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Ruth Gehrmann

Transplantation and Alternative Worlds: Speculation in Doctors' Life Writing

Even though organ transplantation has turned into a repeatable and comparatively reliable practice, it still presents ample cause for speculation. In fact, various works of speculative fiction explore the practice in relation to the future. Yet, as this article suggests, speculation about transplantation does not only occur within the pages of fictional works but also impacts the life writing of medical professionals. This article engages specifically with the life writing of transplant surgeons: Thomas Starzl's The Puzzle People: Memoirs of a Transplant Surgeon (1992), Kathy E. Magliato's Heart Matters: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon (2010), and Breathless: A Transplant Surgeon's Journal by Thomas R. J. Todd (2007). By focusing on two distinct forms of speculation – the employment of elements from speculative fiction and the pervasiveness of the question "What if …?" – this article emphasizes the underlying but often overlooked significance of speculation in medical contexts.

Ben Robbins

"Marriages ought to be secret": Queer Marriages of Convenience and the Exile Narrative

In histories of exile and migration, LGBTQ+ people have often entered marriages of convenience. Within these arrangements, a gay man and lesbian woman typically enter a marriage to expedite immigration processes or to placate conservative family members. Most commonly, these relationships do not produce children, and they consequently call into question the pronatalism that is often associated with hetero-normative conceptions of marriage. This article explores the complex dynamics of these relationship structures through an analysis of childfree married women in the novels of two female queer exile writers: Jane Bowles and Patricia Highsmith. In Bowles's Two Serious Ladies (1943), a US-American upper middle-class couple, Mr. and Mrs. Copperfield, journey to Panama, where Mrs. Copperfield begins an affair with a female sex worker called Pacifica and refuses to return to the United States with her husband. In Highsmith's Ripley Under Ground (1970), the union between the US-American Tom Ripley and the French heiress Heloise Plisson provides a cover for Tom's ambiguous sexuality, as well as his diverse criminal activities, and allows Heloise to enjoy a life of aimless pleasure. In both these novels, queer marriages of convenience permit transnational mobility within unions that are markedly non-procreative and thereby occupy non-future oriented temporalities. This article demonstrates how these writers used the alternative temporal organization of the marriage of convenience plot to undermine the conventional structures of patriarchal genres, including the modernist quest narrative and suspense or crime fiction.

Valentina Romanzi

Staying Human in the Post-Apocalypse: The Frontiers of Individualism in The Last of Us and Its Sequel

Naughty Dog's video games The Last of Us (2013) and The Last of Us Part II (2020) stage a complex tale of human drama in post-apocalyptic settings, retrieving several features of the Frontier myth. In this essay, I argue that the characters' narrative arc is a post-apocalyptic, American Frontier tale in which the individual and collective levels clash (as they often do in such stories), generating moral challenges for the characters and, in turn, for the player controlling them. Thus, I set out to analyze how TLOU draws on and subverts some of the traditional tropes and characters belonging to the classic American Frontier tradition, investigating a number of issues related to individualism, collectivism, violence, and selfishness.

Sylvia Mayer

Narratives of Resilience in Times of Climate Crisis: Angry Optimism and Utopian Minimalism in Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 and Jenny Offill's Weather

The essay discusses two climate change novels, Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 and Jenny Offill's Weather, as resilience narratives. It argues that these novels – New York 2140 speculating about a possible future, set more than 100 years in the future,Weather engaging our present cultural moment, the early 21^st century – explore diverse experiences of, and responses to, human-made climate crisis, directly engaging with the interconnected ecological, political, economic, social, and cultural effects of global warming, but also with responses such as climate skepticism and denial as well as cognitive dissonance, climate anxiety, and grief related to climate change. Applying the concept of resilience in its diverse meanings as an analytical framework emphasizes that fictional climate narratives often go beyond merely "sounding the alarm" about climate risks or concentrating exclusively on catastrophe. Rather, they also shed light on strategies of adaptation, flexibility and endurance and on the potential for transformation to allow for a more hopeful and even utopian reading. For this purpose, the concepts of "angry optimism" and "utopian minimalism" are introduced, the former articulated by Robinson, the latter introduced by critic Anahid Nersessian, who have both participated in the debate on the relevance and timeliness of utopianism in times of climate crisis.

Nathalie Aghoro

Voice, Silence, and Quiet Resistance in Percival Everett's Glyph

This article investigates how the refusal to speak becomes a resonant expression of protest in Percival Everett's novel Glyph (1999). It offers a reading of Everett's experimental work as generating a literary soundscape of the quiet voice to reflect on the functions of sonic absence in the politics and aesthetics of resistance. With Kevin Quashie's work The Sovereignty of Quiet (2012) and Fred Moten's writings on the significance of sound in black radical aesthetics as conceptual bridges, it seeks to establish that Glyph explores the boundaries and possibilities of black self-determination in the American socio-political context as it pitches the acoustics of silence and voice against the mute textuality of the book. Along these lines, the explicit refusal of a voice to speak in Glyph simultaneously reveals and complicates the dynamics of racialization in literary imaginations and reading practices.

Michael Fuchs

Videogames in Horror Movies: Remediation, Metalepsis, Interface Effects, and Fear of the Digital

This article discusses four movies in which transgressions between gameworlds and diegetic realities take center stage: Brainscan (1994), Stay Alive (2006), Livescream (2018), and Choose or Die (2022). By exploring the interactions between videogame worlds and "reality," these movies do not simply project anxieties onto digital games, but rather reflect on media-specific affordances of videogames, inquire into discourses surrounding videogames, and explore game cultures. I am particularly interested in the strategies and aesthetics of remediating videogames in the horror films and the conceptualizations of videogames and game cultures thus produced, as well as the larger cultural fears and anxieties (and hopes and dreams) that these representations evoke.

Michael Fuchs

Digital America: Introduction

This introduction to the special issue "Digital America" sketches some of the ways in which "the digital" has influenced both American culture and American studies scholarship before summarizing the contributions to this issue.

Matthew Daniel Sutton

The Motion and the Noise: Yoknapatawpha's Shifting Soundscape

William Faulkner's dislike of unwanted sound is well documented. The acoustic environment of rural Mississippi amplified irreversibly after the introduction of the automobile, airplane, and automated farm machinery. In his Intruder in the Dust (1948), the jukebox and radio absorb pointed criticism for producing "canned" sounds outside of their "proper" environment. The narrowing gap between town square and dance hall signifies encroaching chaos, as noise drowns out the attenuated "harmony" that keeps elite whites in power and Intruder's African American protagonist Lucas Beauchamp out of the hands of the lynch mob. For Faulkner, the shift in the auditory environment presents both a disruption and an impediment to a system built on white bourgeois ideals. However, Faulkner's pessimism is counterpointed by sociological studies undertaken by Fisk University researchers. The Fisk study identifies the emergence of a blues culture in the Delta whose energy and boundary-crossing impulses illustrate the liberating possibilities of an expanding soundscape. By juxtaposing Faulkner's damning descriptions of "the motion and the noise" with the Fisk University researchers' illuminating fieldwork, this essay interprets a transformative period in the constantly shifting soundscape of the U.S. South. In line with Jacques Attali's dictum that "our music foretells our future," Intruder in the Dust anticipates the cultural upheaval that would energize the Civil Rights Movement. Both in fiction and in fact, the "noise" emanating from jukeboxes and radios in 1940s Mississippi accelerated social change at a volume much higher and a tempo much faster than Faulkner and other gradualists desired.

Gulsin Ciftci

'Vulnerable as a small pink mouse': Vulnerability, Affect, and Trauma in Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life

This essay focuses on the productive interactions between vulnerability and trauma theory. Vulnerability indexes trauma's infinitude and recursion as something constantly generative of new emotional, social, and legal injuries. In the novel A Little Life (2015), Hanya Yanagihara employs narrative fragmentation, multi-perspectivity, and temporal disarray to evoke trauma's patterns of injury and abjection. Vulnerability's double valence creates affective intensities for readers and establishes a sense of intimacy with the protagonist as he is traumatized. Vulnerability in the novel is linked to closeness, thus, in a dual sense. On the one hand, the protagonist closes off from the world. On the other hand, he persists impossibly in fostering intimate relationships. In A Little Life, it is this precarious closeness precisely through which vulnerability becomes a form of resistance that foregrounds agency.

Michael Fuchs

Creative Extinction: Serial Cycles of De-Extinction and Re-Extinction in Resurrection Business

This article explores the videogame Jurassic World Evolution (Frontier Developments, 2018). As a business simulation, Jurassic World Evolution makes playable—and asks players to perform—a serialized cycle of de-extinction and re-extinction: dinosaurs are resurrected only to be wiped out again when a successor that is "better, louder, with more teeth" (to quote Jurassic World's operations manager Claire Dearing) becomes available. The revenue players generate is thus founded on a cycle of extinction, de-extinction, and re-extinction. In so doing, the videogame suggests that de-extinction does not promise a future primarily defined by the overcoming of extinction and the becoming-real of the dream of reestablishing natural abundance through techno-scientific means, but rather a future characterized by an exponential growth in serialized extinctions, made possible by techno-science. That the videogame puts players in charge of both finances and developing their dinosaur "assets" draws players' attention to molecular biology as a new place of production. Hence, resurrection science and its biocapitalist entanglements not only exploit past extinctions but rather suggest that this biocapitalist venture is based on speculation—reaping seemingly unlimited future profits from a potentially never-ending cycle of extinctions, de-extinctions, and re-extinctions.

Barbara Gföllner

'The World Called Him a Thug': Police Brutality and the Perception of the Black Body in Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give

Widespread police violence, often targeted at black people, has increasingly entered public debates in recent years. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, various African American young adult novelists have addressed the topic of police brutality and offer counternarratives to the stories about black victims disseminated in the media. This article illustrates how prevalent debates of Black Lives Matter are reflected in contemporary young adult fiction. To this end, the first part elucidates substantial issues that have led to the precarious position of African Americans today and to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing on theoretical concepts such as Judith Butler’s notion of "precarious lives" and Frantz Fanon’s description of the black experience in a white-dominated world, I will analyze Angie Thomas's novel The Hate U Give in view of ongoing debates about racial inequality. As I will show, the novel features striking similarities to real-world incidents of police brutality while simultaneously drawing attention to the manifold ways in which society disregards black lives and continues to subject African Americans to racial injustice.

Eva-Maria Müller

"Magic Dirt": Transcending Great Divides in Scott McClanahan's Crapalachia

Scott McClanahan, rising star of the US Indie Lit world and "Poet Laureate of Real America" (Moran), writes miasmic chronicles of life in a West Virginian holler. In Crapalachia: A Biography of Place (2013), as in many of the tales he releases in Dickensian pace, McClanahan ties the fate of a place to the fate of its people and connects environmental destruction to the ruins of life. Where mountains are stripped away, happiness is not at home. McClanahan tells family stories of deforestation and disability, mining disasters and mental illness, structural poverty and opportunities denied. His stories are about the slow and fast deaths of forgotten people in forgotten places and he tells them with a ballistic sensibility that opens up new spaces to negotiate difference. Crapalachia is a threnody for a wounded region that complicates imagined hierarchies of center and periphery and blends the worlds of fact and fiction as well as tragedy and comedy. The semi-autobiography mines so deeply for privation that, at its close, it lays bare some of the most hopeful principles of American transcendentalism. In between personal hardships, local misery, national movements, and universal human experience, McClanahan has us see "Crapalachia as the center of the world" (35). This paper explores how the aesthetic, narrative, and stylistic strategies of Crapalachia help navigate the local, national, and global routes of fictions of disregard.

Matthias Klestil

African American Literature, Racial Vulnerability, and the Anthropocene: Reading W .E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece in the Twenty-First Century

This article discusses W. E. B. Du Bois's first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), in the context of the broader debate on the role of race in the Anthropocene and in relation to Judith Butler's theory on corporeal vulnerability. Specifically, this article spotlights three particular ways in which rereading African American literature may enhance a more race-conscious Anthropocene discourse. Initially, this article demonstrates how Du Bois's text gives opportunity to trace African American vulnerabilities through various scales from the local to the planetary. A genealogy of African American racial vulnerability, I argue, can be vital for better understanding and acting against continuing forms of racism in the Anthropocene. This article continues by turning to Du Bois's representation of vulnerabilities as part of power relations, showing how African American epistemologies of resistance negotiate racial vulnerability. Lastly, this article examines how the novel plays with generic conventions to engage racial vulnerabilities, evincing an African American aesthetics of resistance and suggesting alternative forms of storytelling.

Matthias Klestil

Introduction: Versions, Narratives, and American Studies

This introduction lays out the concept of versioning as a cultural practice and highlights key premises and potentials of the analysis of such practices in the context of American studies. Drawing from narrative theory and theories of speculation, it theorizes the notion of a version as a copy with a difference. Moreover, the introduction identifies three forms of versioning in relation to the field of American studies: revisionist versioning, speculation-focused versioning, and code-oriented versioning.

Anna Marta Marini

Semiospheric Borders and the Erasure of Latinx Subjectivity in Culture Shock and Sleep Dealer

Recreating the problematic relationship between the U.S. government and the influx of migrant laborers, films Sleep Dealer (2008) and Culture Shock (2019) both reflect a state of exception existing on the U.S.–Mexico border. In both films, the border is represented as a peripheral locus where the migrant subject is emptied of humanity and political subjectivity, in thrall to the panopticon embodied by the American immigration and border enforcement system. In their real world, the migrant protagonists are denied an access to the central, culturally dominant space; instead, they are offered a virtual realm, a digital access that is subordinated to the level of legitimacy they achieve. The blurring between the organic and the cybernetic contributes to shape a dehumanized borderland realm, at the service of a nativist state power that tries to obliterate the presence of migrants despite their fundamental role in the U.S. capitalist economy. However, the cyborg subject embodies the possibility of resistance to that same power. Relying on their humanity, and yet through the projected digital versions of themselves, the protagonists can eventually counter the dominant order—albeit mostly to an individual extent. Drawing on the relatively extensive academic literature on Sleep Dealer, this analysis highlights similarities and differences between the two films, focusing in particular on Culture Shock and how its virtual reality device allows an expansion on the topics of forced assimilation and erasure of Latinx subjectivity.

Cornelia Klecker, Sascha Pöhlmann

(Re)Imagining Flyover: An Introduction

This introduction to the special issue titled "(Re)Imagining Flyover Fictions" theorizes the flyover trope (as in "flyover country/state") as a critical concept in cultural studies in order to make it an abstract tool to explore, among others, the historical continuities and present facets of polarization in the United States. In addition to these theoretical and methodological elaborations, we will also provide a specific and particularly topical example by analyzing flyover fictions in the context of the 2024 US presidential election.

Marina Pingler

The "Colonial Anthropocene" Imaginary: Re-Imagining Climate Change in Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018)

Climate imaginaries – collectively held visions of future climate change – take shape in a variety of media and genres, from computer models to poetry. While some climate imaginaries have proven particularly enduring and have managed to attain a hegemonic status in climate change discourse – for example, the "techno-market" imaginary and the "climate apocalypse" imaginary – others remain marginalized. Drawing on Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), this article theorizes the "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary as an alternative imaginary and examines its co-production at the intersection of academic discourses, activism, and literature. The "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary generally and Moon of the Crusted Snow specifically negotiate ideological tensions that have emerged in the discourse on the Anthropocene and forge a connection between the seemingly exceptional event of anthropogenic climate change and a historical sequence of colonial violence and forced displacement of Indigenous peoples. As one of this imaginary's manifestations in the literary domain, Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) embeds climate change into a longer story that begins with settler colonialism on the North American continent by drawing on an equally old genre: the Indian captivity narrative. Significantly, the "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary is a reaction to the impulse toward claims to universality resurfacing in the discourse on the Anthropocene, particularly in the notion of "the human."

Stefan Schubert

Working-Class Labor in Postapocalyptic America: Affect, Politics, and the 'Forgotten Man' in Death Stranding

This article examines Hideo Kojima's 2019 Death Stranding as a postapocalyptic video game intent on evoking a particular kind of "Americanness." I analyze the game for its textual and cultural politics, arguing that it reconstructs a vision of the United States that is not just built on older myths like that of westward expansion and rugged individualism but that also evokes a more contemporary trope of the "forgotten man." In my reading, Death Stranding champions not just any person as the potential savior of America but it specifically marks its protagonist as a white working-class male, suggesting that this is the kind of person—and the kind of labor that he allegedly performs best—needed to bring the US back together. I trace this argument by examining how the game's visuals, narrative, and gameplay intersect in depicting a postapocalyptic America that evokes the western genre, in affectively guiding its players to feel for the game's protagonist as a "forgotten man," and in how the gameplay's embrace of working-class labor leads to a ludo-affective dissonance that complicates Death Stranding's political project.

Julia Leyda

The Feminist Futures of American Studies: Addressing the Post-Weinstein Media and Cultural Landscape

This article reflects on the long-term and recent developments in the interdisciplinary field of American studies and its imbrications with its cultural and political contexts. Pushing back against premature assertions of feminism's obsolescence, I argue that scholars and teachers of American studies and media studies must take the popular seriously―popular film and television as well as popular political movements. Given the growing demand from students for a deeper and more sustained engagement with intersectional feminism, the article works through some short case studies to urge even the confirmed feminists to rethink and refresh their approaches to teaching and performing scholarship to best provide students with the theoretical tools to strengthen and define their feminism as a discipline as well as an attitude. Inspired by the popular 2014 movement, "The Year of Reading Women," the #metoo and #timesup phenomena, and the popularity of and backlash against celebrity feminism of Beyoncé and others, this article weaves together academic and pop-cultural sources such as Sara Ahmed and Roxane Gay to underscore our responsibility to maintain, nurture, and contribute to the progress made by previous generations of feminists.

Johannes Walter Vith

Remaking Columbine

High school shootings in the United States generally receive enormous amounts of journalistic coverage and thus spark a lot of public interest. However, the topic appears to be taboo for mainstream cinema, and there are barely any films about real-life school shootings. This article seeks to show that Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003) is both an enlightening exception to this seeming contradiction and an interesting response to the popular narratives surrounding the Columbine High School shooting of 1999. The film is not only unique in its portrayal of a real-life school shooting but also in the way that it approaches the topic. There are three important processes that make this depiction of the Columbine High School shooting so powerful: remaking, remediating, and reflecting. First, Van Sant's film is a remake of Alan Clarke's 1989 film of the same name. Clarke's film depicts several incidents of gun violence in Northern Ireland without any commentary, and Van Sant employs the same techniques in his film about gun violence at a school. Second, the film critiques the discourse around the shooting, as it remediates video games for its filmic rhetoric. Lastly, Gus Van Sant de-narrativizes the shooting and creates a reflective space for the audience. These three aspects all influence the film's storytelling and cinematography, which aim at promoting reflection rather than providing a straightforward narrative.

Johannes Vith

Violent Landscapes: James Benning's Landscape Suicide (1986)

While serial killings, murders, and other violent deaths are traumatic incidents for the communities in which they occur, they also attract a great deal of media attention and form the basis for numerous cinematic adaptations in US-American cinema and beyond. Many of these movies employ a sensationalist approach and focus on the social environments of the killings: the perpetrator's upbringing, triggering experiences, or a generally troubled personality. There are only a limited number of cinematic treatments of violent killings that focus on the natural environment or the landscapes where these incidents occurred.

This article is concerned with filmmakers using (cinematic) landscapes as a mode of cultural expression for violence and trauma. It seeks to show that James Benning's Landscape Suicide (1986) calls for a different understanding of landscape that goes beyond a mere setting for narrative, as it gives landscape active agency in its mediation of two seemingly unconnected murder cases. The film compares and juxtaposes the murder of Kirsten Costas by Bernadette Protti in a suburb of San Francisco in 1984 with the killings of Ed Gein in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in the 1950s. In doing so, the film presents viewers with two distinct functions of landscape in mediating violence and trauma: as a spatialization of time and as socio-political surroundings. Analyzing these aspects of the film helps us to better understand the link between landscape, violence, and trauma in cinematic treatments of violent incidents and also sheds light on the broader connection between landscape and trauma culture.

Robert A. Winkler

"Out there in that cabin in the middle of nowhere in Montana": Narrating the Geographical and Mental Deviance of the Unabomber

In 1996, the mathematician-turned-terrorist Theodore J. Kaczynski, nicknamed the Unabomber, was arrested in his self-built cabin in the woods of Montana after having terrorized the nation for over 20 years. He had modeled his cabin after Henry David Thoreau's idealized Walden cabin. This article argues that the Unabomber's cabin in Montana, often considered a so-called flyover state, serves as the pivotal point for his geographical marginalization in the media coverage of the case. Its location in what is discursively constructed as a 'wilderness' makes it impossible to perceive his cabin through the perspective of the pastoral ideal – this imagined middle ground between nature and culture. The over-determination of this material form in its location apparently off the grid furthermore enables the othering and medicalization of Theodore J. Kaczynski. This article demonstrates that the media coverage of the Unabomber case displays these three tendencies which come together in the nexus cabinsanity, i.e., the conflation of pseudo-geographical, cultural, and medical discourses. Projecting cabinsanity, in turn, enables the dismissal of the Unabomber's critique of technologized society as delineated in his manifesto.

Matthias Klestil

Paul Austers autobiographische Werke: Stationen einer Schriftstellerkarriere. By Christian Eilers (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019), 326pp.

Matthias Klestil reviews Christian Eilers's 2019 study Paul Austers autobiographische Werke: Stationen einer Schriftstellerkarriere.

Joshua Parker

Profiles and Plotlines: Data Surveillance in Twenty-First Century Literature. By Katherine D. Johnston. U of Iowa P, 2023, 207 pp.

Joshua Parker reviews Katherine D. Johnston's Data Surveillance in Twenty-First Century Literature (U of Iowa P, 2023).

Sandra Tausel

"Damned If We Do, Damned If We Don't": Ageist Narratives of Reproductive Control

Women who grow up in Western societies are confronted with media, cultural, and literary narratives conveying the notion that motherhood is "natural" and an integral part of womanhood from a very young age. Thus, having a child is frequently presented as the only option for adult women. Nancy Felipe Russo calls this "the motherhood mandate," which problematically suggests that every woman wants to become a mother and that this "is a woman's raison d'etre" (144). The normative conflation of womanhood with the obligatory assumption of motherhood is ingrained in North American society and reinforces rigid gender norms while exposing hegemonic reproductive expectations. These norms also extend into efforts to control reproduction and produce condemning, frequently ageist narratives that stigmatize those whose reproductive choices do not comply with heteropatriarchal norms. Therefore, this article proposes that age is a crucial lever of reproductive control and examines how ageist facets of such controlling efforts affect characters' lives in Brit Bennett's The Mothers and Sheila Heti's Motherhood. Based on the reproductive choices in The Mothers and Motherhood, I will argue that the ageist reproductive norms and concomitant stigmatizing narratives aim to exert reproductive control, on the one hand, by suggesting that young women are damned if they become pregnant, mothers, or have an abortion, and, on the other, by condemning adult women who decide to remain childfree.