Marc Priewe Livres

'Textualizing Illness' investigates how colonial New England writings represented and contributed to the meaning-endowment of diseases. It explores how the textual configurations of illnesses changed in the wake of the scientific revolution, growing numbers of non-Puritan settlers and African slaves, and increasing contacts with Native Americans. The representations of colonial body perceptions and illness experiences are often hidden in a broad textual archive and thus require „reading across“ different texts and authors to analyze the positions and functions of the sick body in both medical and cultural discourses. In the illness narratives surveyed here, medical issues - from actual practices to intellectual responses to diseases - illustrate how early American literature and society developed a regional distinctiveness while being embedded in transnational circuits of knowledge formation and cultural practices.

Since the early 1970s, a number of Chicana/o writers and artists have interrogated the nation as a regulative idea for cultural identity and social cohesion, and have favored postnational and transnational imaginaries. 'Writing Transit' illustrates how Chicana/o narratives refuse to function as disseminators for a uniform national project. Instead, by representing contact zones between Northern Mexico and Southern California, they create fictional universes in which cultural „heres“ and „theres“ become increasingly blurred. With its focus on unsettled and unsettling cultural positions „beyond the nation“ in Chicana/o literature, film, music and performance art, 'Writing Transit' responds to a need to revise border and resistance paradigms in Literary and Cultural Studies.