PD Dr. Florian Sedlmeier

PD Dr. Florian Sedlmeier

 






Florian Sedlmeier
 has previously been Assistant Professor of Literature at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. He has also held appointments as a Guest Professor for Anglophone Literature and Literary Theory at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin and for American Studies at Universität Hamburg. 


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e-mail: Sedlmeier@em.uni-frankfurt.de 

   

His first monograph, The Postethnic Literary: Reading Paratexts and Transpositions around 2000 (2014) explores how texts by writers, who are marked and marketed as multicultural or postcolonial representatives, feature intertextual references that express positions of individual  authorship. His second book project (Habilitation 2020), which has been funded by the DFG with research stays at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Texas at Austin, suggests a return to William Dean Howells in order to explore the very notion of literature as an institution as well as the institutional conditions of literary production and reception. The study makes use of Pierre Bourdieu to discuss various manifestations of the convertibility of literary capital in Howells’s realist literature and criticism. Several published and forthcoming essays examine some of these manifestations in relation to race, publication media, and character poetics. Other articles examine the intersection of genre and race in Mark Twain’s detective fiction, the functions of allegory in postcolonial literature and theory, the interaction between paratexts and literary narration in recent U.S. literature, and notions of contemporary writers’ collectives. Florian Sedlmeier has co-edited several volumes, including  Rereading the Machine in the Garden: Nature and Technology in American Culture (2014) and Anecdotal Modernity: Making and Unmaking History (2021).