Cover
Titel
The Fiction of America. Performance and the Cultural Imaginary in Literature and Film


Autor(en)
Hamscha, Susanne
Reihe
Nordamerikastudien 31
Erschienen
Frankfurt am Main 2013: Campus Verlag
Anzahl Seiten
334 S., 13 Abb.
Preis
€ 34,90
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
Sascha Pöhlmann, Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Susanne Hamscha’s study “The Fiction of America: Performance and the Cultural Imaginary in Literature and Film” continues the long-standing tradition of inquiring into the Americanness of American culture, refusing to accept it as a tautology and instead acknowledging the constructedness and ideological use of said Americanness. It is well-written and well-researched, structured cleverly and clearly, and refreshingly devoid of jargon; Hamscha is an excellent writer who proves her scholarly aptitude while never losing sight of her readers. In scope and method, the project is as impressive as it is ambitious, and the idea of juxtaposing highly canonical literary texts of the American Renaissance – Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” and “Self-Reliance”, Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick”, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” – with popular films and texts from the late-twentieth and twenty-first century such as “Finding Nemo”, “Jurassic Park”, “Spider-Man”, “Jaws”, and Madonna’s “Sex” and some of her music videos should instantly appeal to any scholar in American Studies with an eye (or two) on popular culture.

Hamscha’s juxtapositions are informed by a duality of different conceptions of the Americanness of American culture: on the one hand, she posits that there are “recurring cultural patterns” (p. 17) that provide an “elaborate system of stock concepts and images” whose “basic structure […] essentially remains the same” (p. 15), and it is these “’foundational scenarios’” (p. 16) that allow for the inscription and recognition of American culture as American; on the other hand, she maintains that the manifestations of these patterns “in actual cultural products may vary and are contingent on the context in which they appear” (p. 15), highlighting their changeability so as not to posit an essentialized Americanness but rather affirm its constructedness as a “dynamic concept” (p. 16). Hamscha emphasizes that one should not think of this balance in terms of original and copy but rather of simulacra, so as not to consider the earliest and most dominant constructions of these tropes models of ‘genuine’ Americanness that are then followed by ‘impure’ iterations or subversions, but rather to accept that even these canonical constructions are already themselves contradictory and problematic.

Hamscha further seeks to resist notions of cultural stability by placing two theoretical concepts at the heart of her study: spectrality and performativity. She argues that “the construction of Americanness is always already troubled and undermined in the very moment of its production by the specters that haunt dominant imaginings of ‘America’” (p. 15), drawing on Jacques Derrida’s “hauntology” to insist on the irreducible trace of the Other in any discursive structure that strives for totality. The concept of performativity complements Hamscha’s conception of American culture very well, as it acknowledges a prior framework that structures and enables performances and makes them legible as such, while at the same time taking each performance seriously in itself as a repetition with a difference that may well potentially change the preconditions for future performances. She illustrates this point well with regard to the performance(s) of the Declaration of Independence, the construction of Philadelphia in the movies “Rocky, National Treasure”, and “Philadelphia” as a foundational site where nation-ness can be performed again and again, and the speeches of Barack Obama as performances that foreground issues of race that have been haunting Americanness and thus invite its redefinition. However, as these examples indicate, Hamscha also proffers an all too inclusive understanding of performance that makes it applicable to any cultural artifact, yet at the same time takes the critical edge off the concept by ignoring the specificities of performativity as well as the difference between performance and the representation of a performance. One result of this is that the mediality and form of the very varied artifacts discussed in this study are neglected for their content, which is especially obvious in the analysis of the films. This is particularly problematic in the chapter on “Song of Myself” and “Spider-Man” with regard to how “the individual bodies of Whitman’s self and of Spider-Man become American bodies – become America, even – which claim to be inclusive and representative of the whole nation” (p. 152), since this becoming works radically different in a textual/poetic attempt to contain multitudes and a visual/filmic representation of a masked superhero wearing “all-American attire” (p. 174).

In considering normative or dominant versions of Americanness in terms of haunted performativity, Hamscha places considerable emphasis on the “foundational scenarios” of the texts of the American Renaissance, and in doing so she does not follow her own theoretical advice to not construct a hierarchy of original and copy. Instead, she does treat these canonical texts as “cultural projection-screens and archetypes” (p. 181) that are then picked up on in one way or another by later texts, and thus she affords them the very significance she sets out to undermine. Furthermore, while the project nominally places itself in the context of postnationalist American Studies, it rather owes much to the myth and symbol school that its revisionism sought to challenge, and it occasionally imposes the national onto works of art – for example when arguing that “both Finding Nemo and Emerson’s essays constitute attempts to produce original Americanness” (p. 113) – rather than take opportunities to move beyond it. In general, the study understands all its hauntings and anti-hegemonic performances within the national framework, as attempts to challenge, change, and improve the definition of Americanness, but it fails to address the question it begs: what would one have to do to imagine outside the very cultural imaginary of the national altogether?

Answers to this question may even have been found in the complex relation to Americanness that the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville and Hawthorne exhibit, since they are all already self-deconstructing with regard to their own nationalist agendas. As Hamscha acknowledges that “the cultural works that have been invested with imaginings of ‘normal’ Americanness always already conjure the very specters that their ideologically motivated readings relentlessly sought to exorcise” (p. 75), she leaves readers to wonder what it is exactly that their juxtaposition with contemporary pop culture is supposed to achieve if this can already be established by considering the texts on their own. Given the structure and argument of the study, the intersection between the texts is where the most important insights should be found, yet this is not the case because the texts do not sufficiently intersect, and the juxtapositions often cannot quite eradicate the tinge of arbitrariness.

It is all the more noteworthy that despite these problems the study as a whole is quite successful. Even though the connections between the compared texts often remain all too tenuous, the interpretations of the texts themselves are highly insightful and worth reading for their apt analyses. The chapter that works best is that on “Moby-Dick” and “Jaws”, in which the parallel reading of novel and film adds up to more than the sum of its parts because there are intertextual references in “Jaws” that place the juxtaposition on much firmer ground than the others. As Hamscha reads “Moby-Dick” as an “experiment in sketching viable alternatives to established cultural and social structures and in contesting coherent narratives of democracy and citizenship by recovering deviant bodies and uncovering dissonant memories” (p. 190f.), she productively turns her prior approach on its head, since this time it is clearly the prior foundational scenario that is already contradictory and complex, and its performance and reiteration in “Jaws” actually restores “cultural stability and a sense of security” (p. 191), so that “Moby-Dick” becomes the specter haunting “Jaws”, instead of “Jaws” drawing attention to what haunts the normativity of “Moby-Dick”. Similarly, her reading of “Brokeback Mountain” in her conclusion works well because it avoids looking for the singular origin of the foundational scenario but instead acknowledges that such cultural patterns have multiple beginnings, arguing that the movie draws attention to the specter of homoeroticism that has always haunted the American Western, demanding a reevaluation of the canon.

Even though there are highly debatable aspects in Susanne Hamscha’s “The Fiction of America”, one should consider it as ‘debatable’ in the positive sense of creative potential for future discussion. I may beg to differ on quite a number of issues, yet these are differences of opinion and not symptoms of a more general lack of quality in scholarship. On the contrary: it is because Hamscha’s scholarship and writing are faultless that I could engage her arguments and methodology so directly, and I would invite any reader to do so as well. Hamscha is to be commended for leaving the safe territory of certain conventions in American Studies to explore new possibilities, and her explorations are as insightful and informed as they are useful to the field, even if there is reason to disagree with her interpretation of these findings. “The Fiction of America” is a rewarding and challenging book in the best sense of the term; it is ambitious, thorough, highly readable, and even entertaining, and it testifies to its quality that one can disagree with it while at the same time recognize it for its merits.

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