Abstract:

This issue of Journal of American Studies of Turkey has roots in its editor’s two Fulbright teaching fellowships, with the Department of American Culture and Literature at Ege University from 2005-2006, and as a newly minted Ph.D. a dozen years earlier with the Department of English and American Studies at Palacký University, in the Czech Republic. Naïvely, he prepared for his first overseas experience thinking of what, not whom, he would teach. The innocent Americanist abroad had no inkling of how classroom dynamics change with students’ affective distance from the object of their study. Only as he began to sense how that distance affected discussion far more than did any gaps in students’ cultural knowledge of the U.S., did he really begin to wonder what, in the world, or at least in the Czech Republic, American Studies actually was. Who studied it? Why? What did they suppose the United States to be? What did they want it to be, and for what purposes? The teacher thus began his study, discovering an America constellated of known elements into sometimes recognizable, sometimes monstrous, and even, occasionally, quite attractive wholes.

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