Waldemar Zacharasiewicz

North American Travellers in the Rhine Valley: Revisions of Their Perspectives on the Landscape and on Sites of Memory in the Contested Region

This volume presents documents and analyses, from various specialisms and perspectives, the cultural, political and national investments and appropriations of the Rhine, from Byron to Lucien Febvre, and from tourism to war propaganda. It includes a comprehensive anthology of original Rhine-related texts (historical, poetical and polemical).

American cultural icons: the production of representative lives

displaces any possibility of stability, both for the reader and the author. She conceives of authenticity not as an essentialist, static category of ascription and authority but “as a process that we can either master or fail at”. Even the outcome, it seems, is eventually irrelevant; the crucial aspect of any attempt at authenticity is that it “harbours many good stories” (278). This collection indeed recounts some of these good stories. Taken together, the essays collected by Julia Straub show that it is impossible and indeed undesirable to dissolve, ontologically as well as aesthetically, the paradoxes of authenticity. They give evidence of the powerful theoretical sway this supposedly nostalgic and retrospective concept still holds. This, in the best etymological sense, illustrious collection presents a valid and valuable contribution to the ongoing discourse on authenticity and thereby does its bit to keep this discourse form coming to an unwelcome conclusion anytime soon.