American studies as media studies

Media are an inescapable part of collectively shared realities, shaping our daily lives in complex and frequently unintelligible ways. In the wake of recent changes in the field of American Studies, questions of medium and mediality have become a central venue for interdisciplinary research and intradisciplinary self-examination. This volume collects twenty-three essays first presented at the 53rd conference of the German Association of American Studies. All of the essays are concerned in one way or another with the aesthetics and materiality of media. They cover a variety of topics ranging from the intermediality of American literature and the visual mediality of film and photography to the role of media in American politics and the impact of the internet. The volume is divided into five segments: The Book as Medium and the Mediality of Literature; Visual Culture; Intermediality: Image - Music - Text; Politics and the Public Sphere; The Didactics of Media Studies.