Volume 55, Issue 4

This article argues that the development of American-style suburbia is related to the European utopian longing for openness as expressed in William Morris's News from Nowhere. This European desire is here shown to be a reaction to an American utopian literary tradition, exemplified by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, a novel that celebrates dense urbanity. After having traveled back and forth across the Atlantic and reversed their respective visions of urbanity, utopian writings ultimately materialized as dystopian urban spaces.

This paper focuses on the ambiguous status of the half-chapter in Julian Barnes's novel A History of the World in 10'½ Chapters (1989). "Parenthesis" stands in contradistinction to the other ten chapters in that it offers a concerted riposte to the provisionality of postmodern history by installing love as a structuring logic by which the terrifying randomness of the past can be negotiated. Much of the distinctiveness of "Parenthesis" derives from the intrusion of an authorial-narratorial figuration of Julian Barnes which, it is argued, lends the half-chapter a degree of authorial privilege and narrative stability that is not evident elsewhere. By reading the 'honesty' of Barnes's discourse on love as a postmodern strategy of seduction, it is claimed that the redemptive potential of love as a way of making meaning from chaos is compromised. To recognise this is to face the prospect that Barnes lulls his readers into believing that "Parenthesis" offers an escape from the scepticism of postmodernism only to confront them with their own naive desire for order in narrative as in history.

Inspired by Allan Kaprows performance 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), the Black American writer Samuel R. Delany created his own mode of 'narrative spaciality.' Spaces to him are primarily systems of signs, conventions, and power. These 'semiospheres' determine all modes of cognition and provoke the fundamental question of whether and how human beings can escape the semantics of their respective culture. This article traces the metamorphoses of Delany's spacial concepts in his literary, essayistic, and autobiographical ceuvre and thus also reconstructs the intellectual development of one of the most idiosyncratic American postmodernists.

Taking its cue from the debunking of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Holocaust memoirs Bruchstucke as a fake and the resultant problem of categorizing it generically, the article focuses on Cato Jaramillo’s equally questionable US-autobiography Too Stubborn to Die: A Child of Nordhausen about the alleged survival of the Nazi concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora. The reconstruction of the Wilkomirski case’ illustrates how the demasking of Bruchstucke in 1998 at the same time uncovers the text’s resemblance with fairy tales, and as such provides the reading strategy for the analysis of Jaramillo’s “True Story” (subtitle): A detailed investigation provides evidence of its missing authenticity - which has so far remained unnoticed in literary or cultural studies - and reveals its Hänsel und Gretel subtext. The discovery of both the story’s fictitiousness and its fairy tale elements helps to demonstrate how the text as a whole splits into a victimized-child and a perpetrator- adult part: It is at once a narrative of suffering and of imaginary sadism whose focalization exhibits both the Hänsel and Gretel and the witch’s point of view.

In 2003 the German songwriter-poet Wolf Biermann published Elf Entwürfe für meinen Grabspruch (Eleven Sketches for My Own Epitaph), a textual encounter that places Biermann’s free-form translations in counterpoint to "Eleven Outlined Epitaphs," Bob Dylan’s Beatesque poem that originally appeared in the liner notes of The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964). Donning the identities of poet and folk singer interchangeably, both Bob Dylan and Wolf Biermann have pursued successful careers straddling the high/Iow an divide since their arrival on the respective pop music scenes of Germany and the US. As cultural documents, however, Biermann’s translations not only articulate his poetical affinity to Dylan’s art, but they also underscore the challenges of mediating the ambiguous tropes of Dylan’s vernacular contextuality to a German audience. This article sets out to examine how the reception of Bob Dylan’s music in 1960s Germany comes to bear on Biermann’s Grabspriiche vis-a-vis Dylan’s epitaphs to argue that, despite the concerted German feuilleton criticism, Biermann’s translations promulgate great understanding of Dylan’s poetry and song.