Approaches to American Cultural Studies

Approaches to American Cultural Studies is a comprehensive survey of the research fields within American Studies.Written by three experienced teachers of American Cultural Studies based at Humboldt Univeristy in Berlin, the book discusses the history of American Studies as academic discipline as well as main ideas, research questions, and problems in American Studies.

Part one delineates the history of (North) American Studies as academic discipline in and outside the US, describing the emergence of American Studies, its relation to English Studies, its inter-disciplinary shape, early research interests, and emerging criticism within the field. Part two locates American Studies within the field of Cultural Studies. It will elaborate on the history and understanding of German "Kulturwissenschaft" versus Anglophone "Cultural Studies," also discussing American Studies' affinity to and difference from Film and Media Studies and traditional Literary Studies. Part three discusses foundational concepts and myths within hegemonial American self-understanding and their ideological foundation of excluding and rendering the existing social Other invisible. The chapters in this section will discuss the myth of the West as Virgin Land, the emergence of American anti-urbanism, the myth of unlimited social ascent, and the significance of religion and family in American culture. And part four focuses on the major modern theoretical "schools" ((Post)Marxism; (Post)Structuralism; Psychoanalysis, (Post)Modernism) and gives examples of how a variety of current theoretical approaches within American Studies discuss the significance of different categories of difference (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, etc.) as constructs which are central to naturalize understandings of the hegemonic Self and the Other.

Including a glossary as well as a list of recommended readings this is the perfect resources for all introductory students of American Cultural Studies.

Antje Dallmann teaches North American literature and culture at Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin and at Leipzig University in Germany. She is the author ofConspiraCity New York (2009) and co-editor of Envisioning American Utopias(2011), Picturing America (2009, both with Reinhard Isensee and Philipp Kneis) andToward a New Metropolitanism (2006, with Gunter H. Lenz and Friedrich Ulfers).

Eva Boesenberg teaches North American literature and culture at Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin. She is the author ofMoney and Gender in the American Novel, 1850-2000 (2010) and Gender – Voice – Vernacular: The Formation of Female Subjectivity in Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (1999), and co-editor ofAmerican Economies (2012, with Martin Klepper and Reinhard Isensee).

Martin Klepper teaches North American literature and culture at Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin. He is the author ofPynchon, Auster, DeLillo: Die amerikanische Postmoderne zwischen Spiel und Rekonstruktion(1996) and his latest books include The Discovery of Point of View: Observation and Narration in the American Novel 1790-1910(2011) and Rethinking Narrative Identity: Persona and Perspective (2013, co-edited with Claudia Holler).