The Pathos of Authenticity is the product of a 2007 conference held at the JFK Institute in Berlin, and its primary focus is on how questions of “authenticity” in American culture have been reconfigured in the wake of 9/11, although some essays, such as Andrew S. Gross's piece on John Berryman's Dream Songs, do look back to an earlier period. Indeed, the editors do a good job in their introduction of putting the genealogy of authenticity into a broader American intellectual context, from ee cummings's modernist understanding of it as a “rebellion against authority” (9), through Lionel Trilling's differentiation between the romantic self-authentication of an inner self and an earlier form of sincerity that involves “congruence between avowal and actual feeling” (11), to the renewed communal nostalgia for emblems of memorialization in the age of homeland security. There are excellent contributions here from conference keynote speaker Bill Brown (of the University of Chicago) on “Commodity Nationalism and the Lost Object,” and from Erika Doss (University of Notre Dame) on ways in which the question of authenticity is inextricably interwoven with questions of national security. The other contributions are mostly from German-based scholars, and they are nearly all critically well informed and professionally delivered. Sabine Broeck's essay that indicts Anthony Giardina's 2006 novel White Guys as part of “a powerful cultural strategy to bemoan what is perceived as the loss of or attack on white cultural capital and material security” (152) is particularly thought-provoking, as is Ruth Mayer's piece on Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude.

The obvious problem endemic to all collections of conference proceedings is heterogeneity, and this potential pitfall is necessarily heightened here in relation to such an amorphous term as “authenticity,” where the reader literally has no idea of what might come next. There are contributions on Susan Sontag, Bret Easton Ellis, “holocaust comedies in the 1990s,” the ghost dance theme in contemporary Native American writing, the “turn to religion” among neo-pragmatist philosophers, and so on. If anything holds these various contributions together, it is an interest in ethics and a reaction against the version of postmodernism as superficial pastiche influentially outlined by Fredric Jameson at the beginning of the 1990s. The ways in which ideas of authenticity have been associated, consistently with a “theory of sublimation” (28), with the genre of autobiography is another interesting strand woven throughout this volume. However, the format of the book has clearly been determined more by the familiar European institutional investment in collaborative scholarship than by any underlying thematic coherence within the subject itself. Although the book usefully covers a broad range of topics, it does so in a largely random manner, with the only underlying epistemological hook being an essentialist nostalgia for identifying some hypothetical “spirit” of what the editors warily term “U.S.–American culture” (29). In this sense, the spectre of trauma and loss so frequently evoked here as a response to 9/11 might be understood in more reflexive terms as a response on the part of the JFK to the loss of that old interdisciplinary coherence once associated with the subject of American studies, for whose systematic erasure these contributors collectively mourn.