[The editor received the following proposal from Clifton Ganyard,
Department of Humanistic Studies, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.]

Call for Proposals

Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies
Special issue -- Globalization, Literature, Film, and the New Economy

Guest Editors: Sabine von Dirke (U of Pittsburgh) and David Coury (U
of Wisconsin-Green Bay)

Deadline: 15 November 2008

In recent years, globalization has become an important topic of
discussion. While initially linked more broadly to discourses in post-
colonial studies, scholarly work on globalization has come rather
slowly to German Studies. In contrast, much of recent cultural
production in the German-speaking world demonstrates that many
intellectuals, authors, and directors are painfully aware of both the
promises and pitfalls of globalization. Their artistic work registers
the accelerated socio-economic, political, cultural, and aesthetic
transformations of our times in multiple ways. In the works of the
younger generation of authors and filmmakers in German-speaking
Europe, the precariousness of the individual's life situation or the
increasing risk of the life-world to use Ulrich Beck's approach,
appears to be a central concern. Discussions of money, consumption,
and unemployment are recurring themes, especially in the texts of the
so-called "Generation Golf" that has had to face a fast-paced
transnational "New" Economy with precious little job and financial
security. Even before 9/11, cultural production thematized that
material comforts and reliable social safety net from the cradle to
the grave--the hallmark of post-war West Germany--is no longer a
reality in Germany today.

This special issue of Seminar seeks to bring together contributions
that investigate discursive and aesthetic articulations of the complex
global socio-economic and political realities of the late 20th and
21st centuries as seen in the German-speaking world. We invite
submissions that reflect upon the transnational changes shaped by
globalization in order to assess the effects they have had on the
cultural topography not only of Germany but Austria and Switzerland as
well. Topics may include the literary and cinematographic engagements
with precariousness and instability of life-worlds, be it the New
Economy, transnational human and capital flows, or the revival of
Angestelltenliteratur and/or Literatur der Arbeitswelt; precariousness
as it was experienced and/or discursively constructed through 9/11;
instability of national and aesthetic categories in light of the
debates about migrant, transnational and global literature as well as
the renewed charge of an increasing Americanization of European,
especially German culture.

Please send 500 word abstracts by 15 November, 2008 to vondirke+@pitt.edu
  or couryd@uwgb.edu

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