Zusammen mit einem Kollegen hat Peter Höyng zwei Romane von österreichischen Autoren der 1920er Jahre aus dem Deutschen ins Englische übersetzt und herausgegeben:
Hugo Bettauer, The Blue Stain. A Novel of a Racial Outcast (1922). Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2017.
Arthur Rundt, Marylin. A Novel of Passing (1928). Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2022.
Obwohl sich beide Romane in Stil und Inhalt wesentlich voneinander unterscheiden, eint sie, dass sie ihrem deutschsprachigen Publikum ein Bild der rassistischen USA vorführen, um eine anti-rassistische Haltung bei der LeserIn zu evozieren.
Sein Vortrag reflektiert über diese Übertragung in doppelter Hinsicht oder in interkultureller Absicht. Zum einen kann die Übersetzung als ein zeitgemäßer Beitrag innerhalb der German studies in Nordamerika verstanden werden. Zum anderen kann die Übertragung aber auch als ein Dokument interkultureller Germanistik gewertet werden, deutsche Literatur in ihrem Versuch das Fremde, ein Drittes oder das Andere zu integrieren. Kurzum versteht sich sein Vortrag als ein Beitrag zur interkulturellen Germanistik, bei der die Germanistik und German studies in Nordamerika zueinander in ein dialogisches Verhältnis treten.

Peter Höyng [ausgesprochen: Hö-ing] studierte Germanistik und europäische Geschichte in Bonn und Siegen, bevor er seinen Doktorgrad mit einer Dissertation zu historischen Dramen im 18. Jahrhundert an der University of Wisconsin-Madison erlangte. Seit 2005 lehrt und forscht er an der Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Aus kulturhistorischer Sicht publiziert er zahlreich zu Themen, die sich vor allem aus seinem Interesse an österreichischer Literatur und Kultur entzünden. So hat er beispielsweise zu Werken von assimilierten Juden wie Theodor Herzl, Hugo Bettauer, Georg Kreisler oder George Tabori gearbeitet, wie auch zum Theater von Elfriede Jelinek oder Thomas Bernhard veröffentlicht, oder aber zu Beethoven als Leser von Literatur zahlreiche Essays vorgelegt. Neben seinen über 50 Essays, hat er insgesamt vier Bücher editiert und eine Monographie publiziert.

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Writing against the Western tradition of freezing Native cultures in a long-gone past, Indigenous Futurism has established itself as a movement in the arts that creates Indigenous perspectives in the context of science fiction and related subgenres. This lecture investigates the artwork of Ryan Singer (Navajo) at the intersection of pop art, activism, and Indigenous Futurism. Singer’s artistic engagements with the fictional characters and settings of the Star Wars franchise are read as pop artistic acts of cultural and political decolonization.

Karsten Fitz is professor of American Studies/Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Passau. He is the author of The American Revolution Remembered, 1830s to 1850s: Competing Images and Conflicting Narratives (2011) and co-editor of the book series Transnational Indigenous Perspectives (Routledge). Among others, his research interests include Indigenous Studies, theories of cultural encounters, American cultural memory, visual culture studies, and political culture in transatlantic contexts.

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The seminar will show perspectives for the research with subcultural print media. For this purpose, Zines will be presented as a special form of subcultural communication of the extreme right in the period from 1990 to 2000. The focus is on Zines published by women of the extreme right. First, the content, design and editorial structure of Zines will be presented. This is followed by an introduction to qualitative (multimodal) methods for analyzing right-wing communication and gender activities.

Alexandra Mehnert is a PhD candidate at the University of Leipzig (project title: “Right Wing Print Media and Gender Discourses”) and project coordinator in a ‘de-radicalization’ project at the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft “Ausstieg zum Einstieg” e. V., Jena. She holds an M.A. in Political Science and a B.A. in German Language and Literature. Her research interests include far right and right wing print media (comics, zines, magazines), democracy, and de-radicalization.

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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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