Steffen WöllLeipzig University · Institute for American Studies
Steffen Wöll
Dr. phil.
About
34
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Introduction
Steffen Wöll is postdoctoral scholar at Leipzig University’s Collaborative Research Centre 1199. He has published on various and intersectional topics in American Studies, including spatial imaginations, border studies, naturalism, postmodernism, digital humanities, as well as film and horror studies. His current research project investigates transoceanic and archipelagic dimensions of American empire around the turn of the nineteenth century.
Additional affiliations
October 2016 - December 2019
Education
October 2014 - July 2016
Publications
Publications (34)
This article engages in an analysis of Herbert Philip Lovecraft’s horror novella “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936), arguing that its nightmarish representations of Orientalized Others, hybrid identities, and miscegenation result from Lovecraft’s depiction of spatial transgressions and deliberate distortions of language. In the story, the seduction...
During the last decades, zombies and the horror tropes that surround them have become a staple of American popular culture, making them a familiar presence in movies, TV series, graphic novels, and video games. From their Caribbean folklore origins, the undead have evolved into potent metaphors for social issues and cultural anxieties. On the surfa...
Found on the walls of ancient caves in northern France, the earliest known maps do not depict the earth but the brightest stars of the milky way. Although we know little about the people who painted these maps, we know that they, like us, looked for answers and meaning. Mapping as material testimony of this desire signals a basic function of human...
In his moody long-form essay H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (1991), Michel Houellebecq quips that the horror fiction writer “serves as example to all who wish to learn how to fail in life and eventually succeed in their work” (2008, 91). Thirty years later, Houellebecq’s assertion rings truer than ever. Unlike Lovecraft’s precario...
The Louisiana Purchase created a complex landscape of cultures and ethnicities located at the peripheries of the Early Republic. Some feared that it would threaten (White) American identity while others imagined the frontier as a clean slate on which the nation could reform its core values. Throughout the nineteenth century, axiomatic regeneration...
On the surface, maps enable the planning and development of human dwelling, the visualization of connections, and drawing of boundaries. Throughout human history, however, maps have also acted as antidotes to chaos by generating spatial imaginations as pathways to meaning, belonging, and yearning. Exploring both theoretical and practical trajectori...
This special forum of JTAS brings together the work of international scholars from the fields of archipelagic American Studies, island studies, and mobility studies. It is the result of two thematic workshops in Leipzig, Germany organized by the collaborative research center “Spatialization Processes under the Global Condition” and the Vienna resea...
The concept of authentic spaces where original cultures and primordial nature coexist in unwitting harmony emerged in early romanticist works, only to be exploited by nativist discourses that called for racial and geographical hierarchies during the second half of the nineteenth century. This paper navigates literary mappings and (trans)oceanic spa...
This article investigates some of the Louisiana Territory's most captivating biographies, laying bare the human geographies of a region whose unique positionality I propose lies in the very complexity and diversity of spatial imaginations and identities. On the one hand, this heterogeneity led to tensions, violence, crises, and injustices. On the o...
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the integration of the Oregon Country into the framework of the United States presented a profound challenge for American writers and policymakers. This paper proposes that the nation’s expansion into the Pacific Northwest and Asia-Pacific hemisphere was undermined by spatial practices, ideas, and im...
In his youth, Richard Henry Dana Jr. rebelled against the conventions of his upper-class New England upbringing when he signed on as a common sailor on a merchant ship bound for Alta California. The notes of his travels describe the strenuous life at sea, a captain’s sadistic streak, a crew’s mutinous tendencies, and California’s multicultural fur...
In H.P. Lovecraft’s horror novella “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936), the incursions of ‘exotic’ cultural and religious practices result in an isolated New England community’s moral and genetic degeneration. This article traces the story’s depictions of Orientalized Others and hybrid identities to themes of spatial transgressions as well as distor...
In the field of US historiography, western expansion has regularly been understood as either a linear sequence of nation-building processes at a moving frontier or in terms of settler colonialism, exploitation of resources, and displacement of non-white peoples. The present book suggests that shifting the focus towards space in nineteenth-century c...
This paper investigates the cinematic rendition of the undermining and deconstruction of a coherent suburban identity and subsequent dissolution of the Middle American reality principle in Mark Pellington’s Arlington Road (1999). Taking into consideration cultural theory as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis, it argues that the movie depicts the subur...
Zombies and the tropes that surround them have become a staple of popular culture and a familiar presence in movies, television series, graphic novels, and video games. From their Caribbean folklore origins, the undead are palimpsestic metaphors for social issues and cultural anxieties. This article examines the rarely studied tensions between apoc...
Firmly embedded in recent paradigm changes brought about by (Trans)Pacific and Archipelagic American Studies, the book provides a variety of takes on the reciprocal histories, knowledges, and conflicts across the Asia-Pacific region and the United States, as seen from an East-West perspective. In fifteen chapters and on 250 pages, the authors trace...
Across four chapters, Davies' study offers a thorough and convincing revaluation of colonial discourses that oftentimes forfeit historical nuance and thematic complexity in favor of seemingly unambiguous dichotomies between colonial abusers and subaltern victims. What is interesting in particular is Davies' selection of primary sources that conscio...
This chapter argues that London’s short stories “Love of Life” (1905) and “To Build a Fire” (1902) demonstrate the elusiveness of unequivocal interpretations of the Northland as a one-dimensional space of white supremacy in naturalist literature during the turn of the century. Going far beyond those ideas, London’s placement of anonymous characters...
In Jack London’s diverse and often contradictory oeuvre, one finds not one master narrative transplanted into uncultivated or ‘exotic’ spaces but manifold variants of both actual and fictional geographies that energize alternative spatial visions and practices. While the issues and challenges brought to light in his writing surfaced during the Prog...
Dieser Band beschäftigt sich mit dem Begriff der Peripherie als kulturwissenschaftlichem Konzept sowie mit den diskursiven und narrativen Dimensionen peripherer Räume. Spätestens seit dem spatial turn ist der Konstruktionscharakter von Räumen evident, was auch und insbesondere die Raumvorstellungen von Zentrum und Peripherie betrifft. Als periphere...
Using a wide variety of fictional and non-fictional textual sources—novels, pamphlets, poems, speeches, essays, etc.—our project investigates the geographical imagination of American writers regarding these peripheral spaces by asking questions such as: How did Americans think about the peripheries, and how do American literary and cultural discour...
Acknowledging the productive impulses of the affective turn, this paper examines the affective impacts of urban architecture conveyed by Horatio Alger in his novel Ragged Dick. Without any strict adherence to a particular school of thought, I draw instead on those concepts and theories that promise enriching for an analysis of a nineteenth-century...
As an epistemic part of the American West, the Yukon territory or “Northland” is often depicted as a monolithic region: a “last frontier” integrated in a stable national framework attained through the manifest destiny of Anglo-Saxon culture to enlighten a supposedly uncivilized space of cultural and racial otherness. In this article, I argue that J...
This paper discusses the cosmic setting of Alfonso Cuarón’s movie Gravity, taking into account its fictional population with the themes, tropes, myths, and symbols that have regularly been identified as exemplary for the composition of a uniquely American personal and national character. Making use of a deconstructive approach and a methodology tha...
Against the background of the San Bernardino shootings and the resulting political quarrel about allowing Syrian refugees into the U.S., a multitude of critical questions about the relationship and compatibility of American and Muslim identity have surfaced. Conjuring up memories of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Republican contester Donald Tru...
The primary objective of this paper is to provide an analysis of the dynamics of and fault lines between two key concepts of IR studies, namely state sovereignty and intervention, either humanitarian or military, and either by states or intergovernmental organizations. Centered around the critical evaluations of Stuart Elden’s Terror and Territory...
Objections to Muslim immigration to the US seem to be related to potential violence of radicalized Islamic groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic State, often connected to fears of backlash from the nation’s failed foreign policy, most notably the “war on terror” and “Arab Spring” that left large parts of the Middle East in disarray. What contributors to...
In his address to the nation in the fall of 2014, Barack Obama outlined the strategy of the United States for a military intervention aimed at the destruction of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. In a telling rhetoric move, Obama put particular emphasis on the terrorist organization’s name, claiming that “ISIL is not ‘I...
During four years of Donald Trump's presidency, controversies about the limits of free speech and virtues of political (in)correctness dominated the media coverage. Shortly before the November 2020 election that marked the end of this era, the release of a sequel to Sacha Baron Cohen's incendiary comedy Borat reiterated the critical role of humor i...
November 22, 1963 was a sunny day in Dallas before the crisp blue sky transformed into the sardonic backdrop for one of the American century’s most notorious incidents. The deadly shots fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade transformed the afternoon’s cheerful mood into a state of permanent national trauma and cultural disruption that has not only...
Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach wurde 1838 in Chirlitz-Turas bei Brünn in Mähren geboren, wo er als Sohn eines freidenkerischen, mit der 1848er Revolution sympathisierenden Lehrers aufwuchs.
Im Alter von fünfzehn Jahren fielen ihm Kants Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik in die Hände, über die er später berichtet, dass ihm das „Ding...
Ernst Mach wird heute weitgehend mit seinen Leistungen auf dem Gebiet der Physik verbunden, etwa der nach ihm benannten Mach-Zahl, der Entdeckung des Dopplereffekts sowie Erkenntnissen innerhalb der Gasdynamik und Wärmetheorie. Mach selbst stets bestritt eine eigene Philosophie entworfen zu haben, indem er seine Analyse der Empfindungen als "Aperҫu...
When Japan signed its Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri, the war in the Pacific officially ended. To achieve this victory, the US had deployed two atomic bombs against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. President Truman's decision has ever since been the subject of controversies, confront...
