Bücher von Philipp Löffler

Participation is a core value of the U.S.-American concept of the nation. The promise of participation encompasses full and equal access to participate in political, social, cultural, religious, and economic activities. At the same time, exclusion from social participation has been salient in the history of the U.S., and recently even a decline in participation alongside growing polarization can be observed. The notion of participation, however, is more comprehensive than such a narrow political perspective may suggest. Forms of literary production and reception can likewise be understood as social practices of participation. This volume sheds light on how participation has been debated in contemporary Americanist scholarship. The papers included explore the idea of participation beyond its function as a political principle in a democratic nation-state, which will help to understand in more detail the diverse relationships between the literary, the cultural, and the political.

¿Reading the Canon¿ explores the relation between the production of literary value and the problem of periodization, tracing how literary tastes, particular reader communities, and sites of literary learning shape the organization of literature in historical perspective. Rather than suggesting a political critique of the canon, this book shows that the production of literary relevance and its tacit hierarchies of value are necessary consequences of how reading and writing are organized as social practices within different fields of literary activity. ¿Reading the Canon¿ offers a comprehensive theoretical account of the conundrums still defining contemporary debates about literary value; the book also features a series of historically-inflected author studies¿from classics, such as Shakespeare and Thomas Pynchon, to less likely figures, such as John Neal and Owen Johnson¿that illustrate how the idea of literary relevance has been appropriated throughout history and across a variety of national and transnational literary institutions.