabled by the trope. The sketch "A Merrimack Reverie" (1840), published in the "factory-girl"2 magazine The Lowell Offering, develops a motif that seems to invert the trope Marx identified—the motif of horticulture in the factory. This motif unfolds much ambiguity in the text which, I will suggest, registers the precarious quality of the magazine’s project to establish the ‘factory girl’ as an affirmative subject position. / "Der vorliegende Beitrag ist die pre-print Version. Bitte nutzen Sie für Zitate die Seitenzahl der Original-Version." (siehe Quellenangabe)