Revisiting Style in Literary and Cultural Studies

Jasmin Herrmann is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English at the University of Cologne. She teaches North American Literature and Culture.

Moritz Ingwersen teaches North American Literature and Culture in the Department of Literature, Art and Media Studies at the University of Konstanz.

Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank teaches in the Department of English at the University of Cologne, specializing in American literature and film.

Olga Tarapata holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Cologne. She specializes in North American literature and culture, science fiction, and disability studies.

The collected volume brings together leading scholars from a broad range of disciplines in the humanities to interrogate the productivity of style as an element of cultural expression and a parameter of cultural analysis. Despite its ubiquity in examinations of artistic singularity or postulations of epochal patterns, style remains a notoriously elusive concept. Suspicious of monolithic definitions, the contributions assembled in this volume address style from a multiplicity of methodological and conceptual angles, drawing from fields that include literary studies, film and media studies, post-structuralist philosophy, philosophy of science, and American cultural studies.

The collected volume interrogates the productivity of style as an element of cultural expression and a parameter of cultural analysis. Leading scholars in fields that range from literary criticism to post-structuralist philosophy, and American cultural studies address style in theory, literature, and cultural practice.

Do Signs Have Styles? (James Williams) - Deleuze on Style (Ronald Bogue) - Félix Guattari and the Problem of Style (Henning Schmidgen) - Derrida's Gestures of Circumspection (Martin Roussel) - Styles of Practice in Philosophy and Mathematical Science (David Holdsworth) - Nonhuman Queerings (Patricia MacCormack) - Hanjo Berressem's Luminous Philosophy (Jan Jagodzinski) - On Rhythmic Style (Bernd Herzogenrath) - Gender, Boxing and Masculinities (Norbert Finzsch) - Free Style Skateboarding (Bryan Reynolds) - Walking and Falling in Style (Karin Harrasser) - Ruth Fulton Benedict's Style (Philipp Schweighauser) - Wearing Western Shirts (Konstantin Butz) - Suburban Chic and the 1980s (Sarah Wasserman) - Film Style in French Melodrama (Wolfram Nitsch) - (Re)Presenting the Holocaust (Lutz Ellrich) - Objective, Burma! (Tom Conley) - [Non]Style is Feeling (Nadine Boljkovac Berressem) - Michaux and Mescaline (Paul Harris) - The Contiguity between Marianne Moore and Susan Sontag (Sabine Sielke) - A Beginning of Pop Literary Communication (Torsten Hahn) - Style as Grace (Günter Blamberger) - Pynchon's Stylistic Transformations (Heinz Ickstadt) - Style in Gravity's Rainbow (Jeff Baker) - Pynchon's Wardrobe of Weirdness (Sascha Pöhlmann)