Documentary practices currently proliferate in contemporary drama and theater in the US and are attracting increasing attention from literary and theater scholars. The recent shift in the genre from using official documentation (such as court recordings) towards account-based narratives (such as first-person testimonials) reflects a distinct orientation towards the archive and historical memory in contemporary testimonial plays that address social and global debates in the public sphere. Focusing on the work of two Black female playwrights, Lynn Nottage’s One More River to Cross: A Verbatim Fugue (2015) and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present… (2012), this talk seeks to situate and theorize the emerging forms of testimonial dramaturgies concerned with remembrance and commemoration. Both plays use live performance to articulate the affective and political affordances of personal stories in public sphere discourses and complicate an understanding of archival stories as stores of objective record. Whilst they engage the theatrical dimension of the archive and raise questions about artistic agency, their individual approaches result in a fundamentally different theater aesthetic with varying levels of (meta)theatricality and audience participation.

Julia Rössler, M.A. is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Amerika-Institut at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Her current research focuses on contemporary American Drama after postmodernism and the history and forms of documentary and verbatim theatre. She has successfully defended her dissertation under the title “Drama After Postmodernism: New Aesthetics of Mimesis on the Contemporary Stage” and she has recently co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English.

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This talk considers the works of Siri Hustvedt and Zadie Smith, two prominent contemporary writers and public intellectuals, as vital sites of relational border crossings. Foregrounding alternative imaginaries beyond personal, national, and disciplinary boundaries, Hustvedt and Smith develop polycentric and relational systems of knowledge and perception. Both writers activate feminist and transnational perspectives to question fixed categories of meaning and identity, inviting readers to consider the generative potential of living, thinking, and writing in between.

Dr. Marks is Professor of English and Co-Program Director of the Liberal Arts: Health Humanities program at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Her monograph “I am because you are”: Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt was published by Winter (Heidelberg University Press) in 2014, and she co-edited the volume Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works: Interdisciplinary Essays (De Gruyter 2016). Dr. Marks has also published articles and book chapters in the field of health humanities, examining the relationship between literature and health. She has taught courses in composition, cultural studies, American literature, and world literature at LaGuardia, Johannes Gutenberg University, Wagner College, Hunter College, and Columbia University. At LaGuardia, Dr. Marks particularly enjoys shaping initiatives that engage multiple disciplines to offer students integrated learning experiences, including learning communities, the First Year Seminar, and the Health Humanities option.

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While the climate crisis continues to ravage planetary systems, a concomitant psychological crisis has unfolded mostly out of sight: the widespread experience of climate anxiety. Among large parts of the American populace, spiraling thoughts about ecological collapse have become commonplace and many report these worries to affect their daily functioning. Both the ubiquitous nature and intensity of these feelings warrants scholarly attention. In my guest lecture, I will discuss the ways in which such worries manifest in the US-American novel and what conclusions can be drawn from analyzing texts relevant to this experience – in particular, Jenny Offill’s novel Weather and Ben Lerner’s 10:04. By doing so, I will present a perspective on climate anxiety that highlights its capacity to induce a crisis of meaning and to reconfigure the worldviews of those who experience it.

Jonas Müller received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in American Studies from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He has recently completed writing his dissertation on climate anxiety under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Alfred Hornung and is currently preparing its publication. His areas of interest include the environmental humanities, gender studies, and political economy.

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