Internationality in American Fiction Henry James – William Dean Howells – William Faulkner – Toni Morrison

«Recently, a fascinating approach to literary studies called 'writer response criticism' originated among Americanists at the University of Göttingen. It marks a promising advance over the Constance Model of 'reception aesthetics'. By focusing on the act of writing in the context not of a given academic discipline but of the choices made by the writer under study, the Göttingen Model transcends the customary national perspective to take the transnational intertext fully into account. Writer response studies delineate the choices made, in the act of writing, among rival perspectives and the artistic potential provided by different literatures and cultures. This concept of literary writing as the challenging of competing foreign literatures by means of modification, transformation, and purposeful avoidance also serves to liberate the customary, nationally circumscribed literary historiography by methodically engaging the comprehensive but focused internationality of literary life. This emphasis is one of the strongest assets of the Göttingen Model. It accounts for its originality and innovative force.» (Roland Hagenbüchle, Zürich)

The Editors: Armin Paul Frank, Professor Emeritus of English Philology, was founding director of Sonderforschungsbereich 309, the Göttingen Center of Advanced Studies in Literary Translation, and also directed cooperative projects on comparative American literary historiography.
Rolf Lohse received his Dr. phil. degree in French Literature from the Technical University of Berlin. His interests in the Italian theater of the 16th century, the French Canadian novel, comic writing, the literature of avant-garde movements, and cinematographic analysis resulted in numerous articles on French, Italian and French Canadian literature of the 19th and 20th century.

«Recently, a fascinating approach to literary studies called ‘writer response criticism’ originated among Americanists at the University of Göttingen. It marks a promising advance over the Constance Model of ‘reception aesthetics’. By focusing on the act of writing in the context not of a given academic discipline but of the choices made by the writer under study, the Göttingen Model transcends the customary national perspective to take the transnational intertext fully into account. Writer response studies delineate the choices made, in the act of writing, among rival perspectives and the artistic potential provided by different literatures and cultures. This concept of literary writing as the challenging of competing foreign literatures by means of modification, transformation, and purposeful avoidance also serves to liberate the customary, nationally circumscribed literary historiography by methodically engaging the comprehensive but focused internationality of literary life. This emphasis is one of the strongest assets of the Göttingen Model. It accounts for its originality and innovative force.» (Roland Hagenbüchle, Zürich)