Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies
Aims and Scope COPAS—Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (ISSN: 1861-6127; eISSN: 1861-6127) is an open access journal. True to its original mission, COPAS showcases the work of early career scholars in the field with an annual issue featuring articles based on contributions from the latest PGF (the Postgraduate Forum of the German Association for American Studies) conference. In 2013, the journal’s scope expanded to include guest-edited thematic issues—proposals are welcome at any time! Published twice a year, in the summer and in the winter, COPAS accepts submissions on a broad range of topics, with the purpose of adding to the array of research existing in the field of American Studies, from the perspectives of early career scholars. Many publish for their first time with our journal and greatly appreciate the detailed hands-on editing process their articles go through, which allows them to polish their ideas and present them in a more concise, argumentative nature. Thus, our goal is to foster and facilitate opportunities for postgraduates to publish their work and experience the academic editing process in an inclusive, hands-on, feedback-driven setting. The scope of our journal brings together research on American Studies topics ranging from literary and cultural studies to film and history to gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. The journal is hosted and supported by the University of Regensburg. COPAS uses Open Journal Systems and is indexed in The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Open Access Policy COPAS is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or their institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access. COPAS is indexed in The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). All articles published in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal. The full text of the articles of the journal are freely available without embargo.
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.
(Re-)Shaping the Public Sphere: Cultural Productions as/and Interventions: The 2024 Postgraduate Forum
Copyright (c) 2025 Chiona Hufnagel, Arunima Kundu, Lisa Seuberth, Ruxandra Teodorescu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The twenty-five years since the turn of the new millennium have been characterized by pervasive experiences of alienation manifesting across social and political spheres. Thus, with this issue, we intend to contribute to the scholarly exploration of discourses surrounding attempts at dis/connection, focusing on how literature can communicate both feelings of disconnection, for example, through exploring the experience of death, as well as affective stories of connection, from familial ties to companionship with animals.
Copyright (c) 2025 Kübra Aksay, Sophie-Constanze Bantle, Ece Ergin, Özde Gezici, Kelly Schmidt, Kit Schuster, Kristina Seefeldt https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper investigates two publishing strategies employed by feminist publishing ventures and the publics they form. With the growing success of women in publishing, their work moves from being published primarily in feminist presses to being found in all possible formats of publishing. Nevertheless, said feminist presses and publishing outlets have always been and still are highly productive and relevant spaces for the feminist cause and movement. They offer options of intervention with or retreat from the market and a broader public and can create their own smaller (counter) public or enclave.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nina Wintermeyer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Autofiction as a Site of Resistance: Reclaiming Agency in Contemporary Women's Writings
This article examines how contemporary autofiction, particularly by women writers, functions as a site of resistance against gendered literary and cultural norms by disrupting the binary between the personal and the public. Focusing on Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997) and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014), I argue that these novels employ autofictional techniques such as blending fact and fiction, fragmented narrative structures, formal experimentation, author-character overlap, and heightened emotional expression. I explore how these strategies enable women writers to politicize personal experiences while maintaining protective ambiguity. Ultimately, I contend that these works demonstrate how autofiction allows women to write themselves into the literary field by challenging conventions of authorship, genre, and gender roles. Autofiction’s genre-defying innovations thus operate not only as stylistic and meaning-making practices but also as feminist strategies for reclaiming agency and reshaping dominant cultural narratives.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lujain Youssef https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A Decade of The Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
With three Peabody wins, sixty-eight Primetime Emmy nominations (and twenty-eight wins), several Writers Guild, Producers Guild, Webby, GLAAD, and Critics Choice awards under its belt, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (LWT), has retained its position as the leading voice on international news and policy, structural issues, and other rather solemn topics that would not be considered entertaining for a primetime show. With long investigative pieces that build on the work of other journalists, LWT challenged the idea that viewers are not interested in stories lasting twenty-odd minutes without any commercial breaks. As the show completes a decade since its premiere (April 2014), it is an opportune moment to reflect on and explore what attracts its audiences. While most satirical comedy is limited to critiquing politicians and public personalities, offering catharsis to its viewers, LWT takes this step further by tackling structural issues, outlining solutions, and soliciting viewers’ participation in addressing them. This leaves the viewers on a hopeful note, making them feel that they are doing their part in standing up to metaphorical Goliath. This essay, thus, also examines the participatory nature of Oliver’s “calls to action”, which fosters a sense of empowerment among the show’s viewers, along with the reasons why audiences connect with the show.
Copyright (c) 2025 Kshitij Pipaleshwar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
How Frank Underwood Paved the Way for Donald Trump
Located between Bellah’s American Civil Religion, Bredekamp’s Image Act Theory, and Genette’s theory on narratology, this essay examines the impact House of Cards had on the 2016 presidential elections. Kevin Spacey’s iconic character Frank Underwood was the first presidential villain, and the first one who moved beyond the series to appear at the Correspondents’ Dinner in 2013. While the breaking of the fourth wall was not new to film, interactions with the audience on- and off-screen were fundamentally new. Furthermore, by including ‘real’ news anchors like Stephen Colbert or John King in the show, boundaries between fact and fiction are blurred. Also, portraits of former presidents are used to contextualize but also contrast Underwood’s words and actions. This stylistic element employs many civil religious narratives which are part of the collective memory. Watching Underwood undermine those commonly known civil religious and democratic dogmas in the ‘fictional reality’ changes and shapes the audience’s perception of the American presidency’s institutional narratives. By rearranging various civil religious elements into a completely new, yet familiar picture, the fictional presidential narrative became part of the historical imagination. Thus, the insight House of Cards offered to a fictional Washington, D.C. with non-fictional markers enabled Donald Trump’s campaign team to develop persisting media strategies for his Reality Show.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anna Ley https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“[A] curious creature”?: Dickinson and/in Popular Culture
The Apple TV+ series Dickinson culminates decades of feminist and queer scholarship on the poet Emily Dickinson, positioning her as a queer icon while challenging conventional portrayals of her life and legacy. Through the lens of feminist and queer studies, this paper examines the series’ portrayal of Dickinson’s journey to poetic self-identification, her resistance to patriarchal constraints, and her impact on contemporary culture. I argue that the series constructs a narrative that merges notions of the biopic with a coming-of-age story as well as historical facts with millennial sensibilities, resulting in a very effective re-writing of Dickinson’s life based on feminist scholarship. I claim that Dickinson not only redefines the poet’s public image but also overcomes restrictions of the biopic genre and thus becomes part of a feminist (and queer) counter-public sphere that resonates with contemporary audiences.
Copyright (c) 2025 Susen Halank https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Home on the Road: Women, Mobility, and Space in Van Life
In this article, I argue that representations of the road created by and about solo female van life travelers reimagine the male-coded American road as a more gender inclusive landscape, pushing back against the gendered divisions of public and private, casting women as mobile, and challenging traditional renderings of the home and domestic space. By situating contemporary van life narratives within the framework of Doreen Massey’s work on space and gender as well as the presentations of the road in the literary canon, I argue that solo female van-lifers use storytelling to place women onto the road as active participants and, in so doing, meaningfully alter the image of the road in the American collective consciousness. Through an examination of traditional understandings of public/private and inside/outside space, I posit that van life subverts these dichotomies, reconfiguring the landscape of the road and reimagining the boundaries between the home and mobility.
Copyright (c) 2025 Catherine Faith Gastin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The artist's statement contextualizes Hannah V Warren’s poetry. Often defined as monstrous and grotesque, Warren’s poetry takes cues from the literature and theory she studies critically. Thus, this statement also situates her poetry within Southern and German Gothic influences while noting comparisons between the two landscapes.
Copyright (c) 2025 Hannah V Warren https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper investigates the literary aesthetics of ropes and argues that ropes represent a poetics of connection and disconnection between humans and other (non)humans in the spirit of new materialism. Drawing on Michel Serres’s philosophical contract theory, ropes can be regarded as the cords of an accord, which become taut and visible in seagoing narratives; in this paper, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1957) are discussed, as both novels devote much attention to the ship’s rigging or rope-work, as well as to the lines of attachment between humans and whales or marlins respectively. Both novels show that upon being roped, an aesthetics of spectrality is introduced, marked by a radical dissolution of binaries such as active/passive or subject/object. This paves the way for a poetics of solidarity, especially in those moments in which the ropes are taut and solid so that the pulls of either agent are felt.
Copyright (c) 2025 Burak Sezer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Corina Wieser-Cox, Whitney Frazier Paterson, Juliann Knaus, Florian Wagner, Gulsin Ciftci, Fenja Heisig https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Queering Dis/Connection within the Pandemic Chronotope in Jodi Picoult’s Wish You Were Here
The COVID-19 pandemic reduced human mobility in a globalized world, altering experiences of time and space. It uncovered power structures and revived past narratives of disease emergence and collective memories of historic pandemics. Using a queer intersectional lens, this paper explores these transformed spatiotemporal dimensions and their effect on human dis/connection by employing the concept of the crisis chronotope (Parui and Simi Raj). It analyzes Jodi Picoult’s Wish You Were Here (2021), examining connections during a crisis that made physical distance necessary. This methodological perspective highlights digital and physical dis/connections and challenges heteronormative temporality in the novel, redefining dis/connection within the pandemic chronotope.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anne Stellberger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Exploring Connection in Emily Dickinson’s Poetics
<span class="NormalTextRun SCXW258810745 BCX4" data-ccp-parastyle="Abstract" data-ccp-parastyle-defn="{"ObjectId":"fff5ad99-f1e0-43b9-92ca-a3d9b32d9e87|206","ClassId":1073872969,"Properties":[469775450,"Abstract",201340122,"2",134233614,"true",469778129,"Abstract",335572020,"1",469777841,"Calibri",469777842,"Arial Unicode MS",469777844,"Calibri",469769226,"Calibri,Arial Unicode MS",335551500,"0",268442635,"22",335551547,"1033",335559740,"276",201341983,"0",335559739,"60",335559738,"240",335551550,"6",335551620,"6",469777843,"Arial Unicode MS"]}">This article examines Emily Dickinson’s poetics through the lens of connection, interpreting her perceived disconnection as a deliberate retreat to foster creativity and self-awareness. Using Carl Jung’s concept of “twin existences” and Kae Tempest’s insights on present awareness, the study explores how Dickinson’s emphasis on the “Eternal Now” underscores the significance of everyday action in affirming human existence and creating a sense of connection with oneself and others. Drawing on several of Dickinson’s poems and letter fragments, as well as historical and feminist interpretations of her life, this article argues that her rejection of conventional standards allowed for a profound engagement with the dualities of life—connection and disconnection, life and death. This analysis offers a new perspective on Dickinson’s work and life, revealing how her poetic practices advocate for the daily nurturing of meaningful connections, contributing to broader discussions on creativity and human interaction.
Copyright (c) 2025 Irene Lopez Sanchez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"I did not feel the same as before surgery"
This paper examines Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (2020) and her journey post-mastectomy, in relation to José Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, which he discusses in his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999). For Muñoz, disidentification is a survival strategy of stepping away from predominant societal ideologies. Muñoz’s theory is particularly fruitful for analyzing Lorde’s intersectional experiences and identity struggles of being a queer woman of color with breast cancer, but lacks an element of reidentification. This paper expands on the concept of disidentification and claims that Lorde does not take this passive stand Muñoz proposes but instead reidentifies herself in the face of prevailing gender norms.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alicia Hüls https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Animacy, Agency and Animatedness: The Human-Animal Transformation in Sorry to Bother You
This paper investigates the racialized affect of ‘animatedness’ (Ngai) as presented in the film Sorry to Bother You (2018). In this dark comedy, workers’ subjectivities are constituted by their labor: Their subjectivity is presented as plastic, by formal techniques such as the use of Claymation or animatronics, but especially by the corporate plan to transform workers into human-horse hybrids dubbed Equisapiens, to improve workplace productivity. This paper outlines the connections between this visual plasticization and the continued dehumanization of Black people, to justify the exploitation of their labor. However, this paper argues that rather than using the Equisapiens as figures symbolizing the loss of the workers’ agency, Sorry to Bother You presents both the workers and Equisapiens as excessively animated, ultimately allowing them to form a coalition based on this shared affect.
Copyright (c) 2024 Maria Menzel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Affective Boundaries: Death, Mediation, and Virtual Space in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011)
In the following article, I examine contemporary conceptions of authenticity in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). I focus on how virtual and material encounters with death affect the protagonist, Adam Gordon and discuss what these encounters communicate regarding the relationship between experience and mediation. Turning to the writings of Andreas Reckwitz, Fredric Jameson, and Manuel Castells, I investigate death’s virtual expressions and pervasiveness in contemporary postindustrial societies versus its more rare and affective presence in material space. Through this context, I argue that Atocha Station privileges literature that foregrounds its own form as a medium, over eliciting affect in readers. Nevertheless, I conclude that the novel does leave space for affect by narrating an encounter with death through the aesthetic of a chat log.
Copyright (c) 2024 Wesley Moore https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Politics of Anger and Trauma Disclosure in Michelle Bowdler’s Is Rape a Crime? A Memoir, an Investigation and a Manifesto (2020)
This article focuses on the memoir manifesto as an intersection of forms and analyzes Michelle Bowdler’s Is Rape a Crime? (2020) as being representative of this subgenre in the current ‘manifesto moment.’ Bowdler as author narrates through the lens of trauma, with an emphasis on the affects the political reflection of trauma evokes. Through the personal narrative, her anger about the injustices of rape culture is explored and affective truths are disclosed without adhering to the hegemonic narrative of overcoming trauma. Instead, the book narrates an emotional arc from lonely suffering to communal activism, engaging the reader in a mode of angry witnessing.
Copyright (c) 2024 Laura Handl https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Deviant and Ashamed: Queer Indigenous Subject Formation in the Age of Grindr
In my contribution, I analyze shame, specifically ‘queer shame’ as an affect in Billy Ray-Belcourt’s (Driftpile Cree) essay “Loneliness in the Age of Grindr” which is from his A History of My Brief Body (2020). I examine how the queer Indigenous subject is formed through shame by participating in contemporary queer digital hookup culture and then later interacting with the Canadian public health system due to the possibility of HIV infection. In the essay, shame functions as an identity-forming affect, which is internalized, sometimes embraced, and also shaped by outside influences.
Copyright (c) 2024 Can Aydin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Remembering: Transnational Memory Cultures and American Studies
Copyright (c) 2023 Verena Baier, Markus Diepold, Lena Gotteswinter, Tamara Heger, Bill Henderson, Christian Knittl, Jon-Wyatt Matlack, Efthalia Prokopiou, Katharina Röder, Jiann-Chyng Tu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Indigenous Readings: Ethics, Politics, and Method in Indigenous Studies on Turtle Island and Beyond
Reading has been at the center of ongoing debates among scholars of Native American, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit literatures for decades. In the context of these debates, my paper seeks to address the difficulties and challenges of reading Indigenous literatures from the standpoint of emerging non-Indigenous scholars educated in a Euro-American framework. For this purpose, the paper provides a toolbox of questions and strategies—organized around the five broad and interrelated topics of positionality, relationality, ethics, context, and incomplete readings—that can help students and early-career scholars to critically question their reading practices. To this end, my paper synthesizes a variety of scholarly perspectives on politics, ethics, and methods in Indigenous studies and applies the resulting framework to Leslie Marmon Silko’s opening of her novel Ceremony “(1977).
Copyright (c) 2023 Angela Maria Benkhadda
(Pod)casting a Bridge: Lolita Podcast and Its Reading Practices
Taking Jamie Loftus’s Lolita Podcast“ (2020-21) as an example, this article investigates negotiations of reading in the podcast as a digital medium—a topic that has not received a lot of scholarly attention so far. Expanding on the theoretical concept of the podcast as a bridging medium, the article examines the reading practices Lolita Podcast uses and reproduces in its discussion of Vladimir Nabokov’s famous and controversial novel Lolita“ (1955). The article studies how the podcast negotiates boundaries and builds bridges between reading practices traditionally seen as separate, such as critical and uncritical reading.
Reading (with) Bateman: Mapping Potentiality of/in Reading
Starting from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critique of paranoid reading and her call for reparative reading, this article proposes two experimental readings of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho“ (1991). Drawing on the writings of Roland Barthes and Eugenie Brinkema, we consider the text’s affective possibilities and potentialities as well as moments when it may surprise its readers, in order to ask what a reparative reading can look like in the case of American Psycho“. First, we read the novel for its potentialities of different affective modes—in this case, boredom and disgust—by looking closely at its syntactic structure. Second, we impose formal constraints on our reading itself, reading the novel as if it was a comedy. Through these modes of reading, our approach opens up new possibilities for parallel interpretations, instead of positing another master reading of the text.
Copyright (c) 2023 Maria Wiegel, Alexander Rüter
There has been a renewed interest in methods in literary studies over the past two decades. This article identifies a tendency towards binarism—paranoid vs. reparative, depth vs. surface, close vs. distant, against the grain vs. with the grain, critique vs. description, content vs. form—in literary studies and promotes a non-dualistic approach to reading. Such a reading does not see reading as a matter of “taking sides” or following strictly defined methods; instead, it works toward disentangling established methodological binaries. This reading is speculative and embraces speculative potentials of literary texts without subscribing to a method at the expense of the rest, without limiting itself to pre-defined methodologies. To move beyond such binarism, the article offers an affective close reading“ of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation“ (2018) and examines the potentials of bringing together close reading and affects to re-entangle interpretation, description, enchantments, affect, and form.
Weaving Together: Reading (in) American Studies
Listening Closely: Narrative Sensitivity and Thematic Apperception in Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School
This article offers Ben Lerner’s 2019 novel The Topeka School “as a case study to argue that even literary texts that are steeped in Theory or feature “diagnostic” narrators (Dames) do not interpret themselves but require active readers to do so. By modeling the novel’s narrative structure on the psychological Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), the narrator obliges the reader to listen to his stories as if she were a psychologist interpreting a patient’s test results. I suggest that, for The Topeka School“, adopting the same attitude of “narrative sensitivity” that psychologists bring to the evaluation of the TAT proves a productive reading strategy (Cramer 28). Especially the idea of listening closely to the text yields profound insights into its form and politics due to its central interest in the nexus of voice and masculinity. Careful attention to narrative perspective, voice, and style reveals that the novel makes powerful political claims through its form alone. It figures male violence as a structural, not an individual problem and links it to the existence of a form of collective voice of white male US-America that can speak through a liberal-minded writer just as well as through a Trump-voter or even Donald Trump himself.
Transnational Performances of Native American and African American Cultures at the German–American Institute Regensburg
In this article I analyze two events the former German–American Institute Regensburg hosted as performances. By examining the exhibition “Native American Traditions” and a week-long series of events titled “The Status of the African American in the Development of American Culture,” I contend that transnational cultural performances can both engage with stereotypical and appropriated knowledge about cultures while also leading to a problematization and diversification of the intricacies of the struggles the members of these groups go through in other situations.
Copyright (c) 2023 Christian Josef Knittl https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Trauma at the Movies: Cinematic Memories of Columbine
The Columbine High School shooting of 1999 has become a cultural icon for school shootings in the United States and beyond. Still, there are only a few cinematic adaptations of it. This article addresses how these movies nonetheless impact the culture of remembering Columbine. It argues that films about Columbine use different strategies to mediate the trauma of the shooting that are closely related to framing or recreating trauma. In addition, as traumatic events such as Columbine often lack clear causes and effects, this article will argue that film is particularly effective in mediating trauma.
Copyright (c) 2023 Johannes Vith https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Norms, Myths, and Vulnerability: Audre Lorde’s Reconstruction of Self in “125th Street and Abomey”
In her poetry collection The Black Unicorn“ (1987), Audre Lorde shows the ways in which those who do not comply to the normative ideals of her contemporary US culture are especially vulnerable to societal marginalization and violence. Analyzing Lorde’s reconstruction of vulnerability in her poem “125th Street and Abomey,” this paper argues that the poet’s drawing from West African cosmology constitutes one method through which Lorde reconstructs her speaker’s vulnerable socio-cultural position as a potential site for transformative processes of intersubjective self-(re)formation.“
Copyright (c) 2023 Julia Machtenberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Remembering and Forgetting Wars: Memorialization of the Global War on Terrorism in the US
This paper offers an insight into the efforts made by war memorial organizations to remember those who served in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) and how the war is manifested in US cultural memory. To exemplify the ways the war is already being remembered by smaller communities and what upcoming plans to memorialize the GWOT in a nation-wide context look like, several memorials are analyzed according to the emotions they elicit and how these influence the memorials’ narratives. The article is concluded by examining which elements of the memorials’ war narratives are highlighted, and which are omitted.
Copyright (c) 2023 Kristina Seefeldt https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Chronicling the Capitalocene — History, Colonialism, and Capital in Annie Proulx’s Barkskins
After first situating Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016) within the context of the Capitalocene, this essay turns to the novel’s historical narrative as decentering the individual human in a broadening account of history on the one hand, while on the other hand putting a renewed focus on the human through the central role of inequality and exploitation within the context of environmental destruction. In a second step, the essay turns to the novel’s representation of capitalism–colonialism as a destructive cycle founded upon the twin logics of elimination and (false) infinity. Barkskins, I make the case, enacts a critique of the underlying principles of the Capitalocene while remaining dedicated to the past—no particular vision of the future is offered up, even as history broadens in scope.
Copyright (c) 2023 Fritz Bommas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0