Poetics of Politics

sebastian m. herrmann carolin alice hofmann katja kanzler · stefan schubert herrmann · hofmann · kanzler frank usbeck Editors schubert · usbeck (Eds.) Poetics of Politics herrmann hofmann Textuality Poetics his volume proposes the ‘poetics of politics’ as an T kanzler and Social Relevance analytic angle to interrogate contemporary cultural schubert in Contemporary of production in the United States. As recent scholar- usbeck American Literature ship has observed, American literature and culture (Eds.) and Culture Politics around the turn of the millennium, while still deeply informed by the textual self-consciousness of postmodernism, are marked by a rekindled interest in American Studies ★ A Monograph Series matters of social concern. This revived interest in politics is frequently read as a ‘grand epochal transiti- Volume 258 Druckfarben Poetics on.’ Sidestepping such a logic of periodization, this cyan of magenta book points to the interplay between the textual and gelb the political as a dynamic—always locally specific— Politics schwarz that affords unique insights into the characteristics of the contemporary moment. The sixteen case studies in this book explore this interplay across a wide range of media, genres, and modes. Together, they make visible a broad cultural concern with negotia- ting social relevance and textual self-awareness that permeates and structures contemporary US (popular) culture. Universitätsverlag winter isbn 978-3-8253-6447-2 Heidelberg american studies – a monograph series Volume 258 Edited on behalf of the German Association for American Studies by alfred hornung anke ortlepp heike paul Poetics of Politics Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture Edited by sebastian m. herrmann carolin alice hofmann katja kanzler stefan schubert frank usbeck Universitätsverlag winter Heidelberg Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. This book is part of the Joint Dresden-Leipzig Research Initiative »Selbst-Bewusste Erzählungen«. For more information, please cf. www.narrativeculture.de/poetics-of-politics. Funding for this volume was contributed in part by American Space Leipzig www.americanspace-leipzig.de. isbn 978-3-8253-6447-2 Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt ins- besondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. © 2015 Universitätsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg Imprimé en Allemagne · Printed in Germany Druck: Memminger MedienCentrum, 87700 Memmingen Gedruckt auf umweltfreundlichem, chlorfrei gebleichtem und alterungsbeständigem Papier Den Verlag erreichen Sie im Internet unter: www.winter-verlag.de Table of Contents SEBASTIAN M. HERRMANN, KATJA KANZLER, STEFAN SCHUBERT Introduction: The Poetics of Politics 7 Film and Television ANDREW HOBEREK Thinking Institutionally: Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, and the Politics of Contemporary Historical Films 29 FELIX BRINKER On the Formal Politics of Narratively Complex Television Series: Operational Self-Reflexivity and Audience Management in Fringe and Homeland 41 ELEONORA RAVIZZA The Politics of Melodrama: Nostalgia, Performance, and Gender Roles in Revolutionary Road 63 MICHAEL BUTTER American Basterds: The Deconstruction of World War II Myths in Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds 81 DOROTHEA GAIL, RAY CANOY The Last Days of American Civilization: The Poetics of Righteous Violence in Bob Goldthwait’s Black Comedy God Bless America 101 Nonfiction BRUNO ARICH-GERZ Poetics of Disaster: Filmic Elements and Traces of Fiction Literature in the 9/11 Commission Report: Frames and Functions of a Generic Hybrid 121 SEBASTIAN M. HERRMANN Foggy Realisms? Fiction, Nonfiction, and Political Affect in Larry Beinhart’s Fog Facts and The Librarian 133 CAROLIN ALICE HOFMANN Testifying by Proxy: A Trauma Studies Approach to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks 153 vi Table of Contents ‘Literature’ KATJA KANZLER Post-Race Ideology and the Poetics of Genre in David Mamet’s Race 175 HANS FRESE The Great American Novel and Beyond: Jonathan Franzen and the Legacy of the Culture Wars 195 ILKA SAAL “Just as Good as the Real Thing”: Historiopoiesis in Third-Generation Narratives on Slavery 215 OLESYA BONDARENKO “Inherently Political”: Rancièrian Philosophy and Language Writing 235 SABRINA HÜTTNER Politics of Dissent: Reconsidering ‘the Political’ in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul 249 New Media STEFAN SCHUBERT Objectivism, Narrative Agency, and the Politics of Choice in the Video Game BioShock 271 SOPHIE SPIELER “Our Everyday Is Better Than Your Best Day”: Spectacle and the Politics of Ambiguity on the Tumblr Blog Rich Kids of Instagram 291 FRANK USBECK “The Power of the Story”: ‘Popular Narratology’ in Pentagon Reports on Social Media Use in the Military 313 Notes on Contributors 335 SEBASTIAN M. HERRMANN, KATJA KANZLER, STEFAN SCHUBERT Introduction: The Poetics of Politics In the introduction to his 2010 book The Passing of Postmodernism, Josh Toth speculates that “[p]erhaps the fall of George W. Bush’s cynical administration [...] and the massively popular rise of Barack Obama’s overtly ‘sincere’ administration [...] finally signals the culmination of a grand epochal transition” (2). Toth’s remarks exemplify a recurrent dynamic in scholarship on contemporary US literature and culture, a dynamic shaping much of the work done in American studies and beyond. First and fore- most, they reflect an intense desire to capture the contemporary moment as one marked by a “grand epochal transition,” an end (or ‘death’) of one period and the beginning of another. Whatever the specific terminology employed—‘post-postmodernism,’ ‘late postmodernism,’ ‘digimodernism,’ ‘metamodernism,’ ‘cosmodernism,’ or the like1—the desire to periodize the present runs strongly in contemporary scholarship. Secondly, by tying his argument to two US presidencies, Toth implies that the recent watershed in literary and cultural styles is intimately connected with the realm of politics. Like many other scholars and writers, he suggests that what distinguishes the present period from the previous one unfolds at the inter- section of aesthetics and politics. Thirdly, however, he uses a conspicuously cautious language to make this point, extensively reflecting on and problematizing the very gestures of periodization on which he nonetheless builds his argument. In an ironic twist, Toth’s and other critical texts, in their desire to ‘end’ postmodernism and to discover a renewed ‘seriousness’ in contemporary texts, thus become entangled in a very postmodern quandary of periodization, diagnosed by Fredric Jameson as a “crisis” in which the concept and categories of periodization “seem to be as indispens- able as they are unsatisfactory for any kind of work in cultural study” (Political Unconscious 13).2 This volume suggests a different conceptual response to the developments in literary and cultural production observed by Toth and others, one that counters the grand récit of periodization with a ‘local’ interrogation of 1 There is a litany of different terms used to describe such an allegedly new epoch. ‘Post-postmodernism’ may be the most widely used term for this phenomenon and appears, for instance, in the studies by Robert L. McLaughlin, Jeffrey Nealon, and Nicole Timmer, but other terms include Alan Kirby’s ‘digimodernism,’ Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s ‘metamodernism,’ Jeremy Green’s ‘late postmodernism,’ and Christian Moraru’s ‘cosmodernism.’ 2 Iterating one of his standard moves of postmodern critique, Jameson particularly takes issue with the ‘totalizing’ effects of periodization: “[A]ny rewarding use of the notion of a historical or cultural period tends in spite of itself to give the impression of a facile totalization, a seamless web of phenomena each of which, in its own way, ‘expresses’ some unified inner truth [...]. Yet such an impression is fatally 8 Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert the contemporary moment. This kind of local approach to historicization— pursued by a number of recent literary histories like Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’s New Literary History of America—programmatically re- frains from organizing historical developments into periods, i.e., clearly demarcated, coherent entities whose definitions inevitably resonate with one or the other grand narrative of history.3 Instead, it explores “points in time and imagination,” spotlights that—rather than being enlisted in linear, teleological conceptions of history—are juxtaposed in ways that aim “to set many forms of American speech in motion, so that different forms [...] can be heard speaking to each other” (xxiv). This approach, in other words, abandons the notion of bounded and homogeneous periods separated by turns in favor of a focus on moments at which particular historical dy- namisms surface.4 In this spirit, our book seeks to illuminate the contemporary moment that so many scholars agree on as marking a new period, but it does so by focusing on a particular, local dynamism that emerges at the intersections of textuality and politicality in a diverse range of ‘texts.’ It explores

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