Berndt Ostendorf Boeken

Ralph Ellison once wrote that the rules of performance in American culture are jazz-shaped. This book explores the Afro-creole core culture of New Orleans as the mainspring of this energizing music. Much of the cultural capital of the city is buried in a complex, tripartite racial history, which threatens the binary logic of North American racism with all sorts of sensual transgressions. Its jazz-derived culture combines elements of African, French, Spanish and Anglo-American cultural practices which in their fusion have created a unique propulsive energy: Second line parades, jazz funerals, Mardi Gras Indians, Cajun and creole foodways, minstrelsy, dance, ragtime and jazz will be interpreted as the result of a set of historical circumstances unique to this Caribbean metropolis of the senses.

Transnationalism has become one of the new key concepts designed to highlight areas of a positive dynamics in the context of an as yet amorphous process of globalization (which many consider as tantamount to Americanization). But what does the much-quoted „fading of borders“ imply when we study its manifestations in the Western Hemisphere? Are the classic markers and containers of self, of culture, of ethnic or racial identity, of economic and political nation truly fading? Or are we witnessing a realignment of bordersi Perhaps merely a displacement, that is new borders and with it a tacit reconfiguration of empire? The contributors of this volume originally presented their ideas at a conference organized by the Bavarian American Academy. Thomas J. Courchene, Jürgen Kähler, Ricardo D. Salvatore, Stefan Rinke, Reg Whitaker, John Urry, Paul Ashdown, Todd Gitlin, Susan H. Armitage, John Carlos Rowe, Werner Sollors, Stephan Palmié and Patricia Fernßndez-Kelly address the question of transnationalism from the perspectives of political sciences, economics, cultural studies, history, sociology and literature. Novelist Bharati Mukherjee concludes the volume by responding to the theoretical aspects raised by the contributors and by adding a fictional exemplification of the formation of a truly transnational American consciousness.

Der „Myth Criticism“ ist jene literaturwissenschaftliche Richtung, die in den USA von etwa 1947 bis 1960 vorherrschte. Um den Mythosbegriff der Myth Critics in den Griff zu bekommen, verfolgt der Autor die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Mythos in der Ästhetik mit besonderer Berücksichtigung derjenigen Theorien, deren Einfluß auf die Amerikaner nachweisbar ist (Platon, Aristoteles, Schelling, Cassirer, Jung, Malinowski) und fragt nach ihrer Anwendung und Anwendbarkeit auf die amerikanische Literatur von Melville über Pound, Eliot u. a. m. bis zu R. P. Warren. Aus dem Inhalt: Die Methode. - Die Theorie. - Die Kritik: Grundbegriffe der Poetik im Lichte der Theorie; Mythos und Symbol in der klassischen amerikanischen Literatur; Direkte Vorläufer des Myth Criticism; James Joyce's „Ulysses“ und "Finnegan's Wake" - mythische Werke? Wissen und Sein; Die erste akademische Kritik; Mythos und Naturalismus; Die zeitgenössische Kritik. - Robert Penn Warren und die Entmythologisierung.