Caroline Rosenthal

Study of three North American women novelists combining the standpoints of gender studies and narratology. By analyzing the works of Thomas, Marlatt, and Erdrich through the lenses of subjectivity, gender studies, and narratology, Caroline Rosenthal brings to light new perspectives on their writings. Although all three authors write metafictions that challenge literary realism and dominant views of gender, the forms of their counter-narratives vary. In her novel Intertidal Life, Thomas traces the disintegration of an identity through narrative devices that unearth ruptures and contradictions in stories of gender. In contrast, Marlatt, in Ana Historic, challenges the regulatory fiction of heterosexuality. She offers her protagonist a way out into a new order that breaks with the law of the father, creating a monstrous text that explores the possibilities of a lesbian identity. In her tetralogy of novels made up of Love Medicine, Tracks, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace, Erdrichresists definite readings of femininity altogether. By drawing on trickster narratives, she creates an open system of gendered identities that is dynamic and unfinalizable, positing the most fragmented worldview as the most enduring. By applying gender and narrative theory to nuanced analysis of the texts, Rosenthal's study elucidates the correlation between gender identity formation and narrative. Caroline Rosenthal is Professor and Chair of American Literature at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Her book Narrative Deconstructions of Gender was published by Camden House in 2003.

Narrative Deconstructions of Gender in Works by Audrey Thomas, Daphne Marlatt, and Louise Erdrich

Gina Comos

Defined as an ecological epoch in which humans have the most impact on the environment, the Anthropocene poses challenging questions to literary and cultural studies. If, in the Anthropocene, the distinction between nature and culture increasingly collapses, we have to rethink our division between historiography and natural history, as well as notions of the subject and of agency since the Enlightenment. This anthology collects papers from literary and cultural studies that address various issues surrounding the topic. Even though the new epoch seems to require a collective self-understanding as a unified species, readings of the Anthropocene and conceptualizations of human-nature relationships largely differ in Anglophone literatures and cultures. These differing perspectives are reflected in the structure of this book, which is divided into five separate sections: the introductory part familiarizes the reader with the concept and the challenges it poses for the humanities in general and for literary and cultural studies in particular, and the three following sections combine broader, more theoretical, essays with in-depth critical readings of US, Canadian, and Australian representations of the Anthropocene in literature. The final part moves beyond literature to include media theoretical perspectives and discussions of photography and cinema in the Anthropocene.

Anglophone Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene

Laurenz Volkmann

Uwe Zagratzki

Neighbourly relations frequently position a “self” against an “Other”. This is the case for both individuals and nations, and, indeed, within the various cultural groups of a nation. Our racial, ethnic, social, or gender identities are often created in demarcating ourselves by stereotyping the Other. Disrespect of the immediate neighbour based on stereotypical pre-conceptions and cultural biases may lie dormant for a long time and then, as shown in recent conflicts around the globe, suddenly surface due to changed economic and political conditions. Media, including films and fictional as well as non-fictional texts, feature prominently in producing, propagating, and maintaining cultural difference and stereotypes in ideologically effective ways. This volume analyses re-presentations from various angles, as it comprises articles dealing with ethnic groups and neighbo(u)rhoods from three world areas, as well as genres and media instrumental to their respective cultural stereotyping. This focus on literary and media representations of the neighbo(u)rly Other from miscellaneous cultural environments results in a comprehensive understanding of analogies and differences in the mechanisms of production and perception of stereotypes. Addressing the manifold discourses at the heart of stereotyping the familiar Other, the book also points to their far-reaching repercussions on lived cultural practices.

Cultural Stereotypes in Literature and Film

Disrespected Neighbo(u)rs

Eva Gruber

Compares the cultural productions of Canada and the US - literature, but also film, opera, and even theme parks - providing a reassessment of Canadian Studies within a comparative framework.

Perspectives on Canadian and Comparative North American Studies

Gained Ground

Dirk Vanderbeke

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores representations of skin in literature, art, art history, visual media, and medicine and its history. The essays collected here probe the symbolic potential of skin as a shifting sign in various historical and cultural contexts, and also examine the material and organic properties of the body’s largest organ. They deal with skin as a sensual organ, as an interface or contact zone, as the visual marker of identity, and as a lieu de memoire in different periods and media. In its material characteristics, skin is regarded as a medium, a canvas, a surface, and an object of both artistic and medical investigations. The contributions investigate representations of skin in sculpture, painting, film, and fictional, as well as non-fictional, texts from the 16th century to the present. The topics addressed here include the problematic representation of racial identity via skin colour in various media; the sensual qualities of the skin, such as smell or taste; the form and function of tattoos as markers of personal, as well as collective, identity; and scars as signifiers of personal pain and collective suffering.

Cultural Representations of Our Contact Zone

Probing the Skin

Therese Frey Steffen

Anke Väth

Gender Studies

Stefanie Schäfer

In North America, imposture narratives of all kinds from ethnic impersonation to confidence games abound because the socio-cultural history and national mythologies of the US and Canada are an especially fertile ground for the invention of identities, whether fake or "real." When discovered, imposture incites fascination and scandal--yet it also showcases how identities are made. Fake identities thus are a negative lens through which the performance of selves become obvious. The essays in this book examine both real and fictional imposture with a special interest in identity performance and in the cultural value attributed to authenticity in Western culture. The North American impostor narrative helps contextualise and historicize how selves are made, from the narrator of colonial travelogues to postmodernist author/narrator voices, from the urban con game to trickster shamanism."

Caroline Rosenthal

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