Alfred Hornung

Life Writing in and beyond the Anglophone World

Life writing and life-writing studies today seem to be closely connected to people and institutions in Anglophone countries, more specifically in the classical countries of immigration: America, Canada, and Australia. In view of the changed nature, function, and appeal of autobiographical (re)presentations, this is not really surprising. The conventional conception of autobiography, which in the West is usually derived from The Confessions of Saint Augustine and stands for the recollection of the chronological stages of life from the vantage point of old age with the intention of creating a unified self in the narrative, has become obsolete and inadequate to capture forms of life in transit. To a certain extent the Augustinian model developed into a European genre of autobiography that also became the standard in the European colonies. At the same time, new forms of life narratives emerged or were practiced in conjunction with the discovery or conquest and subsequent colonization of the American and Australian continents. Concrete themes connected with specific experiences at a given moment in life were turned into narratives to document past events and to account for them. Such types as the discoverers’ “relations,” as well as captivity, conversion, and slave narratives come to mind, as do Indigenous peoples’ pictographs and petroglyphs, oral narratives, songs, prayers, and performances. They prefigure and antedate some of the wide-ranging definitions of life writing today, since they arise from voluntary or forced movements, migration, and removal, making for a non-sedentary life in search of stability. Migration within or between countries calls for and is accompanied by life writing. The predisposition of migrants for autobiographical narratives in the classical countries of immigration also favors the formation of autobiography studies in these new worlds. The flexibility of American, Canadian, and Australian institutions of higher education in adapting to new areas of research and in redefining disciplines facilitated the rise of autobiography studies in the 1980s after the publication of James Olney’s landmark collection Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical in 1980 and its subsequent transformation into life writing under the auspices of race, class, and gender discussions. The first discussion groups of autobiography studies at the MLA

Out of Place: Extraterritorial Existence and Autobiography

Abstract Edward Said’s Out of Place serves to address the double nature of a person’s extraterritoriality in life and in autobiographical texts whose subjects have migrated from their place of origin in the East to the West and define themselves with reference to American culture and politics. The African-Caribbean writer Michelle Cliff, a naturalized American citizen, uses her first two autobiographical novels, Abeng (1984) and No Telephone to Heaven (1987), to reconnect with her Caribindian past and her native island of Jamaica through stays in the US and England. The Turkish-German writer Feridun Zaimoglu, often labeled the “Malcolm X of German Turks,” creates from his extraterritorial existence a new cultural space in Kanak Sprak (1995) or Kopf und Kragen (2001) whose political platform derives from the situation of American minority groups. Edward Said, in turn, provides in Out of Place (1999) the biographical data behind his theoretical discussions of extraterritoriality and cultural imperialism and reconceptualizes the ‘Orient’ from his position as comparative literary critic in New York. All three writers seem to find a place in the genre of autobiography which they remodel commensurate with their extraterritorial existence.

‘Modern,’ ‘Postmodern’ and ‘Contemporary’ as Criteria for the Analysis of 20th Century Literature

A systematic survey of the theories concerning the terms ‘modern,’ postmodern’ and ‘contemporary’ reveals the wide range of different approaches in search of categories for the analysis of 20th century literature. Two fundamental positions emerge: on the one hand a discontinuity between ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ analogous to the structural opposition of two different principles of integration: subjectivity and absence of subjectivity; on the other hand a continuity from ‘modern’ to ‘postmodern’ as a logical further development. The modern writers’ subjective sensibility creates highly structured artifacts with new forms and techniques as a reflex reaction to the inhuman aspects of modern industrial society; postmodern writers, in a dual process of physical reduction and spiritual expansion, move away from all thematic or formal constraints, giving themselves up to the anarchy of pure imagination. ‘Contemporary’ is used as a loose term for a literature critical of social conditions; it fits into neither the ‘modern’ nor the ‘postmodern’ category. While ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ can serve as models of explanation for the categorization of literature, such terms as ‘contemporary’ and ‘avant-garde’ are bound to an historical context and resist any practical systematization.

Diversity and Life Writing in the Transnational Classroom

For this chapter, Alfred Hornung locates the origin of Germany’s diversity studies in the postwar era, during which Germany experienced gradual transculturation, especially due to the presence of African American soldiers, but also due to the appearance of American cultures in the media, the introduction of American studies in German universities, and the teaching of multi-ethnic authors in American literature courses. On the basis of international pedagogical experience, Hornung demonstrates that life writing lends itself particularly well to the representation and recognition of diversity and suggests how inclusion can be furthered. The focus of this chapter’s transnational classroom comparison is Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, whose cultural hybridity has promoted international discussion on inclusive diversity and inspired students to achieve transcultural competence.

Out of Life: Routes, Refuge, Rescue

ABSTRACT Migrations of people have influenced the history of humankind from early on. Today, we are experiencing an exodus of people from misery and war-torn regions in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to the heart of Europe. Edward Saids Out of Place (1999) serves as a foil for the authors discussion of past and present forms of “out-of-life narratives,” which are triggered by and accompany routes of escape in search of refuge and rescue. The authors examples include Jack Londons hobo existence in The Road (1907), Cherokee Jerry Elliss reenactment of the Indian Removal in Walking the Trail (1991), and mobile phone communications, photo galleries, and documentaries on social media of present-day migrants on the Balkan route.

Research Rating Anglistik/Amerikanistik of the German Council of Science and Humanities

The pilot study Forschungsrating Anglistik/Amerikanistik is the first implementation of the Forschungsrating in the humanities. This chapter presents the findings and conclusions of the rating. It consists of three parts: First, the results of the rating, first published in December 2012, are presented, as well as the conclusions drawn by the German Council of Science and Humanities. Second, Alfred Hornung who chaired the review board reflects on the Forschungsrating from the point of view of the chair of the review board as well as an Amerikanistik scholar. Third, Barbara Korte writes about the Forschungsrating from her perspective as a member of the review board and Anglistik scholar.

Maoism and Postmodernism

In this essay I discuss the emergence of the Mao cult during the Cultural Revolution in China and its appropriation in cultural revolutions in Europe and the United States to show how this image resonated with similar cults of popular icons in the West and lent itself to the formulation of theories and practices of postmodernism. The image quality of these cults facilitated the rise of the Mao-craze in the late 1980s and 1990s when political pop productions of Mao by Chinese artists emerged in New York and were then transplanted to China where they met with transfigurations of Mao’s legacy in the People’s Republic. The final stage of postmodern variations of Mao is reached with the presidency of Barack Obama in 2009 and the merging of the two leaders into Chairman Obamao or Comrade Maobama, which can be read as the end of ideological contrast between the two countries for the sake of creating a system of political interdependence for the 21st century, a postmodern prefiguration of a coming ChinAmerica.

Life Sciences and Life Writing

Recent attempts to combine the life sciences with the practice and study of life writing rely on the common basis of a changed research environment about the constitution and conception of life. New fields of research, such as the Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine, chart the way for a cross-disciplinary cooperation, which overcomes C. P. Snow’s claim of two distinct cultures. Both scientists and writers experience and describe aspects of organic life to understand human nature, often in comparison to animal behavior, with an ecological concern for the preservation of the biosphere. In this endeavor they acquire new systems of knowledge and make use of the art of narrative self-presentation. The interaction of the life sciences and life writing in autobiographies and autobiographical fiction of the Canadian zoologist David Suzuki, the Harvard myrmecologist E. O. Wilson, and the New York novelist Siri Hustvedt ranges from the use of evolutionary biological models of life via environmental activism to the insights of neuroscience. In all instances, the science and life writers recognize the advantage of life writing for the presentation of scientific ideas to a larger audience in publications or on TV. Alfred Hornung, University of Mainz E-Mail: hornung@uni-mainz.de Both the life sciences and life writing are two interdisciplinary phenomena entering the academic and popular scene in the second half of the twentieth century. As new fields of research and social practice they emerge from what the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow called the division of intellectual life into two cultures, the sciences and the humanities. The famous example cited in the physicist’s Rede lecture at Cambridge University in 1959 about the ignorance of most people of scientific laws and their inability to describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which for him was the equivalent to having read a play by Shakespeare, still seems to uphold in our time (Snow 1998: 14–15). Hence Craig Howes, long-time co-editor of the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, opens his remarks about the combination of life sciences and life writing at the Annual Convention of the German Association for American Studies in 2012 on “American Lives”with the following anecdote: DOI 10.1515/anglia-2015-0004 Anglia 2015, 133(1): 37–52

When Passion Makes Ideas Travel In Memory of Katharine Newman

In the early eighties in Europe, Dorothy Skardal (Norway) and William Boelhower (Italy) began actively collaborating with the MELUS organization and publishing in its journal. When Wayne Miller, then the journals editor, came to Italy and Boelhower was appointed book review editor in 1982, ties between scholars of ethnic literatures in the United States and Europe began to thicken. Beginning with the 1980s, Dorothy Skardal and William Boelhower inaugurated a series of EAAS (European Association of American Studies) workshops on immigrant literatures within the larger biennial conference format and these encouraged further dialogue between European and American scholars. This forum became what we might call the first MELUS outpost in Europe when workshop members decided to set up their own European journal; In Their Own Words, under the editorship of Boelhower, had a short but intense life of four issues over as many years. Behind all these efforts, of course, was Katharine Newman, who repeatedly encouraged Skardal and Boelhower to start MELUS-type activities in Europe. Through letters and mutual