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 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)

Die vorliegende Dissertation deduziert eine bisher unbeachtete ‚alternate‘ Praxis modernen Schreibens aus der Analyse dreier experimenteller Stadtromane, die weder bei zeitgenössischen Kommentatoren, noch im bisherigen Forschungsdiskurs zum 'amerikanischen Modernismus' Beachtung gefunden hat. Diese Praxis wird exemplarisch in Waldo Franks City Block (1922), Nathan Aschs The Office (1925) und Mary Bordens Flamingo or the American Tower (1927) herausgearbeitet. Die Arbeit argumentiert, dass diese diachrone Missachtung/Nichtbeachtung darin begründet liegt, dass die Romane von ihren AutorInnen unabhängig voneinander, doch nahezu zeitgleich als Prosatexte konzipiert wurden, die eine Gegenläufigkeit zu dem normativen Akzelerationsdiskurs erkennen lassen, welcher sich in verschiedensten Domänen amerikanischen Lebens und Handelns während der ersten Beschleunigungswelle (ca. 1880-1929) herausgebildet hatte. In diesen Romanen finden sich einzigartige, doch vergleichbare stilistische Mechanismen sowie thematische/ideologische Ausrichtungen, die eine generative Agenda (‚generative agenda‘) erkennen lassen: ‚Schnelle‘ textuelle Stile werden appropriiert und/oder mit ‚langsamen‘ Stilen kombiniert (‚aesthetic of in-betweenness‘), um Lesern für die negativen Folgen von Beschleunigung zu sensibilisieren; das Phänomen an sich wird in nuancierter, handlungsorientierter Form neu verhandelt und mögliche Bewältigungsstrategien entwickelt; stilistische, formale und inhaltliche Mechanismen werden angewendet, um eine entsprechende Aktivierung des Lesers herbeizuführen.

This dissertation uses a functional systemic approach to language to examine the construction of the respective first-person narrators of nine of the most popular, commercially successful and therefore influential African American slave narratives published between 1837 and 1862 (Roper, Grandy, Douglass, Brown, Bibb, Northup, Ball, Jacobs, Picquet). This corpus of more than 410,000 words was scanned for various linguistic features such as transitivity of verbs, nominalizations, and several syntactic features. The texts chosen differ as to their methods of production. Some of them were written by the first person narrators themselves, while others were either extensively edited, dictated to an amanuensis, or in some other way controlled. The dialectics of creation and representation through language results in the leading question in this study: how do the first-person slave narrators identify and create a personality for themselves through their texts? This dissertation thus focuses on the linguistic means by which the first-person slave narrator creates what is defined as a “discoursal self”, which helped the narrators to achieve one of their most important goals, namely, to be accepted as reliable. The dissertation consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 introduces a sociohistorical account of slavery, resistance against slavery, abolition, and the development of the slave narrative. The chapter shows that the African American slave narrative was not a completely new and original genre but an amalgamation of a variety of preexisting white and black literary forms. The second chapter is more theoretical and deals with discourse, power, and ideology in the slave narrative. Chapter 3 approaches the language of the slave narrative. The small corpus of scholarly texts that tackle language and style in this genre is reviewed. As an alternative to these approaches, critical discourse analysis (CDA) according to Norman Fairclough is suggested. It eliminates the a priori categorization of specific linguistic features as stylistically significant, because it is based on a functional view of language that perceives linguistic expression as choice on various levels. Every choice is considered meaningful and, according to its presence, absence, or clustering in a given co-text, potentially stylistic. Michael Halliday’s systemic functional grammar is introduced as the basis for the ensuing text analysis. Chapter 4 introduces the first quantitative observations about the density and distribution of the first-person singular pronoun in the narratives. This characteristic is then placed in relation to syntactic condensation in the forms of ellipsis, finiteness and nominalization, all of which are reviewed quantitatively. Finally, this chapter introduces the system of transitivity according to Halliday, Matthiessen, and others. It explains the distinction between the individual process types and provides a quantitative overview of the individual transitivity profiles within each narrative. Chapter 5 represents the main part of this dissertation. Each of the nine narratives is analyzed individually as to the presence of the I-pronoun in the text and the use and distribution of process types. In this way patterns of foregrounded or favored usages against absences of others emerge and contribute to the discoursal selves that the individual narrators present/construct of themselves. These preferred usages in general as well as in their local distributions are examined in detail. The quantitative observations supply the basis for further qualitative analyses derived from a large number of examples from the texts. Thus it is possible to show that each of the narratives is linguistically unique, which results in an individual construction of the respective I-narrator. The use of pronouns, process types and syntactic reconfigurations reveals how control over the activities as well as over the text is constructed, which can be directly related to issues of power. The Summary provides a synopsis of the previous quantitative and qualitative analyses and associates the quantitative results with characteristics of written and oral texts in general. Finally, it thus becomes possible to rank the nine narratives on a cline between predominantly oral and chiefly written characteristics.

Die vorliegende Dissertation stellt eine Interpretation von Thomas Paines THE AGE OF REASON (1794) und Ralph Waldo Emersons NATURE (1836) als politiktheoretische Traktate vor, die normative Demokratiekonstrukte entwickeln. Diese Demokratiekonstrukte werden anhand ihrer Parameter vergleichend und historisierend gelesen. Die Annahme ist hierbei, dass sich die normativen Demokratieentwürfe beider Autoren mithilfe der Denkfigur des rhizomatischen Panoptizismus explizieren lassen. Die Dissertation leitet diese Denkfigur anhand von Texten des französischen Poststrukturalismus und auf Grundlage des soziologischen Ansatzes der Surveillance Studies her und erläutert seine Relevanz für das Verständnis und die Verhandlung von Demokratie in den Epochen der frühen Republik und des Antebellum in den USA. Ebenso findet eine Analyse der diskursiven Vermittlung dieser Denkfigur durch das religiöse Vokabular von Deismus, Unitarismus und Transzendentalismus in beiden Traktaten statt. Ein ausführliches close reading legt schließlich dar, wie einzelne Parameter eines rhizomatischen Panoptizismus in den Texten entwickelt, repräsentiert und diskutiert werden. / The present dissertation introduces an interpretation of Thomas Paine’s THE AGE OF REASON (1794) and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s NATURE (1836) as politico-theoretical tracts that develop normative constructions of democracy. At the core of the analysis lies a comparative and historicist reading of the parameters of these constructions. The thesis informing the analysis posits that both normative constructions of democracy can be made explicit with the aid of the concept of a rhizomatic panopticism. The dissertation develops this concept on the basis of French poststructuralist texts and with theoretical approaches from the sociological field of Surveillance Studies in mind, explaining its relevance for the understanding of democracy during the Early-Republic and Antebellum periods in the USA. Furthermore, the discursive mediation of the introduced concept through the religious vocabularies of Deism, Unitarianism, and Transcendentalism in both tracts receives attention. Finally, a close reading elucidates how the distinct parameters of a rhizomatic panopticism are developed, represented, and discussed in both texts.

Dieses Buch ruft das Genre Kino der (kollektiven) Ängste ins Leben und beschreibt und analysiert dieses Genre anhand beispielhafter Fallstudien nach dem 9/11. Es liefert vielschichtige Filmanalysen zu vier Hollywood-Filmen; Crash (2004), The Brave One (2007), The Company Men (2010) und The Purge: Election Year (2016). Diese Forschung stellt einen Versuch dar, eine abgrenzende Definition dieses Kinos als filmisches (Sub-)Genre zu konzipieren und einen Überblick über die Eigenschaften dieses Kinos zu geben, wobei besonderes Augenmerk auf post-9/11 Filme mit der Angst-Narrativ der inneren Bedrohung gelegt wird. Dieses Genre steht an der Schnittstelle ästhetischer Erkenntnisse, historischer Entwicklungen, kultureller Phänomene und politisch-ideologischer Schattierungen, was die Hybridisierung zu einem der Hauptmerkmale dieser Filmgattung macht. Diese Studie betrachtet das kollektive Angstkino nach dem 9/11 als eine Ansammlung historischer Ängste, von denen einige aus genau dieser Zeit stammen (wie der Patriot Act und die ständigen Alarmstufen Rot), während andere auf frühere Epochen der US-Geschichte zurückgehen (wie die Ankunft der ersten europäischen Siedler in einer unbekannten feindlichen Umgebung, die Hexenjagd in Salem, der Rote Schrecken, die Bürgerrechtsbewegung und die satanische Panik). Anders gesagt, das Buch untersucht die inneren Assoziationen der Filme mit einer Reihe historischer Ängste von der Gründung Amerikas bis zur Gegenwart. Darüber hinaus geht diese Studie den Echos dieser Ängste nach und beleuchtet ihre Ausdrucksformen und ihre Echos in anderen Filmen, literarischen Werken, Genres und Mythen. Obwohl die untersuchten Ängste oft mit relativ spezifischen Problemen verbunden sind (wie Race-Ängste und Kulturkriege, Kriminalitätsängste und Waffenkultur, Wirtschaftsängste und der Finanzcrash sowie politische Ängste und Wahlparanoia), sind sie immer noch überwiegend, nach Ansicht der Autorin, das Produkt eines halben Jahrhunderts neoliberaler Politik. / This book brings 'the cinema of (collective) anxieties' to life as a genre, and it describes and analyzes this genre based on exemplary post-9/11 case studies. Thus, it provides multilayered film analyses of four Hollywood movies; Crash (2004), The Brave One (2007), The Company Men (2010), and The Purge: Election Year (2016). This research constitutes an attempt to conceptualize a demarcating definition of this cinema as a cinematic (sub)genre and to provide an outline of the traits and characteristics of this cinema while paying special attention to the cycle of post-9/11 movies depicting the fear narrative of internal threat. This genre stands at a junction of aesthetic realizations, historical developments, cultural phenomena, and political-ideological shades, which makes hybridization one of the leading features of this cinematic genre. This study approaches the post-9/11 collective anxiety cinema as an accumulation of historical anxieties, some of which stem from this very period (such as the Patriot Act and the constant Red Alerts), while others date back to earlier eras in US history (such as the arrival of the first European settlers in an unknown hostile environment, the Salem Witch Hunt, the Red Scare, the civil rights movement, and the Satanic panic). In other words, the book explores the films' inner associations with bundles of historical anxieties from the inception of America until the current era. Furthermore, this study traces the echoes of these anxieties and highlights their forms of expression and their echoes in other movies, literary works, genres, and myths. Although the examined anxieties are often tied to relatively specific problems (like racial anxieties and culture wars; crime anxieties and gun culture; economic anxieties and the financial crash; political anxiety and election paranoia), they are still largely, in the author's view, the product of half a century of neoliberal policies.