The Press's enthusiasm for innovation is reflected in our continuing exploration of this frontier. We were among the first university presses to offer titles electronically and we continue to adopt technologies that allow us to better support the scholarly mission and disseminate our content widely.
WINTER also presents about 150 monographs and collections per year within a number of well-established series, several of them in co-operation with Heidelberg University and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.Among the largest university presses in the world, The MIT Press publishes over 200 new books each year along with 30 journals in the arts and humanities, economics, international affairs, history, political science, science and technology along with other disciplines. Recently added to this collection has been Comparatio, offering theoretically advanced comparartive studies. Today, WINTER publishes eleven journals like Amerikastudien, Anglistik, Beiträge zur Namenforschung, the journal devoted to German literary history (now over a century old) Euphorion, the Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, Gymnasium, a journal dealing with traditional humanistic education embracing the teaching of classical languages, the Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte, Sprachwissenschaft, the Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie, and Trumah, the journal of the College of Jewish Studies in Heidelberg. Founded already in 1822, the publishing house is closely associated with ‘Heidelberg Romanticism’. Universitätsverlag WINTER is an academic publisher located in Heidelberg, Germany, who covers the whole field of Humanities with particular interest in literature and language studies. On the other hand, a resurgent European interest in 'America' as symbol suggests a tacit defense among international members of a growing American Studies community of symbolic figuration itself as a means of cultural comprehension.
On the one hand, language barriers alone recommend symbolic, iconographie study as a practical means of knowledge production and apprehension in lieu of an alternative common critical idiom. Within the context of the globalization of American Studies and current post-national approaches in the field, this essay argues that the worldwide images that 'America' projects, and the icons by which it is widely identified, retain not only the legitimacy of methodology, but suggest as well their necessity as a cross-cultural epistemology. Kuklick's critique quietly prevails today, in an age when comparative sociological and ethnographic approaches to the study of American society and culture enjoy a conspicuous, if not uncontested, ascendance, at least in the United States.
His is an empiricist's plea against symbolic signification. As is well known, Kuklick insists that symbolic/semiotic methodologies cannot substitute for material, quantifiable research of 'America' in all its complexity. Since at least the appearance of scholar Bruce Kuklick's seminal 1972 statement, "Myth and Symbol in American Studies," the conventional 'myths' and 'symbols' that were once synonymous with the discipline largely have lost their former status as a legitimate methodology.