REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Volume 26 (2010)

Modern cities offer a stage for the emergence, development, and negotiation of transcultural spaces. Here, the dialogue/struggle between urbanity, ecology, and the environment is experienced in its most visible form. Tensions between the creative and destructive aspects of global cities reverberate throughout the humanities. In the wake of the recent politicization of the humanities and especially the `transnational turn´ whitin the discipline of American Studies, the `environment´ and `culture´ have increasingly been represented as hybrid entities.
This volume addresses a number of questions that are related to the symbolic construction of transcultural spaces in academic and literary discourse: How should - and how can - an interdisciplinary approach react productively to the post-ecological turn of the 2000s? What contributions have literary and cinematic fiction, the visual arts, and other discourses in Germany and the United States made to participate in a dialogue on environmental and technological issues? How are we, as scholars of American studies, to deal with the challenges of the ongoing environmental crisis which is, by all means, also a crisis of technological progress? The individual contributions to this anthology discuss both the modes of amalgamation and hybridisation by which city and nature are constitued as complementary fugures as well as the emergence of `transethnic,´ `posturban´ and `virtual´ environments.