Arno Heller

Arno Heller (born September 25, 1939 in Kiel ) is an Austrian Americanist .

After graduating from high school in 1958, Heller studied English and American studies at the University of Innsbruck . In 1964 he obtained a Magister (Mag. Phil) for teaching in English and German and received his doctorate in 1965 (Dr. phil.). After his military service in the Austrian Armed Forces in 1965, he worked briefly (1966) as a high school teacher in Innsbruck and as an assistant professor (1966/67) at Kent State University in Ohio (USA) before he became a university assistant again in Innsbruck (1967–1968). After a scholarship at the University of Sussex (1973/74), he obtained a Master of Philosophy (M. phil). In 1976 he completed his habilitation in Innsbruck and lectured at the university, where he became an associate professor in 1979. After a visiting professorship at the University of Notre Dame (1984) and a substitute professorship in Regensburg (1985), he was offered a position in Tübingen in 1992. In the same year he went to Graz, where he taught literature and cultural studies as a full professor, head of the Institute for American Studies, and from 1999 to 2001 as dean of the humanities faculty, until his retirement in 2002. Heller then returned to his alma mater in Innsbruck as a lecturer .

Heller was President of the Austrian Society for American Studies in 1979/80 and 1988/89 , on the Board of the European Association for American Studies from 1981 to 1985 and since 1982 co-editor of the journal Papers from English and American Studies . He has written more than 100 scientific articles, but also five books (as of 2010), three literary studies, two of which are about growing up in American novels, one about violent fantasies in contemporary American novels, and two cultural-historical works about the American West. In 2017 a biography about Herman Melville was published , which Melville opened up as the most recently deeply pessimistic observer and performer of contemporary American conditions and literarily as a forerunner of modernity (up to postmodernism).

Works (selection)

author

• Odyssey to the Self. On the design of youthful identity searches in the more recent American novel. Innsbruck 1973
• Experiments with the Novel of Maturation. Henry James and Stephen Crane. Innsbruck 1976
• Violent fantasies. Investigations into a phenomenon of contemporary American fiction. Tubingen 1990
• American Southwest. History, culture, myth. Innsbruck 2006
• American Northwest and California. Historical search for traces beyond the myths , Innsbruck University Press, Innsbruck 2010 ISBN 978-3-902719-53-9
• Herman Melville . Biography. Lambert Schneider / wbg. Darmstadt 2017, ISBN 978-3-650-40189-2

Co-author

• with Sonja Bahn-Coblans: William Greaves. Just Doing It. Studies on American Documentary Film, 7. Trier, 1997

editor

• The American novel after 1945. Darmstadt 1987

Associate Editor

• Forms of the American Imagination. Innsbruck 1979
• Utopian Thought in American Literature. Tübingen 1988

literature

• Walter W. Hölbling, Klaus Rieser (eds.): What is American? New identities in US culture. Festschrift for Arno Heller, LIT, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-8258-7734-5

Web links

• Literature by and about Arno Heller in the catalog of the German National Library
• www.arnoheller.at ( curriculum vitae (PDF; 51 kB), bibliography ; PDF; 107 kB)
• Institute for American Studies , University of Graz