This volume of essays had its origin in the 2006 German Association for American Studies conference, which featured wide-ranging papers that, as John Durham Peters puts it, sought to combine “American studies, media studies, and German media theory” (4), often to scrutinize “power, access, and justice” (19). The chapters' bibliographies are invaluable resources. Peters roots this interdisciplinary enterprise in classic works by Lewis Mumford, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, James W. Carey, and Friedrich Kittler. His introductory chapter – and this is one of the best chapters – helps demonstrate why American studies should “grapple” (15) with German media theory. The collection benefits from the breadth of concerns broached at the conference and the chapters are well organized into sections (such as “Visual Culture,” “Intermediality: Image-Music-Text,” “Politics and the Public Sphere”). Some chapters read more like polished conference papers than essays commissioned and composed to mesh with one another to explore the conceptual possibilities of the field. The volume proves Peters's foundational point: “To study media you cannot just study media” (18).

Some of the finest essays investigate “media's influence on literature and literature's influence on media” (xi). Ulla Haselstein's brilliant readings of Mina Loy's and Gertrude Stein's contributions to modernist portraiture, for example, work out the implications of Loy's “visual and literary” (173), “intermedial” (172) notion (developed decades before the advent of Lacanian psychoanalysis or post-structuralism) that Stein's “flesh and blood is made up of words” (172). And Daniel Stein adapts historically and culturally grounded literary studies not only to revise music studies – he concentrates on the representation of music in literature – but to formulate a contribution to “intermedia studies” (181). Ulf Schulenberg's chapter rethinks how literary culture might help make American democracy democratic. Chapters such as these deploy disciplinary strengths to challenge disciplinary boundaries.

An entire section of the book features Winfried Fluck's provocative chapter “Playing Indian: Aesthetic Experience, Recognition, Identity.” This chapter begins by pondering “the amazing power of media to provide an aesthetic experience” (73). Fluck reflects on the cultural production of assignments of significance that contour the lenses through which we read ourselves and our world. But in doing so he rethinks Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation (readers who are “hailed” by texts to read themselves – identify and recast themselves – in particular ideological ways). Readers are not statically interpellated, Fluck argues, but “parasitically” (75) engage in “imaginary transfers” that add “imaginary elements” to “the words on the page” (74) and to that which interpellates them (76). Although this process is social through and through, media's texts do not simply perpetrate “subject positioning” (76). Fluck reads reading more dialectically: fiction, art, and photography “offer a provisional, experimental identity construct that can become the basis for self-extension” (75). A reader's “imaginary investment[s]” (83) are not wholly determined or limited by society's structures of meaning, scales of value, and types of investment.

Fluck reconceptualizes “aesthetics” as “a word for a choice of worlds we want to enter” (84) and uses Edward S. Curtis's romanticized photographs of “vanishing” Indians – performances of Indianness many white readers wanted to see – to elaborate aspects of his argument. His insights spark myriad political questions. In what ways might mass cultural “imaginary transfers” and the mass creation of aesthetic “worlds we want to enter” (which “we” are “we”?) reproduce the capitalist and imperialist power structures that oppressed Indians (and other social groups)? Can “self-extensions” made possible by media and aesthetic experiences lock one into, as well as release one from, ideological structures? Fluck quotes John Ellis (who also contributed an important essay to this volume) on film to underscore this complexity: “Identifications are multiple, fluid, at points even contradictory” (77). It would be intriguing to bring Fluck's extremely smart and generative contributions to essays by Astrid Franke (on media and the social production of apathy) and Pia Wiegmunk (on the uses of media to organize political resistance).

Mass media reaches masses of people – it influences what fascinates, bores, disturbs, placates, energizes, and defines them. Since the 1930s, American-studies scholars envisioned their project as a “movement.” American studies entails probing what we are involved in and what we can do about it. The framing of American studies as media studies certainly advances this long-standing and daring critical project.