Sebastian M. Herrmann Knihy

This book calls for an investigation of the ›borderlands of narrativity‹ -- the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the ›beyond‹ of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of »narrative liminality,« which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years.

Data Imaginary? is about the co-evolution of the literary and of data around the middle of the long nineteenth century. It argues that, during romanticism, US culture negotiated the outlines of the literary - what literature is, what literary value consists of, and what literature can do - in relation to the outlines of another representational project that was gaining sharper contours and a stronger foothold in public perception at the time: data. As the young nation was searching for a national literature of its own, data and data-driven practices formed an important foil, a conceptual resource to articulate the desire for a new, democratic literature.00Revisiting formative decades of US literary self-perception through the conceptual lens of data, this book rethinks the representative project of transcendentalism, the catalog poetry of Walt Whitman, the formal experimentation of abolitionist literature, and the evolution of American (literary) studies.

This book analyzes and historicizes an important and popular motif in contemporary US political discourse: the notion that politics has become increasingly 'unreal.' At the turn of the millennium, the simulated quality of politics in general and of the US presidency in particular has become a major object of concern across a broad range of venues and media: publications in media studies and political science, newspaper editorials, novels, films, and TV shows alike worry over how much or how little we can actually know about the reality of the US president when all our knowledge is based on carefully staged media representations. Rather than adding another voice to this concern, 'Presidential Unrealities' investigates the cultural work such discussions do. Charting their histories and their cultural resonances, the book argues that debating 'presidential unreality' provides a crucial vocabulary by way of which the US public negotiates the postmodernization of American culture and society.