Abstracts of Papers
Matthias Oppermann:
Keynote Address: Story, Archive, Apparatus. American Studies Decentered
"To attain the multiple, one must have a method that effectively constructs it; no typographical cleverness, no lexical agility, no blending or creation of words, no syntactical boldness, can substitute for it." [Deleuze 1987, 22]
Are academic American Studies ready for multiplicities? Is our “system of thought” able to effectively construct them, or are we still stuck in arborescent culture?
As much as the media of American Studies will change, so too will the concept of culture which is paramount to the story of our discipline. Using the categories of story, archive and apparatus [Bass 1999], the keynote address sets out to construct an isomorphism between the disciplinary design of the field and its media of knowledge production and distribution.
|
