alfred hornung Editor hornung (Ed.) · American Lives his volume focuses on religious, historical, literary, American Tcultural and political models, developed in Ameri- ca, for the realization and representation of Ameri- can lives. These original articles demonstrate the importance of different forms of life writing for the hornung Lives disciplines of American Studies. Experts in the field (Ed.) such as literary and cultural critics Sidonie Smith, Craig Howes, Birgit Däwes, historian Thomas Bender, and writer critic Siri Hustvedt among others American Studies ★ A Monograph Series cover the wide range of the presentation and perform- Volume 234 Druckfarben ance of selves in colonial literature, nature writing, American cyan immigrant and campaign auto/biographies, religion, magenta film, TV series, rap music, graphic presentations, Lives gelb comics, and sports. Addressing the transnational schwarz self-affirmations of American citizens in Hawai’i, the Caribbean islands, on reservations, and in urban ghettos they represent the diversified panorama of American lives. Universitätsverlag winter isbn 978-3-8253-6179-2 Heidelberg american studies – a monograph series Volume 234 Edited on behalf of the German Association for American Studies by reinhard r. doerries gerhard hoffmann alfred hornung American Lives Edited by alfred hornung 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. cover illustration Keynote speakers of the DGfA 2012 in Mainz: From left to right: Birgit Däwes, Thomas Bender, Craig Howes, Siri Hustvedt, Sidonie Smith Cover idea: Tanja Heising isbn 978-3-8253-6179-2 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. © 2013 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 ALFRED HORNUNG American Lives: Preface ..................................................................... ix Keynote Lectures SIDONIE SMITH “America’s Exhibit A”: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History and the Genres of Authenticity ...................................... 3 THOMAS BENDER Intellectual Biography and the Matrix of Creativity ............................. 27 CRAIG HOWES Slow Lives: Micro-Traditions in American and Hawaiian Biography and Autobiography ...................................... 49 BIRGIT DÄWES “What happens when the vanishing race doesn’t vanish?” Scenes of Native North American Historio/Biography ........................ 77 SIRI HUSTVEDT Borderlands: First, Second, and Third Person Adventures in Crossing Disciplines .................................................. 111 History and American Lives PATRICK ERBEN “Ship-Mate-Ship”: Commemorating the Lives of Friends in Francis Daniel Pastorius’s Anniversary Poems .............................. 139 vi CARSTEN JUNKER Narrating Family Lives: Religion and Enslavement in Samuel West’s Memoirs (1807) .................................................... 157 KIRSTEN TWELBECK Reconstructing Race Relations: Esther Hill Hawks’ Diary and her Life Among the Freedmen ............ 173 HANNAH SPAHN Eliza Potter’s “barberous profession”: Self, Race, and Nation in A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life ..................... 189 KATHLEEN LOOCK Laughing at the Greenhorn: Humor in Immigrant Autobiographies ... 207 Politics and American Lives MARKUS F. FALTERMEIER Self, Other, and Catholicism in Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness (1952): Narrative Constructions of a Personalist Identity ................... 227 KATHY-ANN TAN “Creating Dangerously”: Writing, Exile and Diaspora in Edwidge Danticat’s and Dany Laferrière’s Haitian Memoirs ......... 249 CEDRIC ESSI Transnational Affiliations in the Mixed Race Memoir: Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father ......................................... 261 CHRISTINA GERKEN The DREAMers: Narratives of Deservingness in Pro-Immigrant Activism in the Twenty-First Century.................... 283 JOCHEN ECKE Grant Morrison’s ‘Fiction Suits’: Comics Autobiography as Genre Fiction/Genre Fiction as Comics Autobiography ............................... 297 vii LUKAS ETTER On the Drawing Board: The Many Autobiographical “Wedges” of Alison Bechdel ................ 313 EVA BOESENBERG Family Business: Death in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home .................... 327 Media and American Lives NASSIM WINNIE BALESTRINI Photography as Online Life Writing: Miranda July’s and Harrell Fletcher’s Learning to Love You More (2002-09) .................. 341 BIRGIT M. BAURIDL “Deep-Mapping” the Diversity of New York Lives: The “City of Memory” Digital Project .............................................. 355 KATJA KANZLER Adaptation and Self-Expression in Julie/Julia ................................... 369 DUSTIN BREITENWISCHER Life and Times of . Promethean (Counter-)Narratives and the Poetic Function of Aesthetic Experience in Rap ................................ 381 CHRISTOPH RIBBAT Staring at (the Man Formerly Known as) Lew Alcindor: The Cultural Politics of a Basketball Life .......................................... 401 FRANK MEHRING Remediating Multi-Racial Memories: Audre Lorde’s Berlin Years and the Genealogy of Afro-German Life Writing .......... 415 JULIA FAISST Rebuilding the Neighborhood: Race, Property, and Urban Renewal Projects in Tremé ...................... 443 viii Life Writing and Life Science BIRGIT CAPELLE A Transcultural Consideration of “Place”: Thoreau’s Walden Pond and Kitarō Nishida’s “basho” ...................... 467 DIRK VANDERBEKE The Mental Detective: Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn ........ 479 HENRIKE LEHNGUTH The Killer Inside: First-Person Narration and the Reader/Viewer in Serial Killer Narratives ................................... 491 MARTIN HOLTZ The Pathological Protagonist in Recent Films by Martin Scorsese ..... 507 JAN D. KUCHARZEWSKI Survival of the Sickest? Cognitive Disorders and the Question of Agency in Contemporary American Fiction ................... 521 MITA BANERJEE, RALF DAHM, BIRGIT DÄWES, CRAIG HOWES, SIRI HUSTVEDT, NORBERT W. PAUL, and SIDONIE SMITH with JULIA WATSON Panel on Life Sciences and Life Writing ........................................... 537 Contributors ..................................................................................... 561 ALFRED HORNUNG American Lives: Preface The history of the American continent from the migration of Asian peoples via the transplantation of European settlers to modern-day immigration of newcomers from all parts of the world up to the twenty- first century has been accompanied by multiform patterns created for the representation of American lives. These forms of representation range from the cave paintings and rock art of indigenous people or their tradi- tions of storytelling via the written narratives of explorers and settlers about their encounter with the New World to the transcultural accounts of immigrants in search for a new American life. Part of the colonial legacy of the European conquest and discovery of America is the adher- ence to conventional forms used for the representation of human lives and the emergence of the human subject in the Renaissance period. First ignorant of, and later disregarding the material culture of life narratives by indigenous people, European immigrants privileged the classical forms of autobiography and biography to accompany the succession of generations. Taking Saint Augustine for a model, Puritans alternated between both forms but also instituted the tradition of the conversion narrative and learned the practice of the captivity narrative as the media- tion between European and Native lives. The prime example is the Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, who carries on the Puritan adapta- tion of the Augustinian form of life writing and establishes in his Autobiography the model for the representation of the self within the new republic of the United States of America. This model has served as a guideline for readers and practitioners of life writing in America. It is only in the second half of the twentieth century when autobiography and biography study become recognized fields of academic research, that new forms of life writing are practiced and retrospectively discovered x Alfred Hornung leading to the urgently needed expansion of the canon and methods of interpretation. For a long time, the classical forms of autobiography and biography as full-blown and complete accounts of human lives were considered the only versions of the genre worthy of discussion. The gradual expansion and inclusion of other forms began with James Olney’s landmark collec- tion Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical in 1980, continued with the turn to expressions of the self by women, ethnic minorities, and postcolonial migrants in the 1980s and 1990s, to yield the most comprehensive and extensive account of life writing research in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Reading Autobiography