Scheitern ist in Mode: Immer offener wird in den USA über den Konkurs der eigenen Firma und (überwundene) Lebenskrisen gesprochen. Auch in der Wissenschaft hat das Thema Konjunktur. Dieser Band untersucht das individuelle Scheitern interdisziplinär. Was verstehen wir unter einem ’gescheiterten Individuum ’, welche sozioökonomischen und technologischen Faktoren tragen dazu bei? Wie wird das Scheitern kulturell verhandelt, und inwiefern kann man es als Widerstand gegen gesellschaftliche Normen umdeuten?
Innehållsförteckning
Contents
Acknowledgments9
Introduction: The Failed Individual11
Susanne Hamscha, Katharina Motyl, and Regina Schober
I. Theoretical Perspectives on Failure
Sometimes You Just Fail: Protest and the Policing of Bad Feeling31
Christopher Taylor
The Primordial Failure: A Cultural-Philosophical Analysis53
Bina Nir
Failure in Economics: A Black-Box73
Hannes Lang and Eva Lang
II. Determinants of Failure: Structures, Normativity, and Power
Destined to Fail: Cosmetic Surgery, Female Body Images,
and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ’The Birth-mark’99
Johannes Fehrle
Disability Aesthetics and Vandalism in American Visual Culture119
Susanne Hamscha
Wohnkultur and Zombification: Trying to Unfail the Homeless Individual139
Wibke Schniedermann
Failed by the Criminal Justice System: The Hyperincarceration
of the Black Urban Poor in the ’War on Drugs?163
Katharina Motyl
III. Failure as Resistance / Failure as Pleasure
’Hanging on?: Mohawk Sovereignty and the Art of Failure189
Astrid M. Fellner
The Addict’s Ethics of Failure: Resistance to Ambition in the Photographic Work of Larry Clark205
Florian Zappe
’Here is the trash heap, nothing there except a muted wailing?:
Dithering in Negativity and the Failure to Move on223
Marius Henderson
Failure as an Ethical Choice: Academic Resistance against
Authoritarian Academic Systems245
Mahmoud Arghavan
IV. Failure in American Literary History
Surviving on Wrecked Ships: The Failing Individual in Edgar Allan
Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)267
Dietmar Meinel
Naturalism and the Aesthetics of Failure287
James Dorson
Productively Failing to Accelerate: Mary Borden’s Alternative
Vision of Existing Successfully in Modern America305
Svenja Fehlhaber
The Failed Individual and the Biopolitics of Climate Catastrophe
in Edan Lepucki’s California (2014)329
Susanne Leikam
V. Failure and the Digital Subject
Narcissus Confirmed: Technologies of the Minimal Selfie347
Geert Lovink
Failing by Design: Self-Tracking and the Failed Individual357
James Dyer
Failure Blogs and the Confessional Self375
Regina Schober
Contributors393
Om författaren
Katharina Motyl, Dr. phil., ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der Universität Tübingen.
Regina Schober, Dr. phil., ist Akademische Rätin an der Universität Mannheim.