Ulla Haselstein

Florian Sedlmeier

To Be Continued discusses forms of creating narrative continuation, such as adventure, parody, the saga format, fan fiction, seriality, spin-offs in case studies ranging from the 18th century to the present. Narrative Structure. Novels organized by tight plot constructions are rather rare. Episodic structures are the rule. The number of episodic sequences is not fixed, the narrative closure of episodes is preliminary, and the interrelation of episodes is open to retrospective reconfiguration, which makes additions and further narrative elaborations a constant option. Intertextual Links. Novels can thus be seen as experiments which use the modification of existing elements and the introduction of new elements to indicate and conceptualize cultural change. Seriality and parody mark the extremely divergent forms such experiments can employ: to write on or to re-write, to quote affirmatively, ironically, or satirically are basic forms of building traditions or of revising them, and can be related to conflicts over literary, economic or symbolic capital. For the reader, the entertainment value of a text may increase or decrease with the familiarity of a story world with its specific characters: the economy of attention, the level of affective bonding, and their consequences - identification, revulsion, or boredom - are molded by continuation.

To Be Continued – Forms of Narrative Continuation

Nicole Maruo-Schröder

Eric Erbacher

The volume reexamines the trope of the intrusive machine and the regenerative pastoral garden, laid out fifty years ago by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden, one of the founding texts of American Studies. Contributions explore the lasting influence of the trope in American culture and the arts, rereading it as a dialectics where nature is as much technologized as technology is naturalized. They trace this dialectic trope in filmic and literary representations of industrial, bureaucratic, and digital gardens; they explore its function in the aftermath of the civil war, the rural electrification during the New Deal, in landscape art, and in ethnic literatures; and they discuss the historical premises and lasting influence of Leo Marx's seminal study.

Nature and Technology in American Culture

Rereading the Machine in the Garden

James Dorson

MaryAnn Snyder-Körber

Birte Wege

Modernity is made and unmade by the anecdotal. Conceived as a literary genre, a narrative element of criticism, and, most crucially, a mode of historiography, the anecdote illuminates the convergences as well as the fault lines cutting across modern practices of knowledge production. The volume explores uses of the anecdotal in exemplary case studies from the threshold of the early modern to the present.

Making and Unmaking History

Anecdotal Modernity

Clemens Peck

Die Gattungsbewegungen der Kriminalliteratur und deren erzählerische Formen sind unauflöslich mit der Herausbildung neuer Wissensordnungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert verbunden. Als Kreuzungspunkt dieser epistemischen Ordnungen erscheint die Kriminologie, die sowohl an der Identifizierung des Verbrechens als auch an einem umfangreichen Wissen über Devianzen und Verbrechertypologien arbeitet. Die Beiträge des Bandes verstehen die Genres der Kriminalliteratur als Schauplatz dieser Diskurse und ihrer Inszenierungsmöglichkeiten. Damit rückt das Verhältnis von Techniken der Narration und der Spurensicherung sowie von medialen Praktiken und der Produktion von Subjektpositionen in den Blick.

Florian Sedlmeier

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