Dissertation in North American Studies on "Salem - A Literary Profile. Themes and Motifs in the Depiction of Colonial and Contemporary Salem in American Fiction, 1828-2017." Supervisors: Hanjo Berressem, Anke Ortlepp, and Oliver Scheiding
This talk explores the events of 1692 that led to the town’s touristic exploitation as well as wh... more This talk explores the events of 1692 that led to the town’s touristic exploitation as well as why and how this dark chapter is remembered in the American cultural memory through classics and a growing corpus of contemporary fiction.
Set in one of the most contested periods of American history, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible has sh... more Set in one of the most contested periods of American history, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible has shaped the collective memory of the Salem witch trials more than any other literary work. Moreover, Miller’s 1953 play does not only form the core of what I term ‘Salem literature’, a corpus of now over 70 works of fiction telling and retelling the ‘Salem story’ of 1692 and its legacy, it has also influenced later works. In fact, I suggest reading Katherine Howe’s young adult novel Conversion (2014) as a lieu de mémoire, a memory site, of Salem literature itself. Like Miller, Howe was inspired by events of the present, an outbreak of conversion disorder at a high school in Le Roy, NY in 2012. The author parallels the account of Ann Putnam, the most infamous ‘afflicted girl’, with the competitive climate of an all-girl Catholic prep school in modern Danvers where large numbers of girls fall sick with inexplicable symptoms. Eventually, it is first-person narrator Colleen Rowley’s reading assignment of The Crucible that helps her understand the dynamics behind the mystery illness. In fact, for a reader unacquainted with Miller’s play, Howe’s novel would forfeit its depth as the play becomes an indispensable intertextual tool for understanding Howe’s claims on the parallels between girls’ lives then and now and her critical reading of Miller’s ‘sexplanation’, to use Robin DeRosa’s apt term. While the play centers on a male hero whose fall is brought about by the ‘afflicted girls’, Howe makes her story of the witch trials, just like the actual event, a predominantly female experience by having Ann Putnam, written out of The Crucible, tell the story from her perspective. This paper shall discuss the role of fiction in shaping different versions of American history and the self-reflexive function of literature about an American trauma.
To this day, Salem, Massachusetts is inseparable from its religious history – the Puritan theocra... more To this day, Salem, Massachusetts is inseparable from its religious history – the Puritan theocracy of the Colonial era has made the town infamous for the witch trials in 1692. But while the witch used to be the town’s biggest threat, in contemporary Salem, the town’s marketing of its contested history and particularly the figure of the witch have made Salem the United States’ number one Halloween destination. Moreover, Salem has become a center of modern pagans (e.g. Wicca) and self-proclaimed witches who pride themselves on Salem new-found religious tolerance and host groups such as the Witches Education League. Erica Feldman, one of their leaders, explains that despite, or just because of its history, “[t]here are a lot of us [witches] here [in Salem] because it’s the one place in the world that really embraces the figure of the witch.” This re-appropriation of the figure of the witch is traceable widely in popular culture (e.g. Harry Potter, Sabrina the Teenage Witch) and even in online activism (e.g. #BindTrump, #MagicResistence), and is also reflected in contemporary ‘Salem literature’ which has experienced a new boom in recent years with a decidedly female authorship and strong female protagonists whose psychic powers and supernatural healing abilities make them all the more fitting into modern-day Salem. Among these are Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009) as well as Brunonia Barry’s The Lace Reader (2009) and The Fifth Petal (2017). This paper aims to explore the depiction of religion in real and fictional Salem in general and the re-appropriation of the witch in particular.
Few places in the United States are as synonymous with specific events as Salem, Massachusetts, l... more Few places in the United States are as synonymous with specific events as Salem, Massachusetts, location of the only organized witch trials in American history in 1692. Salem has thus become a prominent lieu de mémoire (Pierre Nora), a site of memory, and its haunting legacy has made it one of the most frequently used settings in American literature: to this day, over 50 works of fiction discuss Salem’s history and spatiality. Thus, what I term ‘Salem literature’ has itself become a lieu de mémoire.
Building upon Aleida Assmann’s finding that places of memory can initiate and support processes of memory only in connection with other media of memory (cp. 1999), I want to trace how Salem’s memory culture is reflected in literature from the 19th century to the present. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (1835) is set on Gallows Hill, long believed to have been the site of the executions. The narrator bemoans the lack of historical awareness among Salemites and the absence of a memorial: “we could not but regret that there is nothing on its barren summit, no relic of old, nor lettered stone of later days, to assist the imagination in appealing to the heart.” This description stands in contrast to contemporary Salem: Not only has the city become a tourist magnet for all things witch-related, but two memorials can now be visited: the Salem’s Witch Trials Memorial in the city center was established in 1992, and in 2017 a new memorial was erected in the spot recently established as the true location of the hangings, Proctor’s Ledge. This investigation is strikingly reflected in two modern novels, Adriana Mather’s young adult novel How to Hang a Witch (2016) and Brunonia Barry’s The Fifth Petal (2017). Though not critically acclaimed as it lacks rhetorical and narratological depth and shows many clichés of the genre, Mather’s novel serves as an interesting example for making Colonial history appeal to young readers: teenage protagonist Samantha is here credited with finding the real location of the executions, though the depiction is far from historically correct. In Barry’s novel, historian Rose Whelan’s search for the true hanging location, on the other hand, parallels the real investigations of historian Emerson W. Baker and his colleagues of the Gallows Hill Project at Salem State University. In fact, as “honoring this true place was long overdue,” Barry’s novel ends with the installation of the memorial at Proctor’s Ledge, almost foreshadowing the real commemoration on July 19th, 2017 and mayor Kim Driscoll’s words that “Proctor's Ledge is a place - an object - but it is also an idea. And it is also a memory." In this paper, I thus want to discuss how literature mirrors and fosters the cultural memory and memory culture at work in one of the most contested places of the United States.
Hawthorne's influence is traceable in literature all over the world. However, his writing has bee... more Hawthorne's influence is traceable in literature all over the world. However, his writing has been just as influential closest to home: in Salem. Despite Hawthorne's strained relationship with this town, it has literally haunted his writing, since, as he explained, there was a "kindred between the human being and the locality." Works such as "Young Goodman Brown" and The House of the Seven Gables have thus influenced the collective memory of Salem. Moreover, they do not only form the basis of what I term 'Salem literature', a corpus of now over 50 works of fiction which focus on this central place and its legacy but have also influenced Salem literature itself, as can be seen for instance in the works of bestselling author Brunonia Barry. Her second novel, The Map of True Places (2011) from her Salem-based trilogy (including The Lace Reader, 2009 and The Fifth Petal, 2017) tells the story of Hepzibah 'Zee' Finch who returns to her home-town due to a family emergency. While staying with her father, a former Hawthorne scholar, in his house across from the House of the Seven Gables, she is forced to look back on and reappraise her own traumatic past. The novel's theme, the influence of the past on the present, its characters, and the spatiality heavily reference Hawthorne's most famous Salem work as well as his personal life, particularly his relationship with Melville (hence the quote from Moby Dick in the novel's title). In fact, for a reader unacquainted with Hawthorne, the novel would forfeit its depth. In this paper, I thus aim to discuss how Hawthorne's legacy has been adapted and adopted in modern Salem literature, adding to a fruitful discussion of Hawthorne's reach far and wide.
As travel narratives often help the author-narrator (re)discover his or her own identity along th... more As travel narratives often help the author-narrator (re)discover his or her own identity along the journey, this also holds true for William Least Heat-Moon's 1982 bestseller Blue Highways. According to Ronald Primeau’s definition of American road literature, Blue Highways depicts a typical journey of self-discovery as the archetypal American endeavor of traveling into unknown territory gives the narrator the “freedom to explore or redefine [himself]” (15). Moreover, Blue Highways also follows the traditional travel narrative structure of departure – journey – return. However, Heat-Moon follows this structure in a specific way in that he pursues the form of a circle, a leitmotif represented on all levels of the book (visually, formally and conceptually). In many ways, Heat-Moon’s insights in Blue Highways and his statements about the book in interviews are strikingly reminiscent of transcendentalist ideas, especially those of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Particularly Emerson’s 1841 essay “Circles” contains many passages that resemble Heat-Moon's acting and thinking on his journey, and it is not surprising that he has been called a “modern-day Transcendentalist” and his writing a “transcendental argument.” Departing from these previously unexplored parallels, I will compare the two works in the context of the myth of American mobility and its mediation in literature, taking into account aspects of self-redefinition, change and identity by drawing new ‘circles’ on both an individual and a collective level.
Few places in the Unites States are as synonymous with specific events as Salem, Massachusetts, l... more Few places in the Unites States are as synonymous with specific events as Salem, Massachusetts, location of the only organized witch trials in American history in 1692. Salem has thus become a prominent lieu de mémoire (Pierre Nora), a site of memory, and its haunting legacy has made it one of the most frequently used settings in American literature: to this day, over 50 works of fiction discuss Salem’s history and spatiality. Thus, what I term ‘Salem literature’ has itself become a lieu de mémoire.
In my analysis of Salem as a literary space, I want to look in particular at the depiction and construction of contemporary Salem (as ‘Salem literature’ has seen a distinct increase since the 1990s) and trace recurrent elements, one of the most prominent of which is the emphasis on genealogical connections between contemporary Salemites and people involved in the 1692 trials. In Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel claims that “consanguinity (‘blood’) is the functional equivalent of geographical proximity (‘place’) in the way we mentally construct ‘natural’ connectedness”, a statement which holds true looking at literary renditions from Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) to contemporary works such as Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009) or Brunonia Barry’s The Fifth Petal (2017). In this paper I therefore want to discuss the American search for one’s roots in one of the most contested places of the country and the role literature plays in discussing this connection on a personal and on a national level.
“Hansel and Gretel” is not only one of the brothers Grimm’s most famous tales, but has been used ... more “Hansel and Gretel” is not only one of the brothers Grimm’s most famous tales, but has been used for educational purposes since its publication in 1812. During the 19th century, the Grimm’s Children and Household Tales even were, together with John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the two most widely read books after the Bible in the Anglo-American area. Consequently, the tale(s) have influenced the works of many authors ever since. Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story “Young Goodman Brown”, it can be assumed that he was one of those authors since there are striking similarities in structure, content and symbolism between his allegorical story about 17th century Puritan society and the Grimm brothers’ tale. In both works from German, respectively American, (dark) Romanticism, the protagonists go on a journey on which they undergo a learning process through a test of their belief and their ability to differentiate between right and wrong. This procedure has in both tales the traditional structure of departure – journey – return, with the protagonist departing from civilization and a journey through uncivilized territory – a forest – until the return to society follows which they now experience differently. Analyzing these previously disregarded parallels, this paper does not only suggest a possible influence on Hawthorne’s childhood education, but offers a new reading of a classic American short story as it discusses the journey of initiation Young Goodman Brown has to undergo in connection to a fairytale, a parallel which also opens up new perspectives on Hawthorne’s treatment of the American nation’s ‘childhood’ in one of his most famous stories.
“Hansel and Gretel” is not only one of the brothers Grimm’s most famous tales, but has been used ... more “Hansel and Gretel” is not only one of the brothers Grimm’s most famous tales, but has been used for educational purposes since its publication in 1812. During the 19th century, the Grimm’s Children and Household Tales even were, together with John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the two most widely read books after the Bible in the Anglo-American area. Consequently, the tale(s) have influenced the works of many authors ever since. Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story “Young Goodman Brown”, it can be assumed that he was one of those authors since there are striking similarities in structure, content and symbolism between his allegorical story about 17th century Puritan society and the Grimm brothers’ tale. In both works from German, respectively American, (dark) Romanticism, the protagonists go on a journey on which they undergo a learning process through a test of their belief and their ability to differentiate between right and wrong. This procedure has in both tales the traditional structure of departure – journey – return, with the protagonist departing from civilization and a journey through uncivilized territory – a forest – until the return to society follows which they now experience differently. Analyzing these previously disregarded parallels, this paper does not only suggest a possible influence on Hawthorne’s childhood education, but offers a new reading of a classic American short story as it discusses the journey of initiation Young Goodman Brown has to undergo in connection to a fairytale, a parallel which also opens up new perspectives on Hawthorne’s treatment of the American nation’s ‘childhood’ in one of his most famous stories.
Although Richard Brautigan is frequently listed in the canon of American Postmodern writers, his ... more Although Richard Brautigan is frequently listed in the canon of American Postmodern writers, his rather late novel/short story collection The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) has rarely been studied in secondary literature. Written and mostly set in both Tokyo and Montana, the book consists of 131 individual short fictions that are nevertheless connected through the narrative voice and recurring themes. The difficulty in categorizing the book (one can find it listed among Brautigan's novels and his short story collections) shows however that even within Postmodern writing, the book eludes classification and thus confronts the reader with a paradox. Already introduced through the title and the book's genesis, TME establishes a close connection between Asia and America which is intensified by the almost unmissable, yet nearly unexamined integration of (Zen) Buddhist thought, often regarded by Westerners as “witty nonsense or paradox gone mad”. I argue that this convergence, particularly the study of Buddhist non-duality, not only reinforces, but in many ways enhances the Western Postmodern aesthetics in TME and helps approach Brautigan's equally criticized work. The coexistence – and dissolution – of paradoxes will thus be the central framework of my paper. I want to outline how dualisms coexist on different levels of the book, and why the Postmodern literary tradition is particularly well-suited for the integration of Buddhist thought, an idea that even Brautigan himself indirectly addressed when he said in an interview: “My books are often seen as fragmented and pointless in America, not in Japan. They appreciate my novels there.” By bringing a fascinating work back into focus, I ultimately aim to show Brautigan’s innovation in the context of Postmodernism and his concomitant expansion of the short story genre.
Als Prototyp eines literarischen Popstars legte es E.A. Poe darauf an, die Grenzen der Hochkultur... more Als Prototyp eines literarischen Popstars legte es E.A. Poe darauf an, die Grenzen der Hochkultur zu sprengen. 1846 forderte er, sein Werk müsse "zugleich den allgemeinen wie den kritischen Geschmack" treffen. Wie jeder Leser merkt, gleicht poetische Sprache weder in der Richtung, noch in der Popmusik der einfachen Alltagssprache: Sie unterscheidet sich durch einen hohen Grad an Strukturierung (Ton, Metrum, Wortwahl, Stilfiguren) und vor allem, so Poe, bezweckt sie eine bestimmte emotionale Wirkung. Aus dieser intentional zu verstehenden Erzeugungsformel lässt sich also die populäre Zugkraft von Poes Texten ableiten, wie dies bereits die Eigenanalyse seines berühmten Gedichts "The Raven" beschreibt. Sprachwissenschaftler Roman Jakobson prägte um 1960 die These von einer »poetischen Funktion“ der Sprache. Nach Maßgabe ,poetischer' Prinzipien zu schreiben/sprechen bedeutet, so Jakobson, eine Aussage in das Korsett von klanglichen, lexikalischen oder grammatischen ,Äquivalenzen“ zu kleiden. Das heißt: Durch systematische "Häufung formaler Ähnlichkeiten" das Sprachmaterial als solches erfahrbar zu machen, sowie beabsichtigte inhaltliche Ähnlichkeiten zu erzeugen (man vergleiche Herz/Schmerz vs. Herz/März). Wenn Jakobson folgert, »durch ständige Wiederholung identischer Einheiten [werde] der "Sprachfluss wahrgenommen wie der der Musik", meint er also eine Grauzone zwischen Empfinden und Verstehen, oder im Test: zwischen Inhalt und Form. Eine verwandte These prägt aktuelle Überlegungen zur Wirkung von Popmusik. Spätestens seit den Beatles beobachten wir: Popsongs ,sprechen’ nicht nur von Wahrnehmung”, ,Körperlichkeit“, Gefühl”, sondern erzeugen auch erotisierte bis rauschhafte Zustände (P. Fuchs und M. Heidingsfelder). Dieser ,Verkörperungseffekt' ist sowohl musikästhetisch, als auch im Songtext bzw. dessen Realisierung angelegt. Eine Steigerung des »Äquivalenzprinzips"— die »WiederholungswiederhoIung” einer Zeile wie "oh baby baby", die Reduktion von Sprachpartikeln zur Lautmalerei bis hin zu reinen Körperlauten (Seufzen, Schreien) — überführt den kognitiven Inhalt des Songs in die Inszenierung eines direkten körperlichen Kontakts.
Edgar Allan Poe's tales of mystery and horror have remained influential on authors of crime ficti... more Edgar Allan Poe's tales of mystery and horror have remained influential on authors of crime fiction and thrillers to this day. One such example is Dennis Lehane’s best-selling novel Shutter Island (2003), as many reviews identified similarities to Poe's fiction and even Lehane himself declared that it was “very much a Classic Gothic” and, among others, “in the tradition of […] Edgar Allan Poe”.1 However, no in-depth analysis of the similarities has been conducted yet, which is why this work addresses them in a narratological approach. I will first present an overview of typical elements of Poe's short fiction (drawing from a corpus of seven of his most famous short stories and the “Philosophy of Composition”) and then outline where they reoccur in Shutter Island. In my analysis I will elaborate on the prevailing topic of mental illness, its connection to the 'death of a beautiful woman' and the novel's Poe-like 'unity of effect' (evoked through the setting and atmosphere as well as a very effective use of intertextuality and intermediality) to show that Shutter Island contains more Poe than is perceptible at first glance. Although I will also explain where Lehane moves beyond Poe and the Gothic tradition and how he made Poe's elements subject to a functional change in literature of the 21st century, my work will demonstrate why Poe's works remain defining for authors concerned with the dark abysses of the human soul and how influential Poe's legacy still is on one of today's most successful crime writers. 1 Staci Layne Wilson. 02.09.2010. “Dennis Lehane Exclusive
In 1692, 20 people are executed and more than 200 are imprisoned for witchcraft in the colonial t... more In 1692, 20 people are executed and more than 200 are imprisoned for witchcraft in the colonial town of Salem, Massachusetts. Over time, the only organized witch trials in American history have not only become a strong metaphor for mass hysteria and scapegoating, as ‘the Halloween capital of the world’, the town today feeds on its contested past. Moreover, the Salem witch trials have generated innumerable cultural works – films, tv series, and, most prominently, books. To this day, more than 70 works of fiction tell and retell the ‘Salem story’. This talk explores not only what happened in 1692 as well as its touristic exploitation, but why and how this dark chapter is remembered in the American cultural memory, from classics such as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to a growing corpus of contemporary fiction.
Im Jahr 1692 trugen sich in Salem, Massachusetts die einzigen organisierten Hexenprozesse der USA... more Im Jahr 1692 trugen sich in Salem, Massachusetts die einzigen organisierten Hexenprozesse der USA zu. Nachdem die Tochter und Nichte des lokalen Pfarrers unerklärliche Krampfanfälle aufweisen, steht für die Dorfbewohner fest, dass nur ein Schadenszauber die Ursache sein kann. Schnell sind drei schuldige Frauen gefunden - doch als eine von ihnen zugibt eine Hexe zu sein und andeutet, dass weitere Dorfbewohner dem Teufel verfallen sind, entgeht sie überraschenderweise dem Todesurteil. Es wird deutlich, dass Geständnis und Denunziation anderer ein sicheres Rezept sind, um vor dem Galgen verschont zu werden, und die Beschuldigungen der Hexerei verbreiten sich in und um Salem wie ein Lauffeuer. Auch in Neuss gab es nur vereinzelte Hexenprozesse. Doch die zwei bekanntesten Fälle, ebenfalls aus dem 17. Jahrhundert, sind denen in Salem erstaunlich ähnlich - einerseits hinsichtlich der juristischen Machtlosigkeit der der Hexerei bezichtigten Frauen wie Hester Meurer, andererseits in Bezug auf die fatale Fehlinterpretation jugendlicher Wahnvorstellungen im Falle der 18-jährigen Catharina Halffmans. Ausgehend von hier beleuchtet der Vortrag eines der düstersten Kapitel der frühen amerikanischen Geschichte, welches in der amerikanischen Kultur bis heute ein Synonym für Denunziationsbereitschaft und Massenhysterie sowie eine starke politische Metapher ist, die gerade unter der Trump Regierung nichts an Aktualität verloren hat.
Richard Brautigan’s The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) is an exemplary work of postmodern fiction. ... more Richard Brautigan’s The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) is an exemplary work of postmodern fiction. Surprisingly, though, it is rarely discussed in seminars or secondary literature. This presentation aims at putting this work (back) into academic focus, rereading it with a perspective on the almost unmissable, yet nearly unexamined Buddhist thought present in the book. Resulting from this fruitful convergence of postmodernism and Buddhist thought, the presentation also tries to find new answers to the question of the book’s form, as The Tokyo-Montana Express seems to elude standard genre classifications.
To this day, Salem, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the witch trials of 1692. Their unique pace... more To this day, Salem, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the witch trials of 1692. Their unique pace and structure has not only made the infamous town a strong cultural metaphor, but has generated countless novels, short stories, and plays over the past 200 years. This book marks the first comprehensive analysis of literary Salem and its historical as well as contemporary significance, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literature of the 19th century to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to a growing corpus of contemporary fiction.
This article discusses the previously unexplored integration of Buddhist thought in Richard Braut... more This article discusses the previously unexplored integration of Buddhist thought in Richard Brautigan's The Tokyo-Montana Express, a book that has been categorized as a postmodern novel as well as a short-story collection. The thesis is that the "Logic of Soku-Hi, " a concept that rejects thinking in terms of either/or, mirrors the existence of traditional opposites in Brautigan's work as it not only reinforces but enhances western postmodern aesthetics.
This talk explores the events of 1692 that led to the town’s touristic exploitation as well as wh... more This talk explores the events of 1692 that led to the town’s touristic exploitation as well as why and how this dark chapter is remembered in the American cultural memory through classics and a growing corpus of contemporary fiction.
Set in one of the most contested periods of American history, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible has sh... more Set in one of the most contested periods of American history, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible has shaped the collective memory of the Salem witch trials more than any other literary work. Moreover, Miller’s 1953 play does not only form the core of what I term ‘Salem literature’, a corpus of now over 70 works of fiction telling and retelling the ‘Salem story’ of 1692 and its legacy, it has also influenced later works. In fact, I suggest reading Katherine Howe’s young adult novel Conversion (2014) as a lieu de mémoire, a memory site, of Salem literature itself. Like Miller, Howe was inspired by events of the present, an outbreak of conversion disorder at a high school in Le Roy, NY in 2012. The author parallels the account of Ann Putnam, the most infamous ‘afflicted girl’, with the competitive climate of an all-girl Catholic prep school in modern Danvers where large numbers of girls fall sick with inexplicable symptoms. Eventually, it is first-person narrator Colleen Rowley’s reading assignment of The Crucible that helps her understand the dynamics behind the mystery illness. In fact, for a reader unacquainted with Miller’s play, Howe’s novel would forfeit its depth as the play becomes an indispensable intertextual tool for understanding Howe’s claims on the parallels between girls’ lives then and now and her critical reading of Miller’s ‘sexplanation’, to use Robin DeRosa’s apt term. While the play centers on a male hero whose fall is brought about by the ‘afflicted girls’, Howe makes her story of the witch trials, just like the actual event, a predominantly female experience by having Ann Putnam, written out of The Crucible, tell the story from her perspective. This paper shall discuss the role of fiction in shaping different versions of American history and the self-reflexive function of literature about an American trauma.
To this day, Salem, Massachusetts is inseparable from its religious history – the Puritan theocra... more To this day, Salem, Massachusetts is inseparable from its religious history – the Puritan theocracy of the Colonial era has made the town infamous for the witch trials in 1692. But while the witch used to be the town’s biggest threat, in contemporary Salem, the town’s marketing of its contested history and particularly the figure of the witch have made Salem the United States’ number one Halloween destination. Moreover, Salem has become a center of modern pagans (e.g. Wicca) and self-proclaimed witches who pride themselves on Salem new-found religious tolerance and host groups such as the Witches Education League. Erica Feldman, one of their leaders, explains that despite, or just because of its history, “[t]here are a lot of us [witches] here [in Salem] because it’s the one place in the world that really embraces the figure of the witch.” This re-appropriation of the figure of the witch is traceable widely in popular culture (e.g. Harry Potter, Sabrina the Teenage Witch) and even in online activism (e.g. #BindTrump, #MagicResistence), and is also reflected in contemporary ‘Salem literature’ which has experienced a new boom in recent years with a decidedly female authorship and strong female protagonists whose psychic powers and supernatural healing abilities make them all the more fitting into modern-day Salem. Among these are Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009) as well as Brunonia Barry’s The Lace Reader (2009) and The Fifth Petal (2017). This paper aims to explore the depiction of religion in real and fictional Salem in general and the re-appropriation of the witch in particular.
Few places in the United States are as synonymous with specific events as Salem, Massachusetts, l... more Few places in the United States are as synonymous with specific events as Salem, Massachusetts, location of the only organized witch trials in American history in 1692. Salem has thus become a prominent lieu de mémoire (Pierre Nora), a site of memory, and its haunting legacy has made it one of the most frequently used settings in American literature: to this day, over 50 works of fiction discuss Salem’s history and spatiality. Thus, what I term ‘Salem literature’ has itself become a lieu de mémoire.
Building upon Aleida Assmann’s finding that places of memory can initiate and support processes of memory only in connection with other media of memory (cp. 1999), I want to trace how Salem’s memory culture is reflected in literature from the 19th century to the present. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (1835) is set on Gallows Hill, long believed to have been the site of the executions. The narrator bemoans the lack of historical awareness among Salemites and the absence of a memorial: “we could not but regret that there is nothing on its barren summit, no relic of old, nor lettered stone of later days, to assist the imagination in appealing to the heart.” This description stands in contrast to contemporary Salem: Not only has the city become a tourist magnet for all things witch-related, but two memorials can now be visited: the Salem’s Witch Trials Memorial in the city center was established in 1992, and in 2017 a new memorial was erected in the spot recently established as the true location of the hangings, Proctor’s Ledge. This investigation is strikingly reflected in two modern novels, Adriana Mather’s young adult novel How to Hang a Witch (2016) and Brunonia Barry’s The Fifth Petal (2017). Though not critically acclaimed as it lacks rhetorical and narratological depth and shows many clichés of the genre, Mather’s novel serves as an interesting example for making Colonial history appeal to young readers: teenage protagonist Samantha is here credited with finding the real location of the executions, though the depiction is far from historically correct. In Barry’s novel, historian Rose Whelan’s search for the true hanging location, on the other hand, parallels the real investigations of historian Emerson W. Baker and his colleagues of the Gallows Hill Project at Salem State University. In fact, as “honoring this true place was long overdue,” Barry’s novel ends with the installation of the memorial at Proctor’s Ledge, almost foreshadowing the real commemoration on July 19th, 2017 and mayor Kim Driscoll’s words that “Proctor's Ledge is a place - an object - but it is also an idea. And it is also a memory." In this paper, I thus want to discuss how literature mirrors and fosters the cultural memory and memory culture at work in one of the most contested places of the United States.
Hawthorne's influence is traceable in literature all over the world. However, his writing has bee... more Hawthorne's influence is traceable in literature all over the world. However, his writing has been just as influential closest to home: in Salem. Despite Hawthorne's strained relationship with this town, it has literally haunted his writing, since, as he explained, there was a "kindred between the human being and the locality." Works such as "Young Goodman Brown" and The House of the Seven Gables have thus influenced the collective memory of Salem. Moreover, they do not only form the basis of what I term 'Salem literature', a corpus of now over 50 works of fiction which focus on this central place and its legacy but have also influenced Salem literature itself, as can be seen for instance in the works of bestselling author Brunonia Barry. Her second novel, The Map of True Places (2011) from her Salem-based trilogy (including The Lace Reader, 2009 and The Fifth Petal, 2017) tells the story of Hepzibah 'Zee' Finch who returns to her home-town due to a family emergency. While staying with her father, a former Hawthorne scholar, in his house across from the House of the Seven Gables, she is forced to look back on and reappraise her own traumatic past. The novel's theme, the influence of the past on the present, its characters, and the spatiality heavily reference Hawthorne's most famous Salem work as well as his personal life, particularly his relationship with Melville (hence the quote from Moby Dick in the novel's title). In fact, for a reader unacquainted with Hawthorne, the novel would forfeit its depth. In this paper, I thus aim to discuss how Hawthorne's legacy has been adapted and adopted in modern Salem literature, adding to a fruitful discussion of Hawthorne's reach far and wide.
As travel narratives often help the author-narrator (re)discover his or her own identity along th... more As travel narratives often help the author-narrator (re)discover his or her own identity along the journey, this also holds true for William Least Heat-Moon's 1982 bestseller Blue Highways. According to Ronald Primeau’s definition of American road literature, Blue Highways depicts a typical journey of self-discovery as the archetypal American endeavor of traveling into unknown territory gives the narrator the “freedom to explore or redefine [himself]” (15). Moreover, Blue Highways also follows the traditional travel narrative structure of departure – journey – return. However, Heat-Moon follows this structure in a specific way in that he pursues the form of a circle, a leitmotif represented on all levels of the book (visually, formally and conceptually). In many ways, Heat-Moon’s insights in Blue Highways and his statements about the book in interviews are strikingly reminiscent of transcendentalist ideas, especially those of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Particularly Emerson’s 1841 essay “Circles” contains many passages that resemble Heat-Moon's acting and thinking on his journey, and it is not surprising that he has been called a “modern-day Transcendentalist” and his writing a “transcendental argument.” Departing from these previously unexplored parallels, I will compare the two works in the context of the myth of American mobility and its mediation in literature, taking into account aspects of self-redefinition, change and identity by drawing new ‘circles’ on both an individual and a collective level.
Few places in the Unites States are as synonymous with specific events as Salem, Massachusetts, l... more Few places in the Unites States are as synonymous with specific events as Salem, Massachusetts, location of the only organized witch trials in American history in 1692. Salem has thus become a prominent lieu de mémoire (Pierre Nora), a site of memory, and its haunting legacy has made it one of the most frequently used settings in American literature: to this day, over 50 works of fiction discuss Salem’s history and spatiality. Thus, what I term ‘Salem literature’ has itself become a lieu de mémoire.
In my analysis of Salem as a literary space, I want to look in particular at the depiction and construction of contemporary Salem (as ‘Salem literature’ has seen a distinct increase since the 1990s) and trace recurrent elements, one of the most prominent of which is the emphasis on genealogical connections between contemporary Salemites and people involved in the 1692 trials. In Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel claims that “consanguinity (‘blood’) is the functional equivalent of geographical proximity (‘place’) in the way we mentally construct ‘natural’ connectedness”, a statement which holds true looking at literary renditions from Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) to contemporary works such as Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009) or Brunonia Barry’s The Fifth Petal (2017). In this paper I therefore want to discuss the American search for one’s roots in one of the most contested places of the country and the role literature plays in discussing this connection on a personal and on a national level.
“Hansel and Gretel” is not only one of the brothers Grimm’s most famous tales, but has been used ... more “Hansel and Gretel” is not only one of the brothers Grimm’s most famous tales, but has been used for educational purposes since its publication in 1812. During the 19th century, the Grimm’s Children and Household Tales even were, together with John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the two most widely read books after the Bible in the Anglo-American area. Consequently, the tale(s) have influenced the works of many authors ever since. Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story “Young Goodman Brown”, it can be assumed that he was one of those authors since there are striking similarities in structure, content and symbolism between his allegorical story about 17th century Puritan society and the Grimm brothers’ tale. In both works from German, respectively American, (dark) Romanticism, the protagonists go on a journey on which they undergo a learning process through a test of their belief and their ability to differentiate between right and wrong. This procedure has in both tales the traditional structure of departure – journey – return, with the protagonist departing from civilization and a journey through uncivilized territory – a forest – until the return to society follows which they now experience differently. Analyzing these previously disregarded parallels, this paper does not only suggest a possible influence on Hawthorne’s childhood education, but offers a new reading of a classic American short story as it discusses the journey of initiation Young Goodman Brown has to undergo in connection to a fairytale, a parallel which also opens up new perspectives on Hawthorne’s treatment of the American nation’s ‘childhood’ in one of his most famous stories.
“Hansel and Gretel” is not only one of the brothers Grimm’s most famous tales, but has been used ... more “Hansel and Gretel” is not only one of the brothers Grimm’s most famous tales, but has been used for educational purposes since its publication in 1812. During the 19th century, the Grimm’s Children and Household Tales even were, together with John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the two most widely read books after the Bible in the Anglo-American area. Consequently, the tale(s) have influenced the works of many authors ever since. Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story “Young Goodman Brown”, it can be assumed that he was one of those authors since there are striking similarities in structure, content and symbolism between his allegorical story about 17th century Puritan society and the Grimm brothers’ tale. In both works from German, respectively American, (dark) Romanticism, the protagonists go on a journey on which they undergo a learning process through a test of their belief and their ability to differentiate between right and wrong. This procedure has in both tales the traditional structure of departure – journey – return, with the protagonist departing from civilization and a journey through uncivilized territory – a forest – until the return to society follows which they now experience differently. Analyzing these previously disregarded parallels, this paper does not only suggest a possible influence on Hawthorne’s childhood education, but offers a new reading of a classic American short story as it discusses the journey of initiation Young Goodman Brown has to undergo in connection to a fairytale, a parallel which also opens up new perspectives on Hawthorne’s treatment of the American nation’s ‘childhood’ in one of his most famous stories.
Although Richard Brautigan is frequently listed in the canon of American Postmodern writers, his ... more Although Richard Brautigan is frequently listed in the canon of American Postmodern writers, his rather late novel/short story collection The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) has rarely been studied in secondary literature. Written and mostly set in both Tokyo and Montana, the book consists of 131 individual short fictions that are nevertheless connected through the narrative voice and recurring themes. The difficulty in categorizing the book (one can find it listed among Brautigan's novels and his short story collections) shows however that even within Postmodern writing, the book eludes classification and thus confronts the reader with a paradox. Already introduced through the title and the book's genesis, TME establishes a close connection between Asia and America which is intensified by the almost unmissable, yet nearly unexamined integration of (Zen) Buddhist thought, often regarded by Westerners as “witty nonsense or paradox gone mad”. I argue that this convergence, particularly the study of Buddhist non-duality, not only reinforces, but in many ways enhances the Western Postmodern aesthetics in TME and helps approach Brautigan's equally criticized work. The coexistence – and dissolution – of paradoxes will thus be the central framework of my paper. I want to outline how dualisms coexist on different levels of the book, and why the Postmodern literary tradition is particularly well-suited for the integration of Buddhist thought, an idea that even Brautigan himself indirectly addressed when he said in an interview: “My books are often seen as fragmented and pointless in America, not in Japan. They appreciate my novels there.” By bringing a fascinating work back into focus, I ultimately aim to show Brautigan’s innovation in the context of Postmodernism and his concomitant expansion of the short story genre.
Als Prototyp eines literarischen Popstars legte es E.A. Poe darauf an, die Grenzen der Hochkultur... more Als Prototyp eines literarischen Popstars legte es E.A. Poe darauf an, die Grenzen der Hochkultur zu sprengen. 1846 forderte er, sein Werk müsse "zugleich den allgemeinen wie den kritischen Geschmack" treffen. Wie jeder Leser merkt, gleicht poetische Sprache weder in der Richtung, noch in der Popmusik der einfachen Alltagssprache: Sie unterscheidet sich durch einen hohen Grad an Strukturierung (Ton, Metrum, Wortwahl, Stilfiguren) und vor allem, so Poe, bezweckt sie eine bestimmte emotionale Wirkung. Aus dieser intentional zu verstehenden Erzeugungsformel lässt sich also die populäre Zugkraft von Poes Texten ableiten, wie dies bereits die Eigenanalyse seines berühmten Gedichts "The Raven" beschreibt. Sprachwissenschaftler Roman Jakobson prägte um 1960 die These von einer »poetischen Funktion“ der Sprache. Nach Maßgabe ,poetischer' Prinzipien zu schreiben/sprechen bedeutet, so Jakobson, eine Aussage in das Korsett von klanglichen, lexikalischen oder grammatischen ,Äquivalenzen“ zu kleiden. Das heißt: Durch systematische "Häufung formaler Ähnlichkeiten" das Sprachmaterial als solches erfahrbar zu machen, sowie beabsichtigte inhaltliche Ähnlichkeiten zu erzeugen (man vergleiche Herz/Schmerz vs. Herz/März). Wenn Jakobson folgert, »durch ständige Wiederholung identischer Einheiten [werde] der "Sprachfluss wahrgenommen wie der der Musik", meint er also eine Grauzone zwischen Empfinden und Verstehen, oder im Test: zwischen Inhalt und Form. Eine verwandte These prägt aktuelle Überlegungen zur Wirkung von Popmusik. Spätestens seit den Beatles beobachten wir: Popsongs ,sprechen’ nicht nur von Wahrnehmung”, ,Körperlichkeit“, Gefühl”, sondern erzeugen auch erotisierte bis rauschhafte Zustände (P. Fuchs und M. Heidingsfelder). Dieser ,Verkörperungseffekt' ist sowohl musikästhetisch, als auch im Songtext bzw. dessen Realisierung angelegt. Eine Steigerung des »Äquivalenzprinzips"— die »WiederholungswiederhoIung” einer Zeile wie "oh baby baby", die Reduktion von Sprachpartikeln zur Lautmalerei bis hin zu reinen Körperlauten (Seufzen, Schreien) — überführt den kognitiven Inhalt des Songs in die Inszenierung eines direkten körperlichen Kontakts.
Edgar Allan Poe's tales of mystery and horror have remained influential on authors of crime ficti... more Edgar Allan Poe's tales of mystery and horror have remained influential on authors of crime fiction and thrillers to this day. One such example is Dennis Lehane’s best-selling novel Shutter Island (2003), as many reviews identified similarities to Poe's fiction and even Lehane himself declared that it was “very much a Classic Gothic” and, among others, “in the tradition of […] Edgar Allan Poe”.1 However, no in-depth analysis of the similarities has been conducted yet, which is why this work addresses them in a narratological approach. I will first present an overview of typical elements of Poe's short fiction (drawing from a corpus of seven of his most famous short stories and the “Philosophy of Composition”) and then outline where they reoccur in Shutter Island. In my analysis I will elaborate on the prevailing topic of mental illness, its connection to the 'death of a beautiful woman' and the novel's Poe-like 'unity of effect' (evoked through the setting and atmosphere as well as a very effective use of intertextuality and intermediality) to show that Shutter Island contains more Poe than is perceptible at first glance. Although I will also explain where Lehane moves beyond Poe and the Gothic tradition and how he made Poe's elements subject to a functional change in literature of the 21st century, my work will demonstrate why Poe's works remain defining for authors concerned with the dark abysses of the human soul and how influential Poe's legacy still is on one of today's most successful crime writers. 1 Staci Layne Wilson. 02.09.2010. “Dennis Lehane Exclusive
In 1692, 20 people are executed and more than 200 are imprisoned for witchcraft in the colonial t... more In 1692, 20 people are executed and more than 200 are imprisoned for witchcraft in the colonial town of Salem, Massachusetts. Over time, the only organized witch trials in American history have not only become a strong metaphor for mass hysteria and scapegoating, as ‘the Halloween capital of the world’, the town today feeds on its contested past. Moreover, the Salem witch trials have generated innumerable cultural works – films, tv series, and, most prominently, books. To this day, more than 70 works of fiction tell and retell the ‘Salem story’. This talk explores not only what happened in 1692 as well as its touristic exploitation, but why and how this dark chapter is remembered in the American cultural memory, from classics such as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to a growing corpus of contemporary fiction.
Im Jahr 1692 trugen sich in Salem, Massachusetts die einzigen organisierten Hexenprozesse der USA... more Im Jahr 1692 trugen sich in Salem, Massachusetts die einzigen organisierten Hexenprozesse der USA zu. Nachdem die Tochter und Nichte des lokalen Pfarrers unerklärliche Krampfanfälle aufweisen, steht für die Dorfbewohner fest, dass nur ein Schadenszauber die Ursache sein kann. Schnell sind drei schuldige Frauen gefunden - doch als eine von ihnen zugibt eine Hexe zu sein und andeutet, dass weitere Dorfbewohner dem Teufel verfallen sind, entgeht sie überraschenderweise dem Todesurteil. Es wird deutlich, dass Geständnis und Denunziation anderer ein sicheres Rezept sind, um vor dem Galgen verschont zu werden, und die Beschuldigungen der Hexerei verbreiten sich in und um Salem wie ein Lauffeuer. Auch in Neuss gab es nur vereinzelte Hexenprozesse. Doch die zwei bekanntesten Fälle, ebenfalls aus dem 17. Jahrhundert, sind denen in Salem erstaunlich ähnlich - einerseits hinsichtlich der juristischen Machtlosigkeit der der Hexerei bezichtigten Frauen wie Hester Meurer, andererseits in Bezug auf die fatale Fehlinterpretation jugendlicher Wahnvorstellungen im Falle der 18-jährigen Catharina Halffmans. Ausgehend von hier beleuchtet der Vortrag eines der düstersten Kapitel der frühen amerikanischen Geschichte, welches in der amerikanischen Kultur bis heute ein Synonym für Denunziationsbereitschaft und Massenhysterie sowie eine starke politische Metapher ist, die gerade unter der Trump Regierung nichts an Aktualität verloren hat.
Richard Brautigan’s The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) is an exemplary work of postmodern fiction. ... more Richard Brautigan’s The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) is an exemplary work of postmodern fiction. Surprisingly, though, it is rarely discussed in seminars or secondary literature. This presentation aims at putting this work (back) into academic focus, rereading it with a perspective on the almost unmissable, yet nearly unexamined Buddhist thought present in the book. Resulting from this fruitful convergence of postmodernism and Buddhist thought, the presentation also tries to find new answers to the question of the book’s form, as The Tokyo-Montana Express seems to elude standard genre classifications.
To this day, Salem, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the witch trials of 1692. Their unique pace... more To this day, Salem, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the witch trials of 1692. Their unique pace and structure has not only made the infamous town a strong cultural metaphor, but has generated countless novels, short stories, and plays over the past 200 years. This book marks the first comprehensive analysis of literary Salem and its historical as well as contemporary significance, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literature of the 19th century to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to a growing corpus of contemporary fiction.
This article discusses the previously unexplored integration of Buddhist thought in Richard Braut... more This article discusses the previously unexplored integration of Buddhist thought in Richard Brautigan's The Tokyo-Montana Express, a book that has been categorized as a postmodern novel as well as a short-story collection. The thesis is that the "Logic of Soku-Hi, " a concept that rejects thinking in terms of either/or, mirrors the existence of traditional opposites in Brautigan's work as it not only reinforces but enhances western postmodern aesthetics.
This article discusses the previously unexplored integration of Buddhist thought in Richard Braut... more This article discusses the previously unexplored integration of Buddhist thought in Richard Brautigan's 'The Tokyo-Montana Express', a book that has been categorized as a postmodern novel as well as a short-story collection. The thesis is that the "Logic of Soku-Hi, " a concept that rejects thinking in terms of either/or, mirrors the existence of traditional opposites in Brautigan's work as it not only reinforces but enhances western postmodern aesthetics.
Salem, location of the only organized witch trials in the United States, is one of the most frequ... more Salem, location of the only organized witch trials in the United States, is one of the most frequently used settings in American literature. This paper discusses the motif of genealogical connections to people involved in the witch trials in works from Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) to contemporary works such as Katherine Howe's The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009).
To this day, Salem, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the witch trials of 1692. Their unique pace... more To this day, Salem, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the witch trials of 1692. Their unique pace and structure has not only made the infamous town a strong cultural metaphor, but has generated countless novels, short stories, and plays over the past 200 years. This book marks the first comprehensive analysis of literary Salem and its historical as well as contemporary significance, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literature of the 19th century to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to a growing corpus of contemporary fiction.
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a high school in Le Roy, NY in 2012. The author parallels the account of Ann Putnam, the most infamous ‘afflicted girl’, with the competitive climate of an all-girl Catholic prep school in modern Danvers where large numbers of girls fall sick with inexplicable symptoms. Eventually,
it is first-person narrator Colleen Rowley’s reading assignment of The Crucible that helps her understand the dynamics behind the mystery illness. In fact, for a reader unacquainted with Miller’s play, Howe’s novel would forfeit its depth as the play becomes an indispensable intertextual tool for understanding Howe’s claims on the parallels between girls’ lives then and now and her critical reading of Miller’s ‘sexplanation’, to use Robin DeRosa’s apt term. While the play centers on a male hero whose fall is brought about by the ‘afflicted girls’, Howe makes her story of the witch trials, just like the actual event, a predominantly female experience by
having Ann Putnam, written out of The Crucible, tell the story from her perspective. This paper shall discuss the role of fiction in shaping different versions of American history and the self-reflexive function of literature about an American trauma.
Building upon Aleida Assmann’s finding that places of memory can initiate and support processes of memory only in connection with other media of memory (cp. 1999), I want to trace how Salem’s memory culture is reflected in literature from the 19th century to the present. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (1835) is set on Gallows Hill, long believed to have been the site of the executions. The narrator bemoans the lack of historical awareness among Salemites and the absence of a memorial: “we could not but regret that there is nothing on its barren summit, no relic of old, nor lettered stone of later days, to assist the imagination in appealing to the heart.” This description stands in contrast to contemporary Salem: Not only has the city become a tourist magnet for all things witch-related, but two memorials can now be visited: the Salem’s Witch Trials Memorial in the city center was established in 1992, and in 2017 a new memorial was erected in the spot recently established as the true location of the hangings, Proctor’s Ledge. This investigation is strikingly reflected in two modern novels, Adriana Mather’s young adult novel How to Hang a Witch (2016) and Brunonia Barry’s The Fifth Petal (2017). Though not critically acclaimed as it lacks rhetorical and narratological depth and shows many clichés of the genre, Mather’s novel serves as an interesting example for making Colonial history appeal to young readers: teenage protagonist Samantha is here credited with finding the real location of the executions, though the depiction is far from historically correct. In Barry’s novel, historian Rose Whelan’s search for the true hanging location, on the other hand, parallels the real investigations of historian Emerson W. Baker and his colleagues of the Gallows Hill Project at Salem State University. In fact, as “honoring this true place was long overdue,” Barry’s novel ends with the installation of the memorial at Proctor’s Ledge, almost foreshadowing the real commemoration on July 19th, 2017 and mayor Kim Driscoll’s words that “Proctor's Ledge is a place - an object - but it is also an idea. And it is also a memory." In this paper, I thus want to discuss how literature mirrors and fosters the cultural memory and memory culture at work in one of the most contested places of the United States.
In my analysis of Salem as a literary space, I want to look in particular at the depiction and construction of contemporary Salem (as ‘Salem literature’ has seen a distinct increase since the 1990s) and trace recurrent elements, one of the most prominent of which is the emphasis on genealogical connections between contemporary Salemites and people involved in the 1692 trials. In Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel claims that “consanguinity (‘blood’) is the functional equivalent of geographical proximity (‘place’) in the way we mentally construct ‘natural’ connectedness”, a statement which holds true looking at literary renditions from Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) to contemporary works such as Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009) or Brunonia Barry’s The Fifth Petal (2017). In this paper I therefore want to discuss the American search for one’s roots in one of the most contested places of the country and the role literature plays in discussing this connection on a personal and on a national level.
Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story “Young Goodman Brown”, it can be assumed that he was one of those authors since there are striking similarities in structure, content and symbolism between his allegorical story about 17th century Puritan society and the Grimm brothers’ tale. In both works from German, respectively American, (dark) Romanticism, the protagonists go on a journey on which they undergo a learning process through a test of their belief and their ability to differentiate between right and wrong. This procedure has in both tales the traditional structure of departure – journey – return, with the protagonist departing from civilization and a journey through uncivilized territory – a forest – until the return to society follows which they now experience differently.
Analyzing these previously disregarded parallels, this paper does not only suggest a possible influence on Hawthorne’s childhood education, but offers a new reading of a classic American short story as it discusses the journey of initiation Young Goodman Brown has to undergo in connection to a fairytale, a parallel which also opens up new perspectives on Hawthorne’s treatment of the American nation’s ‘childhood’ in one of his most famous stories.
Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story “Young Goodman Brown”, it can be assumed that he was one of those authors since there are striking similarities in structure, content and symbolism between his allegorical story about 17th century Puritan society and the Grimm brothers’ tale. In both works from German, respectively American, (dark) Romanticism, the protagonists go on a journey on which they undergo a learning process through a test of their belief and their ability to differentiate between right and wrong. This procedure has in both tales the traditional structure of departure – journey – return, with the protagonist departing from civilization and a journey through uncivilized territory – a forest – until the return to society follows which they now experience differently.
Analyzing these previously disregarded parallels, this paper does not only suggest a possible influence on Hawthorne’s childhood education, but offers a new reading of a classic American short story as it discusses the journey of initiation Young Goodman Brown has to undergo in connection to a fairytale, a parallel which also opens up new perspectives on Hawthorne’s treatment of the American nation’s ‘childhood’ in one of his most famous stories.
Already introduced through the title and the book's genesis, TME establishes a close connection between Asia and America which is intensified by the almost unmissable, yet nearly unexamined integration of (Zen) Buddhist thought, often regarded by Westerners as “witty nonsense or paradox gone mad”. I argue that this convergence, particularly the study of Buddhist non-duality, not only reinforces, but in many ways enhances the Western Postmodern aesthetics in TME and helps approach Brautigan's equally criticized work. The coexistence – and dissolution – of paradoxes will thus be the central framework of my paper. I want to outline how dualisms coexist on different levels of the book, and why the Postmodern literary tradition is particularly well-suited for the integration of Buddhist thought, an idea that even Brautigan himself indirectly addressed when he said in an interview: “My books are often seen as fragmented and pointless in America, not in Japan. They appreciate my novels there.” By bringing a fascinating work back into focus, I ultimately aim to show Brautigan’s innovation in the context of Postmodernism and his concomitant expansion of the short story genre.
Sprachwissenschaftler Roman Jakobson prägte um 1960 die These von einer »poetischen Funktion“ der Sprache. Nach Maßgabe ,poetischer' Prinzipien zu schreiben/sprechen bedeutet, so Jakobson, eine Aussage in das Korsett von klanglichen, lexikalischen oder grammatischen ,Äquivalenzen“ zu kleiden. Das heißt: Durch systematische "Häufung formaler Ähnlichkeiten" das Sprachmaterial als solches erfahrbar zu machen, sowie beabsichtigte inhaltliche Ähnlichkeiten zu erzeugen (man vergleiche Herz/Schmerz vs. Herz/März). Wenn Jakobson folgert,
»durch ständige Wiederholung identischer Einheiten [werde] der "Sprachfluss wahrgenommen wie der der Musik", meint er also eine Grauzone zwischen Empfinden und Verstehen, oder im Test: zwischen Inhalt und Form. Eine verwandte These prägt aktuelle Überlegungen zur Wirkung von Popmusik. Spätestens seit den Beatles beobachten wir: Popsongs ,sprechen’ nicht nur von Wahrnehmung”, ,Körperlichkeit“, Gefühl”, sondern erzeugen auch erotisierte bis rauschhafte Zustände (P. Fuchs und M. Heidingsfelder). Dieser ,Verkörperungseffekt' ist sowohl musikästhetisch, als auch im Songtext bzw. dessen Realisierung angelegt. Eine Steigerung des »Äquivalenzprinzips"— die »WiederholungswiederhoIung” einer Zeile wie "oh baby baby", die Reduktion von Sprachpartikeln zur Lautmalerei bis hin zu reinen Körperlauten (Seufzen, Schreien) — überführt den kognitiven Inhalt des Songs in die Inszenierung eines direkten körperlichen Kontakts.
and thrillers to this day. One such example is Dennis Lehane’s best-selling novel Shutter Island
(2003), as many reviews identified similarities to Poe's fiction and even Lehane himself declared that
it was “very much a Classic Gothic” and, among others, “in the tradition of […] Edgar Allan Poe”.1
However, no in-depth analysis of the similarities has been conducted yet, which is why this
work addresses them in a narratological approach. I will first present an overview of typical elements
of Poe's short fiction (drawing from a corpus of seven of his most famous short stories and the
“Philosophy of Composition”) and then outline where they reoccur in Shutter Island. In my analysis I
will elaborate on the prevailing topic of mental illness, its connection to the 'death of a beautiful
woman' and the novel's Poe-like 'unity of effect' (evoked through the setting and atmosphere as well as
a very effective use of intertextuality and intermediality) to show that Shutter Island contains more
Poe than is perceptible at first glance. Although I will also explain where Lehane moves beyond Poe
and the Gothic tradition and how he made Poe's elements subject to a functional change in literature of
the 21st century, my work will demonstrate why Poe's works remain defining for authors concerned
with the dark abysses of the human soul and how influential Poe's legacy still is on one of today's most
successful crime writers.
1 Staci Layne Wilson. 02.09.2010. “Dennis Lehane Exclusive
Talks by Clara Petino
Auch in Neuss gab es nur vereinzelte Hexenprozesse. Doch die zwei bekanntesten Fälle, ebenfalls aus dem 17. Jahrhundert, sind denen in Salem erstaunlich ähnlich - einerseits hinsichtlich der juristischen Machtlosigkeit der der Hexerei bezichtigten Frauen wie Hester Meurer, andererseits in Bezug auf die fatale Fehlinterpretation jugendlicher Wahnvorstellungen im Falle der 18-jährigen Catharina Halffmans.
Ausgehend von hier beleuchtet der Vortrag eines der düstersten Kapitel der frühen amerikanischen Geschichte, welches in der amerikanischen Kultur bis heute ein Synonym für Denunziationsbereitschaft und Massenhysterie sowie eine starke politische Metapher ist, die gerade unter der Trump Regierung nichts an Aktualität verloren hat.
Papers by Clara Petino
a high school in Le Roy, NY in 2012. The author parallels the account of Ann Putnam, the most infamous ‘afflicted girl’, with the competitive climate of an all-girl Catholic prep school in modern Danvers where large numbers of girls fall sick with inexplicable symptoms. Eventually,
it is first-person narrator Colleen Rowley’s reading assignment of The Crucible that helps her understand the dynamics behind the mystery illness. In fact, for a reader unacquainted with Miller’s play, Howe’s novel would forfeit its depth as the play becomes an indispensable intertextual tool for understanding Howe’s claims on the parallels between girls’ lives then and now and her critical reading of Miller’s ‘sexplanation’, to use Robin DeRosa’s apt term. While the play centers on a male hero whose fall is brought about by the ‘afflicted girls’, Howe makes her story of the witch trials, just like the actual event, a predominantly female experience by
having Ann Putnam, written out of The Crucible, tell the story from her perspective. This paper shall discuss the role of fiction in shaping different versions of American history and the self-reflexive function of literature about an American trauma.
Building upon Aleida Assmann’s finding that places of memory can initiate and support processes of memory only in connection with other media of memory (cp. 1999), I want to trace how Salem’s memory culture is reflected in literature from the 19th century to the present. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (1835) is set on Gallows Hill, long believed to have been the site of the executions. The narrator bemoans the lack of historical awareness among Salemites and the absence of a memorial: “we could not but regret that there is nothing on its barren summit, no relic of old, nor lettered stone of later days, to assist the imagination in appealing to the heart.” This description stands in contrast to contemporary Salem: Not only has the city become a tourist magnet for all things witch-related, but two memorials can now be visited: the Salem’s Witch Trials Memorial in the city center was established in 1992, and in 2017 a new memorial was erected in the spot recently established as the true location of the hangings, Proctor’s Ledge. This investigation is strikingly reflected in two modern novels, Adriana Mather’s young adult novel How to Hang a Witch (2016) and Brunonia Barry’s The Fifth Petal (2017). Though not critically acclaimed as it lacks rhetorical and narratological depth and shows many clichés of the genre, Mather’s novel serves as an interesting example for making Colonial history appeal to young readers: teenage protagonist Samantha is here credited with finding the real location of the executions, though the depiction is far from historically correct. In Barry’s novel, historian Rose Whelan’s search for the true hanging location, on the other hand, parallels the real investigations of historian Emerson W. Baker and his colleagues of the Gallows Hill Project at Salem State University. In fact, as “honoring this true place was long overdue,” Barry’s novel ends with the installation of the memorial at Proctor’s Ledge, almost foreshadowing the real commemoration on July 19th, 2017 and mayor Kim Driscoll’s words that “Proctor's Ledge is a place - an object - but it is also an idea. And it is also a memory." In this paper, I thus want to discuss how literature mirrors and fosters the cultural memory and memory culture at work in one of the most contested places of the United States.
In my analysis of Salem as a literary space, I want to look in particular at the depiction and construction of contemporary Salem (as ‘Salem literature’ has seen a distinct increase since the 1990s) and trace recurrent elements, one of the most prominent of which is the emphasis on genealogical connections between contemporary Salemites and people involved in the 1692 trials. In Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel claims that “consanguinity (‘blood’) is the functional equivalent of geographical proximity (‘place’) in the way we mentally construct ‘natural’ connectedness”, a statement which holds true looking at literary renditions from Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) to contemporary works such as Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009) or Brunonia Barry’s The Fifth Petal (2017). In this paper I therefore want to discuss the American search for one’s roots in one of the most contested places of the country and the role literature plays in discussing this connection on a personal and on a national level.
Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story “Young Goodman Brown”, it can be assumed that he was one of those authors since there are striking similarities in structure, content and symbolism between his allegorical story about 17th century Puritan society and the Grimm brothers’ tale. In both works from German, respectively American, (dark) Romanticism, the protagonists go on a journey on which they undergo a learning process through a test of their belief and their ability to differentiate between right and wrong. This procedure has in both tales the traditional structure of departure – journey – return, with the protagonist departing from civilization and a journey through uncivilized territory – a forest – until the return to society follows which they now experience differently.
Analyzing these previously disregarded parallels, this paper does not only suggest a possible influence on Hawthorne’s childhood education, but offers a new reading of a classic American short story as it discusses the journey of initiation Young Goodman Brown has to undergo in connection to a fairytale, a parallel which also opens up new perspectives on Hawthorne’s treatment of the American nation’s ‘childhood’ in one of his most famous stories.
Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story “Young Goodman Brown”, it can be assumed that he was one of those authors since there are striking similarities in structure, content and symbolism between his allegorical story about 17th century Puritan society and the Grimm brothers’ tale. In both works from German, respectively American, (dark) Romanticism, the protagonists go on a journey on which they undergo a learning process through a test of their belief and their ability to differentiate between right and wrong. This procedure has in both tales the traditional structure of departure – journey – return, with the protagonist departing from civilization and a journey through uncivilized territory – a forest – until the return to society follows which they now experience differently.
Analyzing these previously disregarded parallels, this paper does not only suggest a possible influence on Hawthorne’s childhood education, but offers a new reading of a classic American short story as it discusses the journey of initiation Young Goodman Brown has to undergo in connection to a fairytale, a parallel which also opens up new perspectives on Hawthorne’s treatment of the American nation’s ‘childhood’ in one of his most famous stories.
Already introduced through the title and the book's genesis, TME establishes a close connection between Asia and America which is intensified by the almost unmissable, yet nearly unexamined integration of (Zen) Buddhist thought, often regarded by Westerners as “witty nonsense or paradox gone mad”. I argue that this convergence, particularly the study of Buddhist non-duality, not only reinforces, but in many ways enhances the Western Postmodern aesthetics in TME and helps approach Brautigan's equally criticized work. The coexistence – and dissolution – of paradoxes will thus be the central framework of my paper. I want to outline how dualisms coexist on different levels of the book, and why the Postmodern literary tradition is particularly well-suited for the integration of Buddhist thought, an idea that even Brautigan himself indirectly addressed when he said in an interview: “My books are often seen as fragmented and pointless in America, not in Japan. They appreciate my novels there.” By bringing a fascinating work back into focus, I ultimately aim to show Brautigan’s innovation in the context of Postmodernism and his concomitant expansion of the short story genre.
Sprachwissenschaftler Roman Jakobson prägte um 1960 die These von einer »poetischen Funktion“ der Sprache. Nach Maßgabe ,poetischer' Prinzipien zu schreiben/sprechen bedeutet, so Jakobson, eine Aussage in das Korsett von klanglichen, lexikalischen oder grammatischen ,Äquivalenzen“ zu kleiden. Das heißt: Durch systematische "Häufung formaler Ähnlichkeiten" das Sprachmaterial als solches erfahrbar zu machen, sowie beabsichtigte inhaltliche Ähnlichkeiten zu erzeugen (man vergleiche Herz/Schmerz vs. Herz/März). Wenn Jakobson folgert,
»durch ständige Wiederholung identischer Einheiten [werde] der "Sprachfluss wahrgenommen wie der der Musik", meint er also eine Grauzone zwischen Empfinden und Verstehen, oder im Test: zwischen Inhalt und Form. Eine verwandte These prägt aktuelle Überlegungen zur Wirkung von Popmusik. Spätestens seit den Beatles beobachten wir: Popsongs ,sprechen’ nicht nur von Wahrnehmung”, ,Körperlichkeit“, Gefühl”, sondern erzeugen auch erotisierte bis rauschhafte Zustände (P. Fuchs und M. Heidingsfelder). Dieser ,Verkörperungseffekt' ist sowohl musikästhetisch, als auch im Songtext bzw. dessen Realisierung angelegt. Eine Steigerung des »Äquivalenzprinzips"— die »WiederholungswiederhoIung” einer Zeile wie "oh baby baby", die Reduktion von Sprachpartikeln zur Lautmalerei bis hin zu reinen Körperlauten (Seufzen, Schreien) — überführt den kognitiven Inhalt des Songs in die Inszenierung eines direkten körperlichen Kontakts.
and thrillers to this day. One such example is Dennis Lehane’s best-selling novel Shutter Island
(2003), as many reviews identified similarities to Poe's fiction and even Lehane himself declared that
it was “very much a Classic Gothic” and, among others, “in the tradition of […] Edgar Allan Poe”.1
However, no in-depth analysis of the similarities has been conducted yet, which is why this
work addresses them in a narratological approach. I will first present an overview of typical elements
of Poe's short fiction (drawing from a corpus of seven of his most famous short stories and the
“Philosophy of Composition”) and then outline where they reoccur in Shutter Island. In my analysis I
will elaborate on the prevailing topic of mental illness, its connection to the 'death of a beautiful
woman' and the novel's Poe-like 'unity of effect' (evoked through the setting and atmosphere as well as
a very effective use of intertextuality and intermediality) to show that Shutter Island contains more
Poe than is perceptible at first glance. Although I will also explain where Lehane moves beyond Poe
and the Gothic tradition and how he made Poe's elements subject to a functional change in literature of
the 21st century, my work will demonstrate why Poe's works remain defining for authors concerned
with the dark abysses of the human soul and how influential Poe's legacy still is on one of today's most
successful crime writers.
1 Staci Layne Wilson. 02.09.2010. “Dennis Lehane Exclusive
Auch in Neuss gab es nur vereinzelte Hexenprozesse. Doch die zwei bekanntesten Fälle, ebenfalls aus dem 17. Jahrhundert, sind denen in Salem erstaunlich ähnlich - einerseits hinsichtlich der juristischen Machtlosigkeit der der Hexerei bezichtigten Frauen wie Hester Meurer, andererseits in Bezug auf die fatale Fehlinterpretation jugendlicher Wahnvorstellungen im Falle der 18-jährigen Catharina Halffmans.
Ausgehend von hier beleuchtet der Vortrag eines der düstersten Kapitel der frühen amerikanischen Geschichte, welches in der amerikanischen Kultur bis heute ein Synonym für Denunziationsbereitschaft und Massenhysterie sowie eine starke politische Metapher ist, die gerade unter der Trump Regierung nichts an Aktualität verloren hat.