MaryAnn Snyder-Körber

This talk takes the short-lived, but significant cultural cold war periodical Perspectives USA (1952-1956) as its focus. Why significant? Among the many publications aiming to win over readers for one or the other side of the cold war conflict, Perspectives stands out due to its concept. First, the quarterly published no original material. Instead, its vision of the United States was selected and reprinted from the nation’s own print public sphere. Second, this curated consolidation of America was published not only in the original English, but simultaneously in French as Profils, in Italian as Prospetti, and in German as Perspektiven along with a further English-language edition for Great Britain. Why was this interesting project so short-lived? In a nutshell, Perspectives was deemed not political or persuasive enough for cold war aims. As this talk will argue, what the multi-language journal instead offered editors and particularly translators was the opportunity to articulate, but also complicate connections between the US and Europe. Only in the pages of Perspectives / Perspektiven USA do James Baldwin and Paul Celan meet to negotiate what a protest against protest literature could mean in the trauma-shadowed midcentury.

BIO: MaryAnn Snyder-Körber is Professor of American Cultural Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg where she is also the Academic Director of the Schreibzentrum |Writing Center. Her research and teaching focus on intersections of modernity and modernism, gender discourses and feminism as well as aesthetics and cultural studies. Her most recent book publication is the co-edited volumed Anecdotal Modernity: The Making and Unmaking of History (2020).

Ort: DOR 24, 1501