CURRENT TENDENCIES IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION
22-23 June 2018 Warburg-Haus Hamburg
A Festakt to celebrate Prof. Dr. Susanne Rohr (Hamburg)
Organized by Marius Henderson, Julia Lange and Jolene Mathieson
This symposium explores current trends in contemporary American literature and examines American literature’s continued importance as a global cultural mediator. At a time when nationalist tendencies in the United States as well as in Europe intensify, fictional texts and their critical potential for reflection acquire considerable social significance, particularly as promoters of transnational exchange. A relevant question in this context is to what extent this millennia-old cultural technique can reflect profound social upheavals in light of changed media conditions. Nineteen renowned scholars in the field of American Studies and related disciplines address this question through readings of the following topics: 1) the legacy of postmodernism and its contemporary revisions, 2) new practices of adaptation and appropriation, 3) neorealism and its revisions of old realist conventions, 4) the new gender, class and race politics of reading and writing fiction, 5) new American environmental fiction, and 6) the relationship between philosophy and poetics.
FRIDAY, 22 JUNE 2018
09:30–10:00 COFFEE
10:00–10:15 OPENING with U.S. Consul General in Hamburg Richard Yoneoka
10:15–11:45 FROM POSTMODERNISM TO THE GREAT BEYOND
Chair: Jolene Mathieson (Hamburg)
Heinz Ickstadt (Berlin) – The Late Style of Two Postmodernist ‘Masters’: Robert Coover and Don DeLillo
Hubert Zapf (Augsburg) – Siri Hustvedt and the Transdisciplinary Knowledge of Literature
Jan D. Kucharzewski (Hamburg) – ‘…the Wood for the Trees’: Anti-Humanist Wonder in Richard Powers’ The Overstory
11:45–13:15 LUNCH
13:15–14:45 NEW PRACTICES OF ADAPTATION AND APPROPRIATION
Chair: Felix Sprang (Siegen)
Bettina Friedl (Hamburg) – Materializing the Word: Lesley Dill and Emily Dickinson
Christa Buschendorf (Frankfurt) – Greek Passion Revisited: Percival Everett’s Appropriation of the Myth of Medea
Joseph Schöpp (Hamburg) – “History is Suffering”: Reading Teju Cole’s Open City in Light of Walter Benjamin and W.G. Sebald
14:45–15:15 COFFEE
15:15–16:45 THE NEW OLD CONVENTIONS
Chair: Ruth Mayer (Hannover)
Thomas Claviez (Bern) – Neorealism and the Problem of Recognition
Sabine Sielke (Bonn) – The Newly Conventional US-American Novel and the (Neo-)Liberal Imagination: On Franzen, Eggers, and the Like
Sieglinde Lemke (Freiburg) – Precarious Escapes: Hillbilly Elegy and Unorthodox
17:00–18:15 NELL ZINK – BECOMING CONTEMPORARY
Moderation: Astrid Böger (Hamburg)
18:15-19:00 WINE RECEPTION
19:30–22:00 SYMPOSIUM DINNER
SATURDAY, 23 JUNE 2018
09:15–10:45 THE NEW POLITICS OF WRITING AND READING I
Chair: Peter Hühn (Hamburg)
Ulla Haselstein (Berlin) – Economies of Attention
Peter Schneck (Osnabrück) – Present Perfect and Past Tense: Resurfacing Literature
Laura Bieger (Groningen) – Reading Institutions: Reassessing Literature’s Public Commitments
10:45–11:15 COFFEE
11:15–12:45 THE NEW POLITICS OF WRITING AND READING II
Chair: Eva Boesenberg (Berlin)
Andrew S. Gross (Göttingen) – Narrating Injustice in Refugee Narratives
Sabine Broeck (Bremen) – Writing on American Slavery After Toni Morrison
Astrid Franke (Tübingen) – Claudia Rankine and the Question of Microaggression
12:45–14:15 LUNCH
14:15–15:15 NEW AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL FICTION
Chair: Ute Berns (Hamburg)
Catrin Gersdorf (Würzburg) – Gardens, Forests, and the Human Condition: Reflections on the Modern American Novel
Astrid Böger (Hamburg) – For the Birds? Nell Zink and Jonathan Franzen’s Environmentalist Ontology
15:15–15:45 COFFEE
15:45–16:45 POETICS AND PHILOSOPHY
Chair: Jan D. Kucharzewski (Hamburg)
Herwig Friedl (Düsseldorf) – Exhilarating Uncertainty: Emerson’s Subversive Proto-Existentialism
Miriam Strube (Paderborn) – Kaleidoscopic Narration: Jazz Aesthetics and Black Pragmatism in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
16:45 CLOSING REMARKS BY SUSANNE ROHR
