Narrating and Constructing the Beach

An Interdisciplinary Approach

Carina Breidenbach, Tamara Fröhler, Dominik Pensel, Katharina Simon, Florian Telsnig, Martin Wittmann

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783110671377
• eBook ISBN: 9783110672299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

The beach confronts us with crucial issues of our times: migration, postcolonial power structures and mass tourism, climate change and pollution as well as gender and burkini swimwear controversies are examples of the numerous conflicts, discourses and practices that manifest within this liminal zone and that find their focal point there. The interdisciplinary volume understands 'the beach' as a (border) phenomenon in its own right and contributes to the new field of beach studies. It takes its point of departure from this changing image of 'the beach' to explore how its topographies, experiences and cultural significations are constructed through art, society and culture and how 'the beach' shapes poetics and aesthetic strategies in literature, film, photography, painting, music and performance. It aims to gain systematic insights from an analysis of historically and geographically specific varieties of the beach and to create a critical awareness for the contextual implications of contemporary discussions revolving around 'the beach'.

Notes on Contributors

Mark Olival-Bartley

Florian Auerochs is PhD candidate and lecturer in the Faculty of German and Cultural Studies at the University of Vechta. He holds a Master's degree in Comparative Literary and Media Studies from Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg. His fields of study include contemporary fiction from Germany and the US, Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities, and Petrocriticism.

Robert Bauernfeind is research assistant at the University of Augsburg. He has studied History of Art at Augsburg, Eichstätt, Munich and Vienna and completed his PhD in 2015. His fields of study are Netherlandish painting as well as illustrations of early modern natural history.

Christian Begemann is Full Professor of Modern German Literature at LMU Munich. His major publications include monographs on the relationship of enlightenment, anxiety and fear (Furcht und Angst im Prozeß der Aufklärung, 1987) and on Adalbert Stifter (Die Welt der Zeichen, 1995). He is the editor of a volume on the metaphorics of procreation and the birth of art (Kunst – Zeugung – Geburt, co-edited with David E. Wellbery, 2002), on German Realism (2007) and on Vampyrism (Dracula Unbound, co-edited with Britta Herrmann and Harald Neumeyer, 2008), as well as of the Adalbert-Stifter-Handbook (co-edited with Davide Giuriato, 2017). Furthermore, he published numerous articles on German literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century (Goethe, Kleist, Tieck, Arnim, Mörike, Richard Wagner, Keller, Storm, Fontane or Robert Müller). He is co-editor of the journal Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur. Currently, he is working on a book about ‘Ghosts and Spirits of Realism.’

Carina Breidenbach, M.A., studied Comparative Literature, Modern German Literature, English and American Literature, and Philosophy in Munich, London, and Berkeley. She received her M.A. in Modern German Literature from LMU Munich with a final thesis about the narratibility of death. Since 2017, she has been PhD candidate at the Graduate School Language & Literature at LMU Munich and Research Associate (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) and lecturer at the Institute of Comparative Literature at LMU Munich. She is currently completing her PhD thesis in Comparative Literature about the ‘poetics of anxiety’ in twentieth and twenty-first century German and Anglophone narrative fiction with a focus on texts by Kafka, Beckett, Pynchon and DeLillo. Her research interests include emotions and their representation in and evocation by literature, narratology, theories of fictionality, and the intersections of literary studies with psychoanalysis, psychology, and philosophy.

Carol Bunch Davis is Associate Professor of English at Texas A & M University at Galveston. She earned a PhD in English at the University of Southern California. Her research examines representations of African American identity in contemporary U. S. cultural production. Her publications include Prefiguring Postblackness: Cultural Memory, Drama and the African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s. Jackson/MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2015; and “‘Be Loyal to Yourselves’: Jim Crow Segregation, Black Cultural Nationalism, and U. S. Cultural Memory in Ossie Davis' Purlie Victorious.” Critical Insights: Civil Rights Literature, Past & Present. Ed. Christopher Allen Varlack. Amenia/NY: Gray House Press, 2017. 36–52.

Konstantin Butz is researcher and lecturer at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. He has studied American Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Bremen and at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He holds a doctorate degree in American Studies from the University of Cologne. His research interests include subcultures, youth cultures, and (un-)popular literature and music. His publications include Grinding California: Culture and Corporeality in American Skate Punk. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012; “The Authenticity of a T-shirt: Ryan Gosling, Roddy Dangerblood, and the Rebellious Genealogy of Thrasher Magazine.” American Rock Journalism. Eds. Marcel Hartwig and Ulf Schulenberg. London: Routledge, 2017. 47–56; Skateboard Studies. Eds. Konstantin Butz and Christian Peters. London: Koenig Books, 2018.

Elsa Devienne is lecturer in U. S. History at Northumbria University (Newcastle upon Tyne). She received her PhD in History from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Devienne was Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University from 2016–2017 and lecturer in American Studies at Paris Nanterre University from 2015–2019. Her research interests are the history of the U. S., California and Los Angeles; environmental and coastal history; urban history; history of gender, sexuality and the body. Her publications include: “The Life, Death, and Rebirth of Muscle Beach: Reassessing the Muscular Physique in Postwar American (1940s–1980s).” Southern California Quarterly 100.3 (2018): 324–367; “Urban Renewal by the Sea: Reinventing the Beach for the Suburban Age in Postwar Los Angeles.” The Journal of Urban History 45.1 (2019): 99–125; La ruée vers le sable: Une histoire environnementale du littoral de Los Angeles. Paris: Sorbonne Editions, 2020.

Thérèse De Raedt is Associate Professor of French in the departm...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Measuring the Beach: Processes, Practices and Discourses
• Gedanken über unsichtbare Inselgruppen
• (Precluded) Arrivals/Departures
• Drawing and Crossing Lines
• Building Structures & Assembling Elements
• SHORELINES & SPACES
• Bodies in Time: Littoral Rhythms of Death and Desire
• Social and Material Transformations
• Revisited
• Notes on Contributors