Spending Time in the Nineteenth Century

This special issue of New American Studies Journal: A Forum looks at nineteenth-century American literature and culture through the analytical lens of free time and leisure. This analytical framework affords a novel access point to American literary history—free time, as this special issue will explore, is a highly contested and politicized concept and resource of the nineteenth century, one that restructures temporalities and spaces. Nineteenth-century American culture and literature can be understood as an archive to explore free time as a significant social and economic innovation into the texture of individual life. The contributions to this special issue explore the rise of free time in the nineteenth century with particular attention toward temporal and spatial reconfigurations that free time afforded. Furthermore they explore the societal and cultural aspects of free time that grew around the logics and logistics of nineteenth-century capitalism—a social formation that made leisure, time off work, not merely possible, but that created entire industries and spaces for leisure and repose.

Making Love Public: The Paradoxes of Intimacy in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove

This article focuses on the paradoxes pertaining to romantic love in Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove. Drawing on love sociology (Luhmann, Illouz) it explores the ways in which James places the love and courtship of his protagonists Merton Densher and Kate Croy in a complex and shifting relation to the private and the public. As sociologists and cultural historians inform us, “romantic love“—a notion that links love and marriage—emerged only in the late 18th century as an ideal advocated by sentimentalism and romanticism and then gained popularity throughout the 19th century. Its emergence was concomitant with the rise of the middle class, the rise of the novel, and the growing separation of the private and the public spheres. Indeed, as Niklas Luhmann argues in his seminal study Love as Passion, the differentiation of the private or intimate sphere—a sphere defined by personal/intimate relations as opposed to impersonal ones—begins with the cultural codification of love. It was only after love and marriage became linked that marriage gained its status as a private affair and the family came to be regarded as the sphere of privacy. This already suggests a paradox built into the idea of romantic love: while love came to be understood as the most intimate relation between two people and as central for the demarcation of the private sphere, it also needed to be made public in order to remain what it was. This paradox is reflected in one of the major ironies of James’ novel: Kate’s decision neither to publicly acknowledge their relationship nor to conduct it in secret, but rather to appear publicly and act privately as if there was nothing to disavow in the first place, leads to the disintegration of their intimate bond. Suggesting that the performative effects of Kate and Merton’s public actions eventually render their intimate bond nonexistent, James exposes the paradox at the heart of romantic love.

“No-Body’s Watch”: Nineteenth-Century Capitalism, Temporality, and the Figure of the Loafer

This article outlines the rather obscure ascent and fall of the loafer as a cultural figure. Beginning with the emergence of the term and its ambivalent semantics of idleness, I will sketch its subsequent racialization and regionalization, as it was appropriated by abolitionist writers who associated with whiteness, poverty, and southern masculinity. The significance of the term lies in the way it combines criticisms of capitalism and racism in a figure of idleness. A figure of idleness, both in its romanticized and disparaging connotations, the loafer alerts us to the fact that US nineteenth-century temporality is closely and inseparably entangled in the history of capitalism and slavery.

Ishmael’s Night of Rest and Relaxation

My article on Moby-Dick explores the juxtaposition of self and other, alienation and community, friendship and leisure. By way of the book’s famous fourth chapter, “The Counterpane,” I argue that repose, conceived as a way of spending time, exposes some of the contradictions of the capitalist dictum of industriousness. The quilt that features so prominently in the chapter is to be underestood as a figure of resting and relaxing, which accumulates a patchwork of additional meanings through Ishmael’s contradictory experiences during the night at the Spouter-Inn with Queequeg.

Melville’s Majestic Missive:“Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”

In keeping with the spirit of American Studies, this article engages in an interdisciplinary examination of Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853). Employing a broad literary-critical-historical methodology that also incorporates cultural and social theory, I sociohistorically contextualize “Bartleby” and demonstrate how this stylistically innovative short story anticipated later works of modernist, existential, and postmodern literature. Now internationally renowned as a classic of American literature, “Bartleby” is of interest not only for its historically innovative style––which continues to resonate with contemporary readers––but also for how it potentially serves as Melville’s self-reflexive meditation on his then declining literary career.

Data, Maps, Networks – Digital Approaches to Reading (in) Nineteenth-Century Literature

Recently, there has been a growing number of scholarly attempts to ‘read’ the 19th century either through digital methods or, more specifically as a precursor to contemporary digital culture. The practice of reading is a category through which the two dimensions of spending time in and with the nineteenth century can be thought together. A focus on reading, as a way to spend time in/with the nineteenth century makes us aware of both the knowledge systems and methodologies of accessing and processing information, both in literary texts of that period and simultaneously in our own work. More specifically, my essay is interested in questions of ‘readability’ and the ‘crisis of reading’, as self-reflexively pronounced in two nineteenth century novels: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Frank Norris’s The Octopus. These novels, I argue, prefigure debates that are well-known to us and that materialize in the opposition between what Katherine Hayles has called “hyperreading” vs linear or immersive reading, between the New Critic’s formulation of close reading and what Franco Moretti has provocatively called “distant reading”, or the postcritical distinction between symptomatic and surface reading. By discussing different strategies of reading, the novels express the uncontrollability in view of increasing information environments. Yet, even if these webs of signification are elusive and at times dangerous, both novels, in a self-reflexive move, express a desire of writing the human reader into this web of signification and therefore to emphasize the significance of reading in an increasingly automated world.

Entangled Encounters: The Transcultural Counterwitness and Implication in Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’s Situations

Drawing on current definitions of public testimony, this study turns to the work of Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’s Situations to explore how video poems challenge the pervasive stereotyping of black Americans in mainstream journalism and implicate viewers, particularly white ones, into the everyday and historical traumas of racial violence. Video poems, such as Situations, take advantage of multimodal channels to move viewers beyond spectator guilt to introduce a more nuanced understanding of American and global racism. Through an investigation of three of their video poems, “Stop and Frisk,” “In Memory of Trayvon Martin,” and “World Cup,” this study explores how Rankine and Lucas’s work opposes, and engages with, the pervasive stereotyping of black Americans presented in mainstream news media; how the multimodal nature of video poetry problematizes the viewers’ relationship with American and global racism; and how acts of counterwitnessing implicate viewers into distant histories of racial trauma.

Introduction: Digital Pedagogy in American Studies

As we are writing the introduction to this special issue we are looking back on the online summer semester 2020, which has profoundly and perhaps lastingly impacted how we do American Studies, not least by pushing us to embrace digital technologies to an extent unimaginable half a year ago. Did we really need a viral pandemic to provide the necessary push for some of our colleagues to become (more) digitally naturalized? Of course not. On the other hand, we would have appreciated practical guidelines and offers of technical support for our digital teaching ideas (as most universities have provided them in the last months) much earlier. Yet, most of these offerings were merely technological or only contained a list of tools available. How can we think critically about our tools, and how can we implement them successfully?

Leipzig’s Social Hypertext Reader SHRIMP and the “Introduction to American Studies”

This article describes the ideas behind and the experiences with the experimental e-learning platform SHRIMP. Developed and deployed at American Studies Leipzig, the platform is used for the introductory Literature and Culture I seminar in the American Studies Bachelor of Arts program, and it serves as the main medium of instruction for around 80 students per year. It breaks up the linear form of the original seminar reader and instead offers students a hypertext of interconnected, short segments, enriched with social media and gamification elements, as well as a learning analytics component that invites students to take control of their own study and learning experience. It is driven by a dual assumption about digitization: that the digital age changes how students interact with text, and that digital textuality offers rich affordances beyond linear reading. Both can be harnessed to improve learning outcomes.

“Art Has a Bad (W)rap”: A Conversation with Michael Cullen about the “Wrapped Reichstag”

“The history of monuments teaches us much more about people and societies that commissioned them than the people and events for whom they were commissioned.” This is how Michael S. Cullen explained the meaning of commemorative architecture in an interview conducted by telephone, due to Corona restrictions, on 17 September 2020 (see also his introduction to Das Holocaust-Mahnmal, 18). Monuments are designed to commemorate important figures and events, but they also materialize the discussions and debates involved in their construction. Cullen should know. His work has made him the voice, perhaps even the conscience, of what is perhaps the most dialogic monument in Berlin: the Reichstag.