Sylvia Mayer Livres

Since the 1980s, „risk“ has been one of the most productively employed categories of analysis in the social sciences. Risk theory and risk research in these disciplines have shown that pervasive risk awareness has increasingly reconfigured societies, politics, and cultures in our period of late modernity. The essays assembled in this volume extend risk research in the humanities to literary and cultural studies and analyze a wide range of literary and audiovisual texts that imagine human encounters with environmental risk in North America. They are grouped into three sections. The first section focuses on representations of the risk of global climate change in several climate change novels; the second section concentrates on the representation of the nuclear risk in non-fictional and fictional texts as well as in film; the third section draws particular attention to the relevance of genre in the representation of a variety of environmental risks, genres ranging from poetry to posthuman fiction to Hollywood disaster movies and video games.

Since its emergence in the second half of the nineteenth century American environmentalism had predominantly been a white, middle-class pursuit, preoccupied with notions of wilderness and wildlife preservation. Only fairly recently, with the advent of the environmental justice movement in the 1980s, has American environmentalism broadened its definition of "environment" to include the concerns relevant to a community's way of living. Especially the concerns of poor urban communities of color, which have been exposed to environmental hazards disproportionately, have entered the political agenda.

The book highlights Harriet Beecher Stowe's prolific career, showcasing her ability to engage with various audiences while navigating shifting economic and cultural landscapes. It emphasizes her versatility across genres and the critical resurgence of her work since the 1970s, positioning her writings as significant contributions to American literature. Edited by Sylvia Mayer and Monika Mueller, the collection aims to broaden the understanding of Stowe's impact and relevance beyond her most famous work, "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

In contrast to the still widespread notion that it is only or largely education in the sciences that can create awareness of environmental problems and foster the knowledge and skills needed to protect and improve the environment, the essays collected in this volume demonstrate that education in the fields of foreign language teaching, literary and cultural studies can and must contribute to these efforts as well. Acknowledging that the current environmental crisis in its various local, regional and global manifestations is, in fact, a cultural crisis, they clarify the role of the formative power of language and texts when it comes to the creation of an environmentally sensitive and knowledgable sense of self. They all start from the general premise that both language learning and a critical engagement with various types of texts – texts transmitted by different media, in oral, print and, more recently, electronic form, in literature, in the arts, in music, in television programmes and in film – mean an active production of knowledge. They show that it is important to make sure that students gain an understanding of how language functions in representing and shaping natural and social realities and of how texts function as important factors in the processes of creating our knowledge about the natural world and about the political, economic, and ethical dimensions of the interaction between human and non-human nature.

Die Studie situiert Texte der Regionalliteratur Neuenglands, die im Zeitraum 1857 bis 1918 publiziert wurden, im zeitgenössischen amerikanischen Umwelt- und insbesondere Umweltschutzdiskurs und fragt nach den argumentativen wie narrativen Formen ihrer Partizipation an der in dieser Zeit geführten naturethischen Debatte. Gegenstand der Untersuchung sind Romane und Kurzgeschichten Harriet Beecher Stowes, Rose Terry Cookes, Sarah Orne Jewetts und Mary E. Wilkins Freemans. Die Analyse des Spektrums naturethischer Argumentationsmuster zeigt, von welch hoher Bedeutung die Frage nach der Qualität der Interaktion von Mensch und Natur in den Texten ist, und sie macht deutlich, daß eine naturethische Positionierung maßgeblichen Einfluß auf die Konstituierung individueller, regionaler und auch nationaler amerikanischer Identität hat. Bisherige Forschungsschwerpunkte der Autorin: amerikanische Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts; afrikanisch-amerikanische Literatur; ökologisch orientierte Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft