Maria Wiegel

University of Cologne | UOC · Department of English

In an interview with Deborah Treisman for The New Yorker, Colson Whitehead answered the question of what sets him apart from one of his protagonists (Benji from Sag Harbor (2009)) by saying “Also, I am a real person” (2008). Emphasizing the fictionality of his characters, Whitehead points at the blurry lines between fact and fiction. This is someth...

“That an African American family inhabits the White House, an edifice built by slaves in 1795, is a powerful example of the transformation of racial attitudes and realities in the United States,” writes African American Studies scholar and social activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in her book From #BLACKLIVESMATTER to Black Liberation (2014). This st...

This essay focuses on both King’s character Pennywise and The Killer Clown John Wayne Gacy, as well as their involvement in the concept of the American Dream. It examines their reflection on American identity and ideology and considers them–in their nightmarishness–symptoms of the American Dream. They can be seen as a symptom of the American ideolo...

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 wh...

Up to this point, the work that has been done on IT is almost exclusively devoted to the novel’s adaptations, the iconic—if not particularly faithful—television miniseries adaptation from 1990 and the two more recent cinematic reboots from 2017 and 2019. This volume, however, focuses on the fertile terrain of literary and cultural critique afforded...

By using a 60s workplace as its setting, Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men (2007-2015) does not merely provide insight into historical gender and sex relations in the workplace of the 60s. It also reflects current sex and gender relations in the workplace of 21st century America (e.g. the #MeToo Movement). As Sara Rogers, leaning on Horace Newcomb and Paul...

This is a conference report: https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-9044?title=urban-planning-in-the-americas-in-the-20th-century

In this blog post I explore the relationship between dieting and the pursuit of the American Dream for women. When is a woman successful? What are society's expectations? http://foodfatnessfitness.com/2021/04/01/the-american-dream-of-being-enough-the-story-of-jean-nidetch-a-slim-entrepreneur/

Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 “sensational bestseller” Sex and the Single Girl – The unmarried woman’s guide to men contains a chapter that provides an empowering definition of a ‘sexy woman’, which is, according to Brown, “a woman who enjoys sex.” However, the book also provides recipes to cook for him to enjoy, instructions for dieting and for what t...

In his infamous testimony at the Tate-LaBianca Murder Trial Charles Manson blames the murders on music, defining music as a conspiracy to “rise” and “kill” (quoted in Bugliosi & Gentry 1974: 508). While we know that it was not music in and of itself that caused Manson Family members to commit murder, Manson’s depiction of music as an agent of viole...

“The Secret Murder of the American Dream” is what Oliver Stone’s Jim Garrison, in the conspiracy-thriller JFK (1991), calls the covering up of the truth behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Every decade has its own ways of depicting the assassination. In my talk I focus on conspiracy theories discussed and constructed in the popular culture...

In a time when terrorism has become a regular topic in newspapers and on television, security appears as a recent and urgent issue. CCTV cameras and surveillance operate in a great part of western public space and life. This article focuses on the ways in which the radicalized internal security policy of the Bluebell Hill Development, in Alan Ayckb...