Julia Straub, Juliane Braun, Glenn T. Eskew, Florian Zappe, Nassim W. Balestrini, Sebastian Huber, Cynthia Falk, Winfried Fluck, Klaus Fischer, Mousa Abu Haserah, Florian Freitag, Olaf Stieglitz, Deborah L. Madsen, Clemens Spahr, Timo Müller, Jochen Achilles, Jasper M. Trautsch

Amerikastudien/American Studies, Volume 60 (2016), Issue 2-3, Page 233 - 234

Winfried Fluck

Amerikastudien/American Studies, Volume 60 (2016), Issue 1, Page 5 - 9

Winfried Fluck

Amerikastudien/American Studies, Volume 58 (2014), Issue 2, Page 235 - 258

For decades, Theodore Dreiser was seen as an old-fashioned naturalist with narrow-minded deterministic views and modest writing skills. In contrast, this essay focuses on the amazing modernity of his conception of the self in which an individual has to look at others in order to gain a sense of self and then acts in anticipation of what he thinks the reaction of the other will be. Dreiser’s intersubjective theory of selfhood bears striking similarities to that of the American pragmatist George Herbert Mead, who formulated his theory of the self at about the same time that Dreiser wrote his novels. Mead’s work has been a major influence on sociological theories of self and identity. For Dreiser, Mead’s trust in the intersubjective basis of democracy remains illusory, however. His characters need to look at others because they are driven by a deep sense of insecurity. Neither reason nor instinct can provide steady guidance, leading to an incalculable variability of results: on the one hand Carrie Meeber’s success as an actress in ‘Sister Carrie’, and on the other a murder ‘by chance’ in ‘An American Tragedy’. This novel stands in a long line of works, ranging from Dostoievsky to Richard Wright and Albert Camus, in which an accidental or unmotivated murder poses a major challenge to classical philosophical theories of the subject because such seemingly incomprehensible crimes confront us with a hidden, inaccessible dimension of human subjectivity. Although their theories of self-formation are similar in crucial respects, there is nothing to be found in Dreiser’s world of Mead’s pragmatist confidence in the possibility of genuine intersubjectivity and the ‘progressive’ vision of society based on it. As his novels show, very different conclusions can be drawn from the open-endedness of self-formation.

Winfried Fluck

Amerikastudien/American Studies, Volume 57 (2013), Issue 4, Page 525 - 531

Recognition has become a key concept in contemporary philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies, drawing most prominently and influentially on the work of Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth, and Nancy Fraser. In each case, the concept of recognition is used to respond to a shortcoming in leading political and social theories. Taylor wants to replace a strictly rights-based liberalism with a multicultural ‘politics of recognition’; Honneth wants to put Frankfurt-style critical theory on new normative grounds (“anerkennungstheoretische Wende”); Fraser, although originally entering the discussion in protest against the prospect of replacing distribution as the primary criterion of justice by recognition, has, in subsequent discussions with Honneth, integrated the concept into the outline of a critical theory that would be equally concerned with questions of distribution and recognition. The goal in each case is to establish new and more comprehensive social norms of fairness and justice by considering the political, social, and cultural conditions of identity formation. Should American Studies pay attention to this debate? If so, how can the concept of recognition be meaningfully and productively applied in American Studies and, in view of this thematic issue, specifically in American literary and cultural studies?3 What are possible gains and losses in comparison with approaches that currently dominate the field?

Winfried Fluck

Amerikastudien/American Studies, Volume 57 (2013), Issue 4, Page 689 - 709

In the past decades the concept of recognition has moved to the center of social theory. Can this concept be of use for American Studies and, more specifically, American literary and cultural studies? My essay tries to answer this question in five parts: first, a discussion of two opposite views of the social and cultural role of recognition exemplified by Charles Taylor and Alexis de Tocqueville; second, a reconsideration of the concept of identity, since recognition is inextricably linked with questions of identity formation in current debates; third, a description of the ways in which the struggle for recognition stands at the center of fictional texts and forms an imaginary core that has often been forgotten in the professionalization of literary studies; fourth, an analysis of how recognition can be understood and described as an effect of the reading experience (and of aesthetic experience more generally); and fifth, a return to the starting question of this essay, namely what the concept of recognition can contribute to American Studies and how it can be assessed in comparison with other, currently dominant approaches in the field.