Rezensionen 359 empathy with the protagonist’s fate, in this case a severe short-term memory loss. The conclusion also reasserts that formal criticism as practiced here is less likely to be ideologically misappropriated than content-oriented criticism. The entire dissertation, well documented and clearly structured as well as largely focused around its governing questions, makes for inspiring and thought-provoking reading. Besides the especially strong portion on Jorie Graham, what stays in the reader’s memory is particularly the intelligent discussion with Nussbaum, Booth, Shusterman, et al. in the opening chapter. This discussion is worth being more widely disseminated in the English-speaking world, where this book should face a welcome reception if the publisher can market it appropriately. For such a wider readership, though, the presence of complex quotations in German may prove a hindrance. In addition, further proofreading is required (a discussion strikes a “chord,” not a “cord,” 85) and key theses would need to be further clarified: the study’s concluding sentence, “[i]t is in scrutinizing the inexhaustible riches of literary forms and appreciating their ethical dimensions that one can do justice to the unique nature of literature and the ethical import it has always had” (167), may veer, for some, too close to tautology. Thomas Austenfeld English Department University of Fribourg Gregor Schrettle, Our Own Private Exodus: Gwen Shamblin’s Dieting Religion and America’s Puritan Legacy. Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2006. Manfred Kopp Schrettle’s highly original, very informative, and thoroughly researched study deals with the work of the evangelical weight-loss author Gwen Shamblin. Deploying a carefully construed, historically perspectified, and consciously self-critical cultural studies approach to elucidate the underlying meanings of the American imperative to be thin, Schrettle also very successfully explores how Shamblin’s sometimes rather bizarre discourse can be understood as a typical expression of the way America understands herself. The actuating principle behind these interrelated processes rests on the particularly symbiotic relationship between United States culture and religion, a relationship that, according to Schrettle, is uniquely exemplified in Shamblin’s writings, “because nowhere else are the issues of fat and faith combined with in [sic] each other in such an intricate way” (11). Notwithstanding this intricacy, Schrettle manages to put Shamblin’s teachings in a nutshell when summing up that it is “her theory that most heavy people are overweight because they attempt to compensate for spiritual emptiness by overeating. She recommends her readers to turn to God, arguing that God alone is able to fill this AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 2 Rezensionen 360 emptiness. If they follow this advice, weight loss will follow almost automatically” (11). Shamblin’s god, though, is not just a given Christian deity, but, rather, her own version of this numinous entity, which is why, in 1999, she and her husband David felt called upon to found their own church, the Remnant Fellowship. Together with her “multimillion-dollar company” (190), the legally separate but ideologically strongly intertwined Weigh Down Workshop, this church, which “has often been described as possessing all the typical problematic characteristics of a religious cult” (39), has made Shamblin a very wealthy woman. The fact that Shamblin is female can be seen as psychologically important, because most of her followers are women as well. Schrettle opens this part of the discussion by quoting from a recent survey according to which many American girls “‘were more afraid of becoming fat than they were of cancer, nuclear war or losing their parents’” (48). And he draws a very interesting parallel when he infers that, in the United States, “the pursuit of beauty can thus be equaled to the pursuit of happiness that the Declaration of Independence famously mentions” (48). However, what may appear strange or moot reveals its shocking significance when he also explains that “current statistics still report that more than 90 per cent [sic] of the cases of severe eating disorders (especially bulimia and anorexia nervosa) are girls and women” (50). Utilizing a poststructuralist perspective to investigate how, “[i]n the area of body ideals, […] the manifestations of social behavior and interaction reflect the way the underlying power is distributed” (53), Schrettle skillfully connects this Foucauldian approach to the writings of Gwen Shamblin and to her strong “emphasis of the importance of female submissiveness and her deeply engrained conviction that women have to be thin and pretty” (65). Historically, though, thinness was not always tantamount to prettiness or attractiveness. This becomes obvious when Schrettle talks about the beginnings of the dieting movement in the United States, where, prior to the 1880s, “doctors and researchers everywhere were convinced that a certain degree of corpulence was absolutely advisable as it served to protect the body from various contagious diseases” (72). In the following years, this gradually began to change, so that a person like the voluptuous and formerly very popular American actress Lillian Russell could at one point no longer serve as a model for female attractiveness, while “[t]he fragile, almost wraith-like French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who had been called ‘ugly’ on her first visit to the United States in 1880, was praised for her virtuous, chaste beauty when she visited again in 1900” (73-74). This example is an excellent illustration of the aesthetic paradigm change at the end of the nineteenth century, but the ideological basis for this development was laid much earlier. By having recourse to the writings of John Winthrop, William Bradford, and others, Schrettle makes clear to what extent seventeenth-century North American culture was based on religion. He then argues that modern times and increasing secularization led to “considerable shifts in the underlying meaning of this culture” (107), but that “much of its original structure was left intact” (107). Schrettle goes on to explain that also this internally modified culture had to fulfill certain “social functions” (108), such as “control and selection” (108) - which he views as “remarkably similar to those formerly performed by the different components of the religious corset that had shaped almost all aspects of the Pilgrims’ lives” (108) - and that - and here he is perhaps a bit too unspecific - “[e]xcessive weight in a person has thus come to Rezensionen 361 be understood as an abominable violation of a (new) social code that is felt, if only subconsciously, to function as a type of glue holding the society together - or, in other words, as civil religion” (108). Schrettle thinks that this civil religion can be seen as a sort of Rousseauvian social contract, and that the most problematic part of this secular faith is that anybody unable to conform to its aesthetic ideals suddenly finds himor herself in an outsider position, which has led to the consequence that nowadays “[f]at people are regarded as a potentially dangerous threat to the fate and status - or, formerly, salvation - of the entire community” (108). In the seventeenth century, many of the then new communities in North America were based on Puritanism. After quoting Max Weber, Perry Miller, Sacvan Bercovitch, and others, Schrettle establishes a very interesting parallel between this theological doctrine and Gwen Shamblin’s dieting religion when he argues that the only difference between both concepts is “that the incentive she employs to get people aboard and turn them into believers is not the prospect of wealth but of slimness” (135). He then continues to clarify that, “[i]n both cases, religion is functionalized and serves to help its adherents pursue, to some degree, their own ulterior objectives. Instead of simply observing the traditional requirements of their religion handed down to them from earlier generations, more and more people begin […] to devote attention to the strictly utilitarian aspect of religion and use it for their purposes” (135). Schrettle puts the almost revolutionary character of this situation in a historical perspective when he points out that, “[a]t the time of the Puritans, this was a relatively new phenomenon. Until then, it had been primarily political leaders and thinkers who had been interested in the aspect of the practical usability of religion […] whereas the popular approach to religion had usually been marked by faithful obedience and subordination” (135). More often than not, this popular approach to religion had also been marked by asceticism. Schrettle draws yet another important connection between Puritanism and dieting when he talks about the difficult relationship between such an asceticism - which he views as “a firmly established constitutive element of collective national consciousness, of modern civil religion” (151) in the United States - and consumerism. Thus he argues that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, “American culture was not ready to accept consumerism as a new universally valid approach to life without any counterbalance. Cultural logic clearly required a force that would fulfill a function of control and restraint again, and thus maintain the moral equilibrium” (151). However, in a time of increasing industrialization, mass production, and rapidly growing affluence, such a powerful and effective cultural force was hard to find. According to Schrettle, it was in this socioeconomic context that the importance of dieting and thinness gained momentum, that “[t]he attack on fat was apparently perceived as an appropriate means through which the nation felt it could keep up, in modified form, the Puritan tradition and heritage” (152). As mentioned above, considerable parts of this Puritan heritage can still be observed today. Moreover, in contemporary North American society, dieting and slimness serve yet another important purpose. Working on the assumption that “the diversification of modern society has resulted in an erosion of common values” (158), Schrettle is sure that “[i]n an otherwise morally unstable and confusing cultural environment, the omnipresent preoccupation with body weight and diet serves as a vital point of orientation” (158). In addition to this, he also refers to a personal inter- Rezensionen 362 view with Christian dieting expert and cultural historian Marie Griffith, who thinks “that most American presidents and other politicians feel obliged to go jogging or lose weight in other ways because this increases their trustworthiness and helps them improve their moral status in the eyes of the public” (158). That said, Schrettle succinctly infers that “dieting and the thinness imperative have found entrance into the realm of US civil religion at a time when the traditional ethical consensus is declining continuously” (158). On the frequently interrelated levels of logical coherence and aesthetic expression, such a decline can be reflected in ambiguity and contradiction. Schrettle convincingly shows how both of these stylistic phenomena are present in Shamblin’s writings. Her work is ambiguous because, on the one hand, her highly selective interpretation of the Bible mirrors her very conservative understanding of the relationship between husband and wife (24), parent and child (42), and citizen and government (42), but on the other hand, there is also “a destabilizing, countercultural quality to be detected in Shamblin’s texts” (195), since “[s]he repeatedly expresses her conviction that secular culture is deficient, notwithstanding the fact that in the case of the United States it is based on religion to an extraordinarily high degree” (195). Furthermore, Schrettle discloses some other contradictions in Shamblin’s writings when he argues that “[s]he advises her followers not to worry about calorie counting - and yet, she tells them that they are not saved if they weigh more than a largely arbitrarily defined cultural ideal prescribes” (200); when he criticizes how “[s]he points out that many people overeat in order to compensate for of [sic] a lack of emotional perspective - but claims that all people are slaves and that obedience is the summum bonum” (200-201); or when he states that “[s]he teaches her readers how to eat M&Ms - although she wants to pull them away from the world” (201). From all this, Schrettle finally concludes that “Shamblin uniquely exemplifies and embodies some of the paradoxical tendencies so characteristic of her cultural milieu” (201) and, as he also shows, of North American culture in general. Reading Our Own Private Exodus is a great opportunity to achieve a better understanding of this culture. Unfortunately, though, any review of the book would be incomplete without also mentioning its problems. One of them is that the mottoes at the beginning of each chapter have no detailed references. Another one is the work’s structure. Thus the text contains too many cross-references and repetitions, and the conclusion (158-201) is far too long and offers a lot of information which would have belonged to previous chapters - as when Schrettle talks about the female body and female dieting (158-178), which would have made more sense in chapter 3, “Being Thin Is a Cultural Imperative - Feminist Perspectives” (47-66). Moreover, the study suffers from a couple of typographical errors - “predispotion” (37) instead of ‘predisposition,’ “exodus motive” (43) instead of ‘exodus motif,’ “Camilla Paglia” (64) instead of ‘Camille Paglia,’ etc. - and an index would have been helpful too. These, however, are minor points of criticism that certainly do not diminish the value of Schrettle’s highly readable book, which clearly deserves a much wider audience, preferably on both sides of the Atlantic. Manfred Kopp Paderborn