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.

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.

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.