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

MaryAnn Snyder-Körber

Andrew S. Gross

Papers from a conference held June 21-24, 2007 at the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universit'at Berlin.

American Passions of the Real

The Pathos of Authenticity

Frank Kelleter

Alexander Starre

Birte Wege

The "public sphere"-an idea with deep roots in the European enlightenment-has always been a contested concept in American culture and society. American intellectuals, artists, politicians, and activists have stressed the non-unitary, diversified, and oppositional dynamics of all things public. From the early days of the American republic, competing interest groups and commercial mass media (first newspapers, novels, and the theater, then radio, television, and the internet) have worked to pluralize public speech and public action-and ultimately the notion of "publicness" itself. This essay collection explores the public sphere in North America as a multi-agential, commercially embattled, highly mediated, and ultimately trans-nationalized aggregate of publics and counterpublics. The contributors present innovative theoretical and historical assessments of American counter/publics across an array of fields including social activism, political communication, literary discourse, and contemporary mass media.

American Counter/Publics

Catrin Gersdorf

Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit

Elena Giannoulis

Today, coolness is a term most often used in advertising trendy commodities, or, more generally, in promoting urban lifestyles. The Cultural Career of Coolness explores the history of the term as a metaphor for affect control and aesthetic detachment, charts various cultural practices of coolness in the United States and Japan, and links them to the rationalization of intimate relations and an incorporation of disaffection in modernity.

Discourses and Practices of Affect Control in European Antiquity, the United States, and Japan

The Cultural Career of Coolness

Ulla Haselstein

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