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Organized by Clemens Spahr (Mainz) and Philipp Löffler (Heidelberg) Keynote Speakers: As the dilemmas of globalization have become more acute, social, political, and economic questions have gained renewed prominence in contemporary American literature. These developments have unearthed a “desire to discover or rediscover a place of community at once beyond social divisions and beyond subordination to technopolitical dominion” (Jean-Luc Nancy). Rather than privileging a specific perspective (race, gender, nation, etc.), therefore, the conference wants to pursue holistic approaches to cultural and social issues in contemporary American literature. While the need for collective answers to the loss of stable world models has been addressed from various political and sociological points of view, literary scholarship has not paid sufficient attention to these phenomena. Yet American literature has re-examined both critically and playfully the forms and functions of collectivity in the global age. Literary reflections of collectivity surface on many levels, including for example the new American immigrant literature, post-9/11 and post-Katrina literature, and ethnic literatures of the American borderlands. In our conference, we want to examine the production and the functioning of new models of collectivity within two overlapping critical frameworks. On the one hand, we want to analyze traditional conceptions of collectivity (e.g. nations, ethnic groups, social classes) as they are appropriated and re-fashioned in contemporary literature. On the other hand, the conference will be focused on globalization as a phenomenon that perpetually creates new spaces of collective belonging, challenging and eventually transcending or even dissolving the rigid confines of classes, cultures, and nations. Starting out from these two theoretical perspectives, we want to raise the following questions:
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