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The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies After the Transnational Turn
Author(s): Laura Bieger (Editor), Ramón Saldívar (Editor), Johannes Voelz (Editor)
- Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
- Publication Date: 11 July 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 312 pages
- ISBN-10: 9781611684070
- ISBN-13: 1611684072
Book Description
The Imaginary and Its Worlds collects essays that boldly rethink the imaginary as a key concept for cultural criticism. Addressing both the emergence and the reproduction of the social, the imaginary is ideally suited to chart the consequences of the transnational turn in American studies. Leading scholars in the field from the United States and Europe address the literary, social, and political dimensions of the imaginary, providing a methodological and theoretical groundwork for American studies scholarship in the transnational era and opening new arenas for conceptualizing formations of imaginary belonging and subjectivity. This important state-of-the-field collection will appeal to a broad constituency of humanists working to overcome methodological nationalism. The Imaginary and Its Worlds: An Introduction• LITERARY IMAGINARIES • Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America – Ramón Saldívar • The Necessary Fragmentation of the (U.S.) Literary-Cultural Imaginary – Lawrence Buell • Imaginaries of American Modernism – Heinz Ickstadt • SOCIAL IMAGINARIES • William James versus Charles Taylor: Philosophy of Religion and the Confines of the Social and Cultural Imaginaries – Herwig Friedl • The Shaping of We-Group Identities in the African American Community: A Perspective of Figurational Sociology on the Cultural Imaginary – Christa Buschendorf • Russia’s Californio Romance: The Other Shores of Whitman’s Pacific – Lene Johannessen • Form Games: Staging Life in the Systems Epoch – Mark Seltzer • POLITICAL IMAGINARIES • Real Toads – Walter Benn Michaels • Obama Unwound: The Romanticism of Victory and the Defeat of Compromise – Christopher Newfield • Barack Obama’s Orphic Mysteries – Donald E. Pease • Coda. The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer – Winfried Fluck • Contributors • Index
Editorial Reviews
Review
“One of the most valuable aspects of this critical anthology involves its illumination of different ways in which the term “social imaginary” has been used and the different intellectual traditions it evokes. . . . This collection of essays is a fine tribute to Fluck’s significant career as a pioneer of international American studies, but it also raises broader questions about ways in which non-U.S. perspectives on American cultural politics can provide an important check and balance system within the field.”– “Amerikastudiemerican Studies”
“The book’s final section on “Political Imaginaries” brings Fluck, Pease, Walter Benn Michaels, and Chris Newfield together in what amounts to a jazz riff on the state of the imaginative nation. If we ever wondered why we are in this business of American Studies after the transnational turn, this section reminds us of the whimsical provocation, play, and sheer imagination that can, under the best of circumstances, guide us to unexpected places of ideation and creation.”– “American Literary History”
About the Author
Laura Bieger is junior professor of North American culture at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including The Imaginary and its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn, co-edited with Ramón Saldívar and Johannes Voelz.
