Rezensionen 346 the World’s Here! : The Black Presence at White City (2002), which is not addressed by Hollweg. It should also be noted that China refused to officially participate in the Fair in protest against the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), and that a privately-funded group of Chicago’s Chinese-American community organized the Chinese exhibit. Native Americans were present in the midway (but not the exhibition area) in Col. Cody’s Camp of the Nations. Hollweg considers gender in relation to the Fair through detective novels and humorous pieces. Cross-dressing, masquerading, and role inversion figure prominently in her discussion of criminal novels, e.g., E.M. Van Deventer’s Against Odds (1894), which features a female detective. In contrast, Marietta Holley’s Samantha at the World’s Fair (1893) offers a feminist critique of society. Since Holley was the most popular female humorist of the late nineteenth century, it would have been effective to briefly discuss another of her books, Samantha on the Race Problem (1892) to underscore the links between the diverse elements of the Schattengeschichte (226) that expressed the critical viewpoints of the excluded and powerless. Hollweg’s book provides a challenging and innovative critical approach to the popular texts of the Exposition that should prove useful to both scholars and students and, in its concluding passages, provides grounds for further research into the effects of the Disneyfication of culture (worldwide) and the internet on the prospects of future world’s fairs and international cultural expositions. Louis J. Kern History Department Hofstra University Hempstead, NY Thomas Claviez, Ulla Haselstein, Sieglinde Lemke. Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature. Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg, 2006. Stipe Grgas Most of the papers gathered in this collection were presented at a conference of the John F. Kennedy Institute which was held to celebrate Winfried Fluck’s 60th birthday. As such the book is a gesture of recognition that pays homage to a deserving scholar whose work, amongst other things, has dealt with the function of literature and aesthetics, and who, more particularly, has in various ways exemplified the significant contributions Europeans have made to the field of American studies. Mapped onto these coordinates, the book has a theoretical focus: it addresses a growing concern within the field of literary studies, it marks a juncture within the discipline and sets up a possible agenda for future research. AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 2 Rezensionen 347 The theoretical background upon which one can read most of the contributions is the “cultural turn” which, as far as literature goes, has problematized if not swept away the tradition of viewing its artifacts as autotelic entities. According to those who espouse this turn, literature is just one amongst numerous other strategies by way of which humans attempt to meaningfully inhabit their environment. The focus of research interest in this realignment of priorities shifts from the examination of immanent structures to the account of the ways in which literature relates to an extratextual reality. To give it some specificity within the more and more encompassing notion of culture, literature can be perceived as a constituent of the “cultural imaginary,” to use the title of Fluck’s study of the American novel: an agency which produces and disseminates culture’s networks of discursive themes, images, motifs, and narratives that collectives rely upon to constitute their identity. It was only to be expected that much scholarly work has been devoted to unraveling the manner in which literary works have bolstered specific identity politics, constraining action, or empowering resistance. If this has been true for critical theory in general, it has been even more pronounced in both American literature and American studies. It has been noted that in the United States literature was assigned the role of elaborating a national idea of culture unlike, for example, in Germany, where it was the task of philosophical discourse to do so. Therefore it comes as no surprise that explorations of the American polity, the strategies of its constitution and the processes of inclusion and exclusion that attended it, frequently relied on literary texts as an archive of evidence. In the introduction to the book under review the editors speak of a “critical consensus” prevailing in America which maintains that literature must be a part of the “democratic public sphere”. However, they note that the acceptance of this axiom has led to conflicts because one group of critics holds that the American literary canon is ideologically subservient to the interests of the ruling elite, while another group believes in the efficacy of literature to castigate the shortcomings of “social regimes of meaning” and to search the canonical texts for a “counterfactual vision”. However one is inclined to adjudicate between these two positions, preferring to see literature as either validation or negation, the reader of the book under review recognizes that its authors attempt to take the argument a step further. Reading much that has been produced within the field of American studies or writing on it within the prescribed theoretical paradigms, one frequently feels an unease that the literary text has become irrelevant, that it has disappeared into thin air. Often it functions as no more than a source of documentation, illustrative of sociohistorical circumstances, or as an index of ideological options. The essays collected in this volume articulate this unease by reintroducing the notion of the aesthetic, which has tended to disappear among the factions of critical discourse vying for interpretative hegemony in American literature. The authors gathered here consider literature as a “rhetorical strategy” whose power lies “in its ability to draw out, and possibly challenge, the reader’s imaginative investments in certain characters, social values, or patterns of action” (8). In their attempts to define “the transgressive quality of the aesthetic,” they explore the textual strategies of particular literary works, the “discursive environment” of the reading public, as well as other social functions. The first group of texts gathered under the title “The Transformative Potential of the Aesthetic” investigates the notion of transgression by putting it within broader Rezensionen 348 frameworks. Using a systems theory approach, Wolfgang Iser defines culture itself as an “emergent phenomenon” and develops an argument which shows the literary text, as a part of culture, to be a “paradigm of emergence” (33). Herbert Grabes historicizes the imperative to make it new, shows it to have been present in historical formations predating modernism, and gives examples of recent literary developments which evince a return to an aesthetic “of a milder degree of strangeness, of more subtle differences” (56). Focusing upon the nexus of the aesthetic and the political and targeting texts by Melville and Twain, Emory Elliott addresses the manner American writers have critiqued the dynamic of power and astonishment. He proposes a parallel between the military strategy of shock and awe used by the Americans before the attack on Iraq and the political implications that can be read from the two earlier novelists who shocked their readers into the recognition of some of the dehumanizing traits that continue to mark American foreign policy. Ulla Haselstein is less convinced of the “oppositional merit” of literary texts, both because of the general marginalization of literature and because of the capability of modern society to contain and control them. Focusing upon Leo Marx as a representative of the older school of American studies, Donald Pease questions their practice, stating, for instance, that each of the national metanarrative’s “foundational signifiers” “possessed a performative dimension that empowered the myth to bring about belief in the truth of state of affairs they represented” (105). The New Americanists, on the other hand, needed these “to disclose what the myths covered over” (110), after which they “worked the gaping contradictions between facts and beliefs into motives for social transformation” (111). The next group of papers is entitled “Possibilities and Limits of Aesthetic Transgression”. Focusing upon the role Victorian literature dealing with the British Empire actually had at the time when it was published, Ansgar Nünning voices the need to take stock of the very notion of function and attempts to produce a convincing definition. He stresses the point that the functions of literature are subject to historical change and that they are specific in historical and cultural terms. In his taxonomy of the functions his chosen corpus of text played in a specific time and place he warns of the risk “of privileging as well as overemphasizing the transgressive role of literature” (128). Pointing to the fact that poetry, “as a private aesthetic space” “rarely figures in theoretical speculations of the anthropological bent” (149), Astrid Franke explores what this genre, exemplified by a reading of a poem by Tennyson and one by the American poet Hayden Carruth, can bring to the reader that may have been elided or neglected in prose narratives. In her reading of The Scarlet Letter, Sieglinde Lemke uncovers a sort of double bind in Hawthorne’s text which affirms the validity of opposites that seem mutually exclusive. Stefan Brandt’s initial appraisal of Hawthorne’s stance towards the romantic ideal as being ambivalent eventuates in the generalization that the American author managed “to create a careful balance between structuring and playful destructuring […] an ambivalent strategy of both authentification and deconstruction” (219-20). Chistopher Decker looks at Fritz Lang’s early American films in order to investigate the part they played in Hollywood’s cinema of social critique during the thirties. In his view, Lang’s work was most effective when he was able to integrate the experimental innovations of his Weimar period or Brechtian devices into the established American-style forms of telling stories. Susanne Rohr’s aim is to focus not on whether or not the Holocaust can be repre- Rezensionen 349 sented, but on how this is done. Her discussion of the new subgenre of Holocaust comedies shows them to be “transgressing taboos”, exploring ways of aesthetically dealing with the (un)representable. The third and final grouping of papers bears the title “Modernism and the Function of Literature”. Relying upon the works of William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, and Richard Powers, Heinz Ickstadt goes against the grain of Dewey’s skeptical evaluation of modernist art and recognizes in these authors an antithetical project founded on the ideal of “the communicative possibility and social function of art” (264). Thomas Claviez explores the “somewhat uneasy status” (290) of the common man in the work of Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and James Agee. The following quotation from his article illustrates the function of literature that I think the papers grouped in this section seek to articulate: “It is the political task of the artist to transcend the impending heterogeneity and differentiation of society, and thus to leave politics - as a negotiation of differences that has to acknowledge them in the first place - behind” (306). The next two papers deal with Ernest Hemingway. In his Rortian reading of Hemingway, Kurt Müller focuses upon the blanks in Hemingway’s text and shows how this is not only a proper response to the structure of the text itself but how it has moral implications in the sense of the ethical reading promulgated by Rorty. As his point of departure Frank Mehring notes the “peculiar incuriosity regarding the city of Paris” (339) and shows how the way the locality functions within Hemingway’s texts points to broader cultural configurations. Not to leave out drama from the repertoire of genres dealt with in the collection, Dalia El-Shayal’s essay focuses on the structural issues that have allowed Greek theatre to stand as a “model for adaptation” (362) by African and African-American playwrights. El-Shayal demonstrates how the superimposition of Greek tragedy and American history highlights the tragic consequences of slavery. This collection of essays is a welcome intervention in the field of American studies, whose practices have witnessed almost the virtual disappearance of interest in the aesthetic. As such, it gestures to a need of reappraisal which stems both from developments outside the discipline as well as from a sense of exhaustion and loss of disciplinary identity within. Whether future developments will accord with the research agenda that I have attempted to sketch in this review is an open question. In conclusion, I want to foreground a point which I think has relevance far beyond the confines of the book under discussion. Rarely do the contributors to this collection succumb to a habit of thought which has made it virtually an article of faith to assume that value or ideas of interest lie only on the side of transgression and not on the side of fixity and structure. Focusing on transgression, they showed themselves acutely aware that only something stable can dissolve itself, that identity is the presupposition of alterity, that for literature to be subversive there must be an enabling point of reference. If for nothing else, it is this note of informed caution that I believe gives special merit to the collection and that can open a rich quarry for further study. Stipe Grgas Department of English University of Zagreb