“Amerika gibt es nicht”
On the Semiotics of Literary America in the Twentieth Century 1
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20657451 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Oliver Simons (0000-0002-9230-5164, Harvard University Press, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 82 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 196-211 |
| Publication date | 2009-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The German Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-8831 • E-ISSN: 1756-1183 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1756-1183.2009.00045.x |
| OpenAlex | W2145345000 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 8 |
From Alexis de Tocqueville's arrival in Manhattan and his amazement at the artificial façades of houses on the East River, we can observe a specific semiotic model in depictions of America: America does not exist, which is to say, the referent often becomes questionable in these texts. All the more frequently descriptions of America hew to a metonymic mode of writing; they deal with signs which refer to other signs, with accounts reporting mostly what has been read elsewhere. With Franz Kafka and Wolfgang Koeppen this essay shows how America has become the setting of poetological self‐determination; America is a textual construct in which the significatory nature of language is itself negotiated. Under these conditions, how can another America novel be written at the end of the 20 th ‐century? In the concluding passages, this essay discusses how contemporary authors Thomas Meinecke and Michael Roes succeed in resurrecting America's narrative possibilities
Art · Art history · Construct (python library) · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Metonymy · Narrative · Referent · Semiotics · German legal, social, and political studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Literature and Cultural Memory · Philosophy
How American Is It
Deutschlands literarisches Amerikabild. Neuere Forschungen zur Amerikarezeption der deutschen Literatur (Germanistische Texte und Studien, 3)
Amerika! New Images in German Literature
The Practice of Everyday Life
"The Myth of America in Peter Handke's "Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,07 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2012 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |