popular culture
Racial Ambiguity and Racial Capital: Marketing the Postracial Melting Pot
The essay investigates how racialization is employed as a form of capital at a time when multiracial figures have taken center-stage in fashion magazines, films, and the music scene and are imbued in the media with utopian visions of a ‘postracial’ future. I argue that racial ambiguity is commercially exploited as a resource, both to commodify racialization and to make it appear structurally irrelevant at the same time.
Pisarz-Ramirez, Gabriele. “Racial Ambiguity and Racial Capital: Marketing the Postracial Melting Pot”. In Selling Ethnicity and Race. Consumerism and Representation in Twenty-First-Century America, eds. Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez, Frank Usbeck, Anne Grob, and Maria Lippold (Trier: WVT, 2015): 99–116.
Selling Ethnicity and Race - Consumerism and Representation in Twenty-First-Century America
Pisarz-Ramirez, Gabrielle, Frank Usbeck, Anne Grob and Maria Lippold, eds. Selling Ethnicity and Race: Consumerism and Representation in Twenty-First-Century America. WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag: Trier. 2015. Print. Mosaic. Studien und Texte zur amerikanischen Kultur und Geschichte, Band 57.
Narrative Liminality and/in the Formation of American Modernities
This DFG-funded network proposes the notion of "narrative liminality" as a category for the study of US American culture.
"'Do Not Cross' - TV Women Doctors Trespassing on Male Territory
Schmieder, Katja. "'Do Not Cross' - TV Women Doctors Trespassing on Male Territory." Communicating Disease: Cultural Representations of American Medicine. Ed. Carmen Birkle and Johanna Heil. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013.
The Politics of Melodrama: Nostalgia, Performance, and Gender Roles in Revolutionary Road
Ravizza, Eleonora. "The Politics of Melodrama: Nostalgia, Performance, and Gender Roles in Revolutionary Road." Poetics of Politics: Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture. Ed. Sebastian M. Herrmann et al. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015. 63-80. Print.
'We Don't Want Life to Look Difficult, Do We?': Representations of the Fifties and Self-Reflexive Nostalgia in Mad Men
Ravizza, Eleonora. "'We Don't Want Life to Look Difficult, Do We?': Representations of the Fifties and Self-Reflexive Nostalgia in Mad Men." COPAS 14.1 (2013): 1-14. Web.
Poetics of Politics: Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture
Herrmann, Sebastian M., Carolin Alice Hofmann, Katja Kanzler, Stefan Schubert, and Frank Usbeck, eds. Poetics of Politics: Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015. Print. American Studies - A Monograph Ser. 258.
Objectivism, Narrative Agency, and the Politics of Choice in the Video Game BioShock
Schubert, Stefan. "Objectivism, Narrative Agency, and the Politics of Choice in the Video Game BioShock." Poetics of Politics: Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture. Ed. Sebastian M. Herrmann et al. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015. 271-89. Print.
'Lose Yourself': Narrative Instability and Unstable Identities in Black Swan
Schubert, Stefan. "'Lose Yourself': Narrative Instability and Unstable Identities in Black Swan." COPAS 14.1 (2013): 1-17. Web.
The Unpopular Profession
This paper discusses a genre of essay writing that advises students not to pursue a career in academia and that has recently enjoyed increased popularity. Focusing on one such “Thesis Hatement,” it argues that these texts are marked by inner contradictions and that these contradictions are indicative of the cultural work they do. Emphatically rejecting academia, these texts typically fail to convince their audience and, in a curious split between denotation and pragmatics, open up a position from which to embrace a graduate career.
Herrmann, Sebastian M. “The Unpopular Profession? Graduate Studies in the Humanities and the Genre of the ‘Thesis Hatement.’” Unpopular Culture. Eds. Martin Lüthe and Sascha Pöhlmann. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2016. 313-36. Print.