Kirsten Twelbeck | University of Augsburg (original) (raw)

Papers by Kirsten Twelbeck

Springer eBooks, 2019

Die folgenden Seiten sind ein Pladoyer nicht nur fur das Lesen komplexer literarischer Texte, son... more Die folgenden Seiten sind ein Pladoyer nicht nur fur das Lesen komplexer literarischer Texte, sondern auch fur die Literaturwissenschaft. Im Zentrum steht ein Fallbeispiel, das sehr spezifisch und insofern nicht einfach verallgemeinerbar ist, das aber aufgrund seiner Radikalitat dennoch Ruckschlusse auf das kreative und verandernde Potenzial literaturwissenschaftlichen Denkens zulasst. Gegenstand meiner Betrachtungen ist ein koreanisch-amerikanischer Experimentaltext – ein Werk also, in dem innovatives Schreiben mit einer starken kulturellen Komponente zusammenfallt. Aufgrund dieses Zusammenfallens stellt Theresa Hak Kyung Chas’ Dictee (1982)1 eine doppelte Provokation von Mehrheiten dar, die sowohl kulturell konnotiert als auch bestimmten Genrekonventionen verpflichtet sind. Doch da mein Gegenstand das Denken selber ist, steht nicht die ideologiekritische Aussage dieses Textes im Mittelpunkt, sondern die viel zu selten diskutierte Kernpraxis unseres Faches – jene langen Phasen der Textanalyse, in denen etwas passiert, das ich im Folgenden als „multikulturelle Flutung“ bezeichne und als ein Training fur den Umgang mit den globalen Umwalzungen unserer Epoche ansehe.

Beyond the Civil War Hospital understands Reconstruction as a period of emotional turmoil that pr... more Beyond the Civil War Hospital understands Reconstruction as a period of emotional turmoil that precipitated a struggle for form in cultural production. By treating selected texts from that era as multifaceted contributions to Reconstruction's »mental adaptation process« (Leslie Butler), Kirsten Twelbeck diagnoses individual conflicts between the »heart and the brain« only partly compensated for by a shared concern for national healing. By tracing each text's unique adaptation of the healing trope, she identifies surprising disagreement over racial equality, women's rights, and citizenship. The book pairs female and male white authors from the antislavery North, and brings together a broad range of genres.

Sprache, Flucht, Migration, 2019

Amerikastudien/American Studies

In a 2016 article in The Guardian, Phil Whitaker explains why a substantial number of well-known ... more In a 2016 article in The Guardian, Phil Whitaker explains why a substantial number of well-known writers are also medical doctors. Whitaker, who belongs in this group himself, lists Anton Chekhov, Michael Crichton, Khaled Hosseini, and a few others, to state his point: "Their ability to feel what others feel, and simultaneously to view it with detachment, gives us perhaps our greatest strength as writers." Importantly, it is the physician's skills that pave the way towards writing as a profession, and not literary excellence that helps make a professional healer: doctors virtually read "[e]ach patient's illness" as "a narrative-symptoms as the beginning, diagnosis as the ending-and a middle that weaves a coherent and irresistible path between the two." Such explanations sound logical and comprehensible, yet they evoke new questions as well: why does it seem to be, almost exclusively, men, who translate their interaction with patients into poetry and prose? What motivates them to do so? Does their creative engagement inform their work as medical doctors? And, most importantly, perhaps: what do we learn about the medical profession, about writing, about an era, when we replace the hierarchical concept of the doctor-becoming-awriter by the idea of a mutually inspiring relationship between two systems of knowledge acquisition? Sari Altschuler's The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States builds on this idea of reciprocity. The book approaches "the practice of writing" as a "valuable training of the medical mind" (5) and discusses a number of well-known American physician-writers who wrote poetry or prose between the American Revolution and the Civil War. As public intellectuals, they relied on what Altschuler calls "imaginative experimentation" (8-11) to study and discuss health-related topics, test medical theories, fill research gaps, and solve medical and philosophical contradictions. Unlike Joan Burbick's Healing the Republic (1994) and other path-breaking publications in the field of medical humanities, The Medical Imagination does not reference physicians' writings to make a general statement about national health or American culture: carefully researched and very readable, the book sketches out an intellectually agile and dynamic community of early American physician-writers. It sheds light on individual biographies and friendships, emphasizes generational and cross-generational connections and conversations, and carves out the political concerns of individual participants who steered the relationship between health and literature in new directions. These medical men believed in the power of narrative to either cure or cause harm, but instead of resorting to narratives of healing, they preferred to outline and discuss the relationship between art and science, "imaginative experimentation," and "reductive, mechanistic paradigms" (102). Building on a variety of contexts, and rich in detail, The Medical Imagination offers an in-depth analysis of the life and oeuvre of key figures in American medical and literary history, including Benjamin Rush,

How Far is America From Here?, 2005

and the Silence of Asian American Studies Ten years ago Korean Americans were commonly perceived ... more and the Silence of Asian American Studies Ten years ago Korean Americans were commonly perceived as being well adapted to American culture, a model-minority. It wasn't until the "post colonial turn" in ethnic studies 1 and the aggression directed at Korean immigrants during the "Los Angeles Riots" that research started focussing on a de-centred diasporic community, held together by collective memories o f colonization, war, and postwar dictatorship. 2 Korean American literature, video productions and the visual arts have since challenged the idea o f an essentially "ethnic" Korean American enclave 3. The focus shifted I refer to new conceptions o f culture which focus less on shared experiences of racism, stereotypisation and discrimination but on a "politics o f representation" which places questions o f power, hybridization and agency centre-stage. See Stuart Hall, ''New Ethnicities", Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds.

In the early nineteenth century, an author who simply identifies herself as "a Lady" instructs Am... more In the early nineteenth century, an author who simply identifies herself as "a Lady" instructs American readers how to "make the most" of those short lived, withering "objects which surround us"-the queendom of flowers. First published in 1829, Flora's Dictionary becomes a phenomenal success. It is printed several times, culminating in the lavishly illustrated 1855 edition, a beautiful gift book featuring mixed bouquets with flowers of all colors and shapes. In the accompanying explanations, readers learn that yellow acacias convey a concealed love, that jasmine breathes elegance, and that zinnias announce absence. They are also informed that the author's name is Elizabeth Washington Gamble Wirt. As she proudly claims in the preface, she has written the book for the sole purpose of entertaining her family (she is a mother of ten). Yet for the nineteenth-century "true woman," entertainment is also thoroughly educational: listing more than 200 flowers, Flora's Dictionary acknowledges the value of botanical categorization while sharing the common admiration of a blooming earth. The actual impetus for the book, however, is a patriotic, transcendentalist longing for "something sacred" to take root in American conversations (Gamble 16). Arranged in the strict alphabetical order of an encyclopedia, Flora's Dictionary draws on Middle Eastern and Asian symbol ism, scours through British poetry, fantasizes about the popular names of flowers and their botanical definitions, alludes to their scent, look, and medical virtue-all to build associations that aim at replacing "those awkward and delicate declarations" of American men with something reminiscent of the "mute eloquence of the eastern lover" (Gamble 16).

In the 1970s, Christmas Eve was divided between extremes. First, we had Toast Hawaii, like many o... more In the 1970s, Christmas Eve was divided between extremes. First, we had Toast Hawaii, like many other Germans in the Federal Republic: take a slice of sandwich bread, cover it with ham and a wheel of canned pineapple, top it with a slice of gleaming yellow processed cheese, bake it, and stick a bright red maraschino cherry in the resulting crusty indentation. Arranged on bread that, according to 'low-food biographer' Carolyn Wyman, was "tamed to be more palatable to a broader range of people from … the small kid to the adult," Toast Hawaii was the stringy glue that held our nation together. An exotic feast for eyes and palate, it created a sense of belonging against all odds, even for a ten-year-old like myself. A child who was taller than most, switched between a southern dialect and Standard "High" German, and had a Low German family name that gave her away. Precariously fragile to begin with, my sense of belonging abruptly ended as soon as we unpacked my grandmother's annual parcel. Coming all the way from Lower Saxony, it would include a small but heavy package of pumpernickel: 500 grams of black, crust-less rye bread, wrapped in cellophane to keep it moist.

According to historian Leslie Butler, with the signing o f the Emancipation Proclamation on Janua... more According to historian Leslie Butler, with the signing o f the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, "America's first principles seemed up for grabs." From this point on, Reconstruction was not only a phase of political, social, and economic readjustment but a long-term individual and collective process that "required mental adaptation" (Butler 173). It is with this adaptation process during the nation's "Second Founding," 1 2 and, more particularly, with the early phase o f this process, that this article is central ly concerned. The mental dimension of Reconstruction includes the emo tional setup o f the era and how it changed over the course of time. On a thematic level, this dimension expresses itself in ambivalences about an ideal self, in debates about America's future society, and in the hopes and fears regarding the organization of the nation to come. By focusing on the connection between individual self-construction and processes of col lective reorganization, this article sheds light on the internal struggles that made political Reconstruction such a difficult and multi-faceted endeavor. 1 David Quigley introduces the term by writing that "[b]ack in 1787, America's first founding had produced a constitution profoundly skeptical o f democracy. James Madison and his coauthors in Philadelphia left undecided fundamental questions o f slavery and freedom. All that would change in the 1860s and 1870s" (Quigley ix).

MLAIB und ABELL, 1997

Why resurrect it all now. From the Past. History, the old wound. The past emotions all over again... more Why resurrect it all now. From the Past. History, the old wound. The past emotions all over again. T o confess to relieve the same folly. To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion. To extract each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that w ill not repeat history in oblivion. (DICTEE 33) 1 For a sim ilar confession see Kim 3-4: "What D ictée suggested [...] seemed far afield from the identity I w as a fter a congealed essence defined by exclusionary attributes, closed, ready made, and easy to quantify."

Springer eBooks, 2019

Sprache, Flucht, Migration, 2019

Amerikastudien/American Studies

How Far is America From Here?, 2005

MLAIB und ABELL, 1997

This article analyzes Mary Bradley Lane's radical feminist utopia/dystopia "Mizora" (1881/2 and 1... more This article analyzes Mary Bradley Lane's radical feminist utopia/dystopia "Mizora" (1881/2 and 1889) as an effort to capture and weigh the intellectual and emotional dimensions that distinguish the 1880s from other decades in nineteenth-century America. A strange mix of women’s rights discourse, eugenics, scientific debates, and late Victorian ideals, the narrative complicates the feminist debate about gender, education, and science that preoccupied the postwar/early progressive women’s movement.

„Rites of Renewal: Imperialist Encounters in the Work of Jack London.” Shifting Grounds: Cultural Tectonics along the Pacific Rim. Edited by Jutta Ernst and Brigitte Johanna Glaser. (forthcoming).., 2017

This article discusses Jack London's photographs from the Russian-Japanese war in the context o... more This article discusses Jack London's photographs from the Russian-Japanese war in the context of U.S. neo-imperialism and in connection with his travel narrative "The Cruise of the Snark."

By focusing on the representation of New England as republican garden, this essay analyzes how He... more By focusing on the representation of New England as republican garden, this essay analyzes how Henry Ward Beecher's novel "Norwood" (1867) brings together his critique of urbanization with a consoling vision of national progress, inter-regional connectivity, and a highly structured, anti-feminist social order. The nostalgic version of a future republican garden that this 19th century best seller seeks to bring forth is then further illuminated by setting it against Mary Bradley Lane's utopian/dystopian novel "Mizora" (1889)–a deeply disturbing novel that relies on "eugenic feminism" (Asha Nadkarni) to attack the men of Beecher's generation.