Antje Kley Livres

This volume sheds light on the nexus between knowledge and literature. Arranged historically, contributions address both popular and canonical English and US-American writing from the early modern period to the present. They focus on how historically specific texts engage with epistemological questions in relation to material and social forms as well as representation. The authors discuss literature as a culturally embedded form of knowledge production in its own right, which deploys narrative and poetic means of exploration to establish an independent and sometimes dissident archive. The worlds that imaginary texts project are shown to open up alternative perspectives to be reckoned with in the academic articulation and public discussion of issues in economics and the sciences, identity formation and wellbeing, legal rationale and political decision-making.

„The United States was born in the country“, Richard Hofstadter once wrote, „and remained emotionally attached to it long after it had moved away“, David B. Danbom added in his 'History of Rural America'. Thus it may be argued that the study of American culture and civilization, first and foremost, needs to make sense of the rural. This multidisciplinary volume focuses on rural America, on areas seemingly apart from the political, economic, and cultural centers of the nation. Despite this apparent marginality, the rural often proves to be constitutive not only of regional but also of other subnational and even national American identities. Putting rurality at the center thus problematizes the well-established dichotomous models of city vs. country. The contributors to this volume address the rural as a mythic construction (e. g. as the American „Heartland“ and as the centerpiece of a US pastoral tradition), as a (socio-)economic sector, as an imaginary time-space within American culture, and as the site of specific political, social, and cultural practices with, at times, transnational/global implications. The various perspectives on rural America are drawn from the fields of history, sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, environmental studies, and journalism.

Investigating the distinct poetics of Richard Powers' writing, this volume demonstrates that the author's complex body of fictional work warrants much more focused and systematic critical attention than it has received so far. The essays explore how Powers' work oscillates between the poles of realism and metafictional postmodernism, creating narratives in which the conventions of realism are both deployed and undermined, in which characters are simultaneously presented as motivated agents and as textual constructs. By conceptualizing Powers' novels as texts in which order is both a central and a consciously fictional idea, the essays collected in this volume discuss how Powers' densely structured fictions indicate the potential of a concrete relation between life and literature that manifests itself in an inherently narrative vision of human consciousness.

Im Rahmen aufeinander folgender Modernisierungsschübe und der damit verbundenen Erfahrung der transzendentalen Obdachlosigkeit, die ethische Fragen zum Gegenstand öffentlicher Verständigung macht, trägt die Repräsentation von Welt im Roman zur Konstitution und Kritik der für einen modernen Ethikdiskurs zentralen Basiskonzepte individueller Autonomie und Verantwortung bei. Ausgehend von dieser These zeigt die transatlantisch angelegte Studie, die auf Medienkulturgeschichte und den „ethical turn“ rekurriert, dass der Praxis des Erzählens im modernen britischen und amerikanischen Roman immer wieder neu die ethische Funktion zuwächst, LeserInnen mit medial bedingten und zunehmend kontingenten Wahrnehmungs- und Evaluierungstechniken zu konfrontieren und vertraut zu machen. Dies geschieht, wie exemplarische Analysen ausgewählter Texte von Richardson, Brown, Hawthorne, Eliot, Thorpe und Powers dokumentieren, in inhaltlichen und formalen Medienreflexionen, die seit der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts auf die Drucktechnologie, seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts auf die Technisierung des visuellen Weltbezugs und seit dem späten 20. Jahrhundert auf die digitale Integration der Medien bezogen sind.