Rezensionen 149 3 See Rorty’s autobiographical piece (1999). “Trotzky and the Wild Orchids”. In: Philosophy and Social Hope. ism had not kept its promise 3 . Throughout his lifetime, this melancholy accompanied him and turned him into one of the most elegant and original philosophers of the twentieth century. Ulf Schulenberg Hochschule Vechta Institut für Anglistik und Germanistik Christoph Henry-Thommes, Recollection, Memory and Imagination: Selected Autobiographical Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. (American Studies - A Monograph Series, vol. 132). Heidelberg: Winter, 2006. Flutur Troshani Henry-Thommes argues that Nabokov’s version of life-writing is a “secularized” embodiment of St. Augustine’s theory of recollection, memory, and imagination. By revisiting Augustine’s interpretation of these concepts, he argues, Nabokov emphasizes not only their synthesis but also their potential to give symbolic meaning to particular events that have been narrated in the text. Hence, Nabokov puts forth a sophisticated formulation of life-writing whose mission is to create ‘a true reality’ that is ‘creative, perceptive, and subjectively artistic’ (11). Henry-Thommes has developed the following strategy to look into the problem. He begins by locating two constituent dimensions - investigating if there exist stable links between Augustine and Nabokov’s oeuvres, and inspecting the role that recollection, memory, and imagination play inside Nabokov’s autobiographical paradigm. Each of these dimensions corresponds to a separate part of the book. In the first part, “Structural Analogies in the Works of Augustine and Nabokov,” Henry-Thommes examines Augustine’s Confessiones, Books Ten and Eleven, Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory, and “The Texture of Time,” a philosophical essay that Van Veen, Ada’s fictional autobiographer, includes in the fourth part of the novel. Going through these texts, Henry-Thommes examines the periodic resurfacings of a number of structural analogies, which are points of contact between Augustine and Nabokov’s paradigms. They are sense perception, recollection, forgetting, memory, and imagination. It should be noted in addition that they are intended by the author as criteria towards formulating what he calls a “grammar of autobiography.” His purpose is to sketch a list of sustainable features that autobiographical writing reveals, regardless of the dominant paradigm. AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 150 In Augustine and Nabokov’s understanding, sense perception is programmatic. We imprint in our mind “incorporeal images of the objects perceived.” They in turn are “stored in the memory and when we call something to mind, it is an image that we recollect.” If we are unable to retrieve an image, it means that its imprinting has not been performed (59-60). Henry-Thommes differentiates voluntary and involuntary acts of recollection, all of which are dynamic and riveting processes. He sets the context by insisting on voluntary recollection, because forgetting or “a failure to recollect something may be due to a lack of will to do so” (75). This positioning seems to almost inevitably lead him into a more detailed discussion of the role that will plays in the process of recollection. Augustine and Nabokov set well-defined premises about the relation between memory and recollection. They argue that recollection is fundamentally a “reactivation of memory-images,” thus a deliberate gesture to dig out images that have been stored in our minds. However, Nabokov is correct when he cautions that “our brain is not an ideal organ for constant retrospection and the best we can do is to pick out and try to retain those patches of rainbow light flitting through memory” (68-69). Memory can only be explained as a “form of imagination,” which is not only reproductive but also creative (80). It is, in fact, “in our minds [that] we also make up things which we have never seen or been through” (81); as Augustine put it, our mind “by increasing, or diminishing, or changing, or connecting at will what has not been forgotten, […] often imagines something as if it were of such a kind of which it knows that it is not or of which it does not know whether it is so.” (82). These considerations serve to set the context for a more detailed analysis of memory, because of its central function inside the autobiographical paradigm. Henry- Thommes proceeds in three steps. He begins by investigating how Augustine and Nabokov endeavor to put “order” into the “mass of recollections,” which David Hume defined as “the chief exercise of memory.” Then, he examines how Augustine’s theory of memory has evolved into a broader and “more general theory of consciousness” and investigates the resonating effects that this theory has had upon the (re)definition of memory, self, and life-writing in general (87). Finally, he discusses the seminal role that memory plays in the perception of time. Augustine and Nabokov think of memory as the “locale” where the segments of time - past, present, and future - merge. Indeed, time, on the one hand, seems to be able to transcend the limitations of its own segmentation. Memory, on the other, turns into a synthesizer of “the present memory of past events, the present contemplation of present events and the present hope of future events.” In this sense, “time [has] become a plaything of the imagination” (88). In the second part, “Nabokov’s Autobiographical Works,” Henry-Thommes extends the theoretical perspective to individual narrative accomplishments, including “The Texture of Time,” the autobiographical novel Mary (Mashen’ka), and the fictive autobiographies The Gift (Dar), Lolita, and Ada. In “The Texture of Time,” Nabokov presents a “strictly secularized version of the theory of time and memory,” which as a matter of fact sets the tone for his interpretation of the historical self. This is an important point of reference for Henry-Thommes to anchor his argument, because memory in Nabokov’s understanding plays a significant role. Memory is a “guarantor of identity,” thus it secures the individual’s Rezensionen 151 “continuity of [conscious] being across time.” It ensures “the only liaison […] between past experience and present consciousness” (189). In Mary (Mashen’ka), Henry-Thommes’ investigation focuses upon Lev Glebovich Ganin’s attempts to “recollect his past.” By synthesizing his memories of the time when he was still in Russia before migrating to Berlin and his recollections of his first great love for Mary, whom he affectionately called Mashen’ka, and by using his imagination “creatively,” Ganin searches to revive his past. Although he tries very hard, he never succeeds and thus cannot re-live the past in his present. He fails in his endeavors, because he is unable to “recover the meaning of his past life” through art (227). In The Gift (Dar), Nabokov meditates with greater subtlety and sophistication the tension between the present and the past. He splits Count Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev into Fyodor, the character, and Fyodor, the author of his own autobiography. It is impossible for Nabokov at this point to maintain an independent profile and resist the obsessive pull of fictionalization. And as a matter of fact, fictionalization leads into (re)creating “his past” and that of “the other characters participating in it” (272). Henry-Thommes argues that Nabokov’s greatest achievement in The Gift (Dar) is to have shown how the author risks to “turn [himself] into fiction” (272). He confirms that de-emphasizing the polar identity and centeredness of the self leads into dealing with the author’s hopes and fears, his authenticity, and his sins of the past. Humbert Humbert in Lolita, or the Confessions of a White Widowed Male “lives entirely in the past” (297). Obsessed by his love for Annabel, he shuts out the twists and turns of the present to live in his past. As he realizes that there is no possibility to completely reconcile the past with the present, Humbert remains tied to his recollections of 1923, “the year [when] he met, loved, and lost Annabel” (298). So far, he has lived in a Hegelian spiral, Henry-Thommes explains, which “represents a constant upward movement consisting of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.” “And, because [Humbert] unremittingly spirals around in the closed circle of that fateful year, he gets caught up in a vicious circle.” He lives in this circle until the end when his whole mental and emotional system is detonated and “the novel [finally] restores the balance between the past, present and future” (298). The construction of a specifically unstable autobiographical self lies at the heart of the novel, which oscillates, as Henry-Thommes reminds us, “between recollection, governed by reproductive imagination, on the one hand, and free creative artistic invention guided and inspired by the creative imagination, on the other.” Thus, at the end, Humbert Humbert is an “intricate blend of fact and fiction” (311). As Van puts his and Ada’s story into a “book,” Henry-Thommes also notes the disquieting effect of the “otsebyatina (what one contributes oneself).” Memory does not remain flat and unchanged; on the contrary, it is a constant source of reference whose “‘elements’ [are] appropriated by the imagination, and this synthesis enters into further combinations that include not only ‘inventions’[,] but also recollections” (327). This says much about the desire to tailor life-writing after the autobiographer’s needs and demands. The gaps and “discrepancies” of memory are abolished by negotiating between “the real world” and its “artistic correction.” The overall effect is cumulative, because artistic correction “includes slides from English, French, and Russian novels, Italian and Dutch painters and Nabokov’s previous novels” (330-31). Rezensionen 152 ‘Mind pictures’, in Van’s case, Henry-Thommes argues, are intensely private and public at the same time, cutting across the “fine arts,” and “combining literary imagery and painting.” Rather than simple replicas of the past, ‘mind pictures’ reveal the author’s intellectual engagement with life-writing. And, in fact, it seems that genres transcend one another to culminate in “turn[ing] mental images of the past into pieces of fine arts” (330-31). Indeed, they seem to confirm the importance and priority of creative imagination, Henry-Thommes argues. The bibliography of this book is divided into four sections, two of which are further divided into subsections. At the end, the reader is presented with a brief summary and a list of abbreviations of the titles of the texts that Henry-Thommes has used through his study. An index is missing. Also, a few quotations have been cited more than once and some spelling mistakes could have been avoided. In the footnotes, Henry-Thommes presents the Latin or Russian version of the quotations from Augustine or Nabokov’s texts, respectively. Flutur Troshani University of Shkoder “Luigj Gurakuqi” Department of English and American Studies Shkoder, Albania Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, Markus Hünemörder, Meike Zwingenberger, eds., Europe and America: Cultures in Translation. (American Studies - A Monograph Series, 139). Heidelberg: Universitäts-Verlag Winter, 2006. Daniel Leab This collection of heterogeneous but in the main attractive essays grew out of a conference held in Tutzing, Bavaria in October 2005. The conference was convened to “examine the state of transatlantic affairs” (ix) in what the editors have cogently described as “an interdisciplinary and nuanced manner” (ix). A group of renowned German and American scholars from various points of view discussed - often presciently and intelligently, at times however too elliptically - a diverse range of topics touching on relations between the U.S. and Germany, including contemporary politics, the impact of religion, ethnicity, and immigration, and manifestations of what is perceived to be U.S. cultural imperialism in the arena of popular culture. The authors of the essays in the volume under review, whether Germans or Americans, are not anti-American in a simplistic form. They do, however, not forgo a critical skepticism which echoes widespread European and American comments about the foreign policy of the U.S. since the horrors of September 11, 2001, as well as domestic developments in that country since then. The current Bush administration, however generously one views its overseas policies (and not just in the Middle East) as well as its domestic approach, has used AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 153 up a great deal of the positive capital built up among all kinds of people both in the U.S. and elsewhere since the heyday of the Vietnam War over a generation ago. And in most of this volume’s essays what is happening now - probably right now, as you are reading these lines - underscores the authors’ attitudes and arguments. Duke Professor of Political Science and Professor of Philosophy Michael Allen Gillespie puts it very well when he touches on “the Manichean fantasies of fundamental difference that have gained a foothold on both sides of the Atlantic” (25). His concern is that currently running against George Bush would be an effective and successful election strategy in Germany. Two perceptive veteran German policy wonks (Heinrich Oberreuter and Saskia Hieber, both employed by Tutzing think tanks) are more optimistic about “rebuilding bridges” between the U.S. and Germany, yet the bulk of their essay is concerned with the differences that have evolved as the Bush Administration is “shaking the formerly huge confidence in Washington’s rule of law” (32). One of the editors of the collection, Markus Hünemörder, a historian of American Culture at the University of Munich, also believes that it may be possible to heal the “trans-Atlantic rifts” by “looking beyond the U.S. presidential election of 2008” (49); the hope is that the policies of the current administration will not be continued by Bush’s successor, but as the electoral process unrolls in the U.S. we do not know whether this will actually be the case, and the professor does not offer any alternatives to that hope. Nor are those dealing with religion more optimistic. Paul Boyer, a well regarded scholar of American intellectual history, and now a Professor Emeritus, in a comprehensive essay reviews the general U.S. response to organized religion over the years and concludes somewhat pessimistically that recently there has been an “upsurge and political mobilization of fundamentalist beliefs and literalistic biblical interpretations” which have and continue to play “a profound role […] in shaping contemporary American popular culture, politics, and foreign affairs” (63). Jürgen Gebhardt, a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University Erlangen-Nürnberg, and Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, who teaches American Cultural History at the University of Munich and is one of the book’s editors, both offer thoughtful reflections on the German and American responses to secularization. Gebhardt’s essay deals more with the German theocratic response; Waldschmidt- Nelson rather forcefully touches on America’s civic religion, which was built on the belief by most Americans that “their country is God’s chosen nation” (84). Both authors, although in a way more concerned than Boyer with developments in Germany, are also worried about the rise of Christian fundamentalism in contemporary America. The general attitude of Germans towards the United States, and its development over the past few decades is the topic of the contribution by Christian Schwaabe, who teaches Political Science in Munich; Gebhard Schweigler, a Professor of International Relations at the National War College in Washington, DC; and Philipp Gassart, a University of Heidelberg historian currently a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. They deal with what the editors call “‘the phenomenon of Anti-Americanism” (xi). Schwaabe carefully plots the demise of Anti-Americanism in post-war Germany and its revival on both the Right and the Left sides of the political spectrum. Schweigler focuses on differing stereotypes of Marianne and Rambo, personifying France and the U.S., respectively, and utilizes them to discuss German misunder- Rezensionen 154 standing of the American political scene. Gassart, building on the well-known question “what then is the American, this new man” raised by the transplanted Frenchman de Crevecouer in his 1782 Letters From An American Farmer, calls his essay “What then is the Anti-American, this new man” and most convincingly lays out “the paradoxical attitude” which has resulted in “anti-Americanism […] forced to adopt an American accent” (128). The impact of that American accent as practiced by the poet William Carlos Williams on German literature is the subject of an essay by the now emeritus Americanist Heinz Ickstadt. The specific influence of the poems of Williams on post- World War II German poetry is laid out by Peter Schneck, currently teaching American literature at the University of Munich, in a response to Ickstadt’s paper and to one presented by Werner Sollors, who teaches literature at Harvard University. Sollors details the polyethnicism to be found in the U.S., notwithstanding consistent attempts at Americanization, and also points out that even though Germany in the past was not an “Einwanderungsland”, it has more of a polyethnic past than is usually assumed. Another one of the editors, viz. Meike Zwingenberger, in a comprehensive but brief essay “takes a critical look at how Germany and the United States deal with migrant workers and other transnational phenomenon” (xi-xii). Immigration, ethnicity and similar themes are also dealt with in a series of further essays. Ruth Mayer, the holder of a chair in American Studies at the University of Hannover, in detail critiques the “Black Atlantic” thesis of the British sociologist Paul Gilroy, who maintained that the ocean was “a rhizomatic structure complicatedly interlinking black communities worldwide” (177); she maintains that it is hard to ignore the “underlying economic realities and intricate hierarchies organizing the contact zones” (182) of the Black Diaspora. Graham Huggan, who teaches at the University of Leeds, in his view of the post-colonial world convincingly rejects the ideas inherent in the word “intercultural,” which he attacks as “at best, a self-serving Western-liberal project” (189). Iris Schmeisser, who teaches American Cultural History at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, in her keen comments on the Mayer and Huggan articles agrees with their somewhat contradictory views on the “problems entailed in antiessentialist concepts such as transculturality or diaspora” (xii) but, in the words of the editors, points up the risk Mayer and Huggan take in attempting “to conceal the contradictions and discontinuities that define the reality of scattered cultural enclaves” (xii). The text concludes with a series of “sketches” by Ian Chambers, who teaches Cultural Studies in Naples at the Universita “L’Orientale.” They are mostly concerned with California, and even though often impressionistic, they are overall well-written, interesting, contain fascinating nuggets of personal and scholarly information, and make a happy coda to the more serious preceding essays. In fine, this book is a good read. The essays are thoughtful and thought-provoking, opinionated but not dogmatic, relatively free of jargon, a clever reworking of papers presented at a conference (all too often not the case). There are substantial and useful bibliographies appended to most of the essays. Readers can learn a lot from dipping into these pages and certainly will benefit from a more thorough perusal. Perhaps the sub-title should not have referred to “translations” but to “transitions,” a function of many of these essays. Rezensionen 155 This book is dedicated to Berndt Ostendorf, aptly characterized by the editors as “one of Europe’s most important […] trailblazers in the study of the American cultural landscape” (xiii). He is a dedicated and prolific scholar perhaps best known for his study of African-Americans, but he also has contributed to the study of American music and religion as well as cultural nationalism, to name just a few areas of his interest and expertise. Many of the essays in this volume are penned by his friends, colleagues, and former students. He has been and still is one of the leading German Americanists. He has also really been one of the “good guys”. This collection seems to me, moreover, to be a tribute to the American practioners of public diplomacy; there was a willingness, in the words of Patricia H.H. Guy, Consul for Public Affairs, U.S. Consulate General Munich, “to provide financial support for this volume” (xv), even though it must have been clear that not everyone in her bailiwick would be happy with the themes of at least some of the essays with their less than positive response to current U.S. policies. Still, although this book is slim (only 210 pages), it is rich in content and ideas; it and the conference from which it is spawned, as she points out, not only happily “fête” Berndt Ostendorf and his “grand legacy,” but also “enhance the scholarship of transatlantic relations and […] contribute greatly to improving mutual understanding on both sides of the Atlantic” (xv-xvi). Daniel Leab Department of History Seton Hall University New Jersey, USA Nieves Pascual, Laura Alonso-Gallo and Francisco Collado-Rodriguez, eds., Masculinities, Femininities and the Power of the Hybrid in U.S. Narratives: Essays on Gender Borders. (Anglistische Forschungen Band 373). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007. Patrycjia Kunjatto-Renard As Julia Kristeva put it, “‘A ‘fixed identity’ [is] a fiction, an illusion’” (106). This lack of stability moved her to create the term “subject-in-progress”. A subject is always a temporary result of becoming, a constantly evolving and unstable flux. Identity is multiple, a sum of various elements whose relative importance depends on the situation of the subject at a given moment in his or her development. Western culture posits identity questions in either/ or terms: one is either male or female, from here or from elsewhere, a stranger or familiar, etc. Some subjects will accept these dichotomies and seek to construct their self in agreement with them, while others will resist them. But those who resist, even if they face more difficulties and existential angst, enjoy greater freedom. Such are some premises underlying the essays comprised in AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1