U srijedu, 9. svibnja, prof. Silvia Schultermandl sa Sveučilišta u Grazu održat će predavanje o transnacionalnom zaokretu u američkim studijima. Predavanje će se održati u 18h u vijećnici Filozofskoga fakulteta, a pratit će ga druženje s gošćom. Više o predavanju i predavačici u nastavku.
Transnational Turns and Ambivalent Positions: An Alternative American Literary History
Transnationalism is, no doubt, one of the biggest buzz-words of the 21st century. In a narrow sense, it describes the continuous flow of goods, people and ideas within the agitated dynamics of a globalized and modern world. With its inherent motivation of destabilizing the nation-state as an organizational category, transnationalism has animated scholars to adopt a new perspective on American literature. Typically, research in transnational American Studies promotes investigations of American culture in its myriad appropriations in local and specific contexts on a global scale by defining borders as permeable and flexible. What is missing from the abundant scholarship is a substantiated study which extends the modes in which transnationalism challenges the nation-state into the aesthetic realm: 1) onto the level of aesthetic representation throughout American literary history; and 2) onto the level of aesthetic response (i.e. the texts’ realization via the dialectical relationship between reader and text.)
The overall theme is the notion of ambivalence as both a feeling about the self within the transnational world and a strategy to subsume the reader into the endeavor of re-thinking American literature from a transnational vantage point. My research program will analyze the constitutive elements of the present “transnational turn” in American literary studies in these fields and look for their historical linkages in search of the aesthetics of transnationalism which runs throughout American literary history. It will thoroughly analyze the aesthetic representation and ideological conceptualization of ambivalence from multiple angles, and will show that its prevalence throughout American literary history continuously challenges and queries that nation-state.
I claim that there is an aesthetics of transnationalism which runs parallel to the empire- and nation-building endeavors of much of American literature. This aesthetics of transnationalism is tangible on the narrative representation in fiction and autobiographical writing in the form of ambivalent authorial positions.
Silvia Schultermandl is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Graz, where she teaches courses in American literature and culture studies. She has published widely on ethnic American literature, transnational feminism, and 9/11. She is the author of Transnational Matrilineage: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Asian American Literature (2009) and the editor of Contemporary Asian American and British Asian Literatures (2006), A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity (2010, with Sebnem Toplu), and Growing Up Transnational: Identity and Kinship in a Global Era (2011, with May Friedman). Together with Erin Kenny (Drury University), she is the series editor of LIT Verlag’s book series Contributions to Transnational Feminism.
