JOEL PFISTER, Surveyors of Customs: American Literature as Cultural Analysis (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016), 276 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.1 Joel Pfister’s Surveyors of Custom: American Literature as Cultural Analysis is a timely contribution to the current debate around critique and post-critique. In his monograph, Pfister makes the case for an understanding of…
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MATTHEW WILKENS, Revolution: The Event in Postwar Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2016), 176 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 63.1 Readers of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man will remember a pivotal scene in which the narrator—the Invisible Man of the title—witnesses an elderly black couple being evicted from their Harlem apartment. An angry crowd gathers.…
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ELIZABETH S. ANKER AND RITA FELSKI (eds.), Critique and Postcritique (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2017), 329 pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 63.1 Another death of Theory? Another burial? Another entombment during which no one sheds a single tear and all one hears are listlessly uttered anecdotes, as well as some mumbled and incoherent obscenities?…
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