Theories of American Culture - Theories of American Studies
Winfried Fluck/Thomas Claviez (eds.)
Theories of American Culture - Theories of American Studies
(Tübingen: Narr, 2003)
American Studies is a joint, interdisciplinary academic endeavor to gain systematic knowledge about American society and culture in order to understand the historical and present-day meaning and significance of the United States. In this sense, work in American Studies, no matter whether it addresses the issue explicitly or not, is always grounded in a set of underlying constitutive views of American culture that are confirmed or challenged by new findings. Although such often tacit assumptions may not be systematically developed, one may nevertheless classify them as theories, since - inevitably - they imply generalizations about “America” or the meaning of American history that have a systematic dimension, no matter whether this dimension is fully worked out or not. It is high time that the implicit assumptions that shape our interpretations of American society and culture, including those of the recent revisionism, become a topic in American Studies, because they are the crucial constituents of these interpretations. The contributions to this volume, no matter what their politics and views on the topic of theories of American culture are, put the topic itself back on the agenda of American Studies.
Contents:
WINFRIED FLUCK/THOMAS CLAVIEZ
Introduction
American Studies Reconsidered
LEO MARX
On Recovering the “
DONALD E. PEASE
The Place of Theory in American Cultural Studies: The Case of Gene Wise
MARK BAUERLEIN
The Institutionalization of American Studies
SUSAN HEGEMAN
The “Culture” in American Studies
WINFRIED FLUCK
American Culture and Modernity: A Twice-Told Tale
Conceptualizing Diversity
CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD
Diversity in an Age of Pseudo-Integration
GILLIAN BROWN
Thinking in the Future Perfect: Consent, Childhood, and Minority Rights
RONALD A. T. JUDY
America and Powerless Potentialities
SIEGLINDE LEMKE
Theories of American Culture in the Name of the Vernacular
Theorizing the National in a Spirit of Due Reluctance
BRUCE ROBBINS
Cosmopolitanism,
SÄMI LUDWIG
Thin Pluralism: Some Observations on American Multiculturalism
ULFRIED REICHARDT
The “Times” of the
New Paradigms of
ASTRID FRANKE
William Carlos Williams and John Dewey on the Public, its Problems, and its Poetry
SUSANNE ROHR
Pragmaticism - A New Approach to Literary and Cultural Analysis
ULLA HASELSTEIN
Collateral Advantages: Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry
THOMAS CLAVIEZ
Afterword: American Studies - The State of