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This article applies imagology to "migration literature" - a genre that is described as a "peripheral phenomenon" in the 2007 handbook "Imagology", but that requires more thorough attention due to the increasing number of significant writings by immigrant authors. Focusing on works by Rafik Schami, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Amara Lakhous, Igiaba Scego, Hatice Akyün, Yoko Tawada, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and considering theoretical observations by Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, and Homi Bhabha, this article analyses how most texts prefer arguments and metaphors of everyday life to the traditional images and stereotypes of nationalistic discourse. It concludes by distinguishing two perspectives central to most of them: that of an "in-between" and/or a "Third Space."
This article outlines a production-oriented imagology and equips the imagological toolkit with concepts and terminology from cultural memory studies, reception aesthetics, narratology, rhetoric, and text linguistics. It thereby presents the theoretical framework which makes it possible to analyse generic elements without a national connotation with regard to their function in generating a national image. Using as examples genres from English Romanticism and how they evoke Englishness, the article highlights the aesthetic complexity of national images and their range of variation. Simultaneously it paves the way for a more nuanced deconstruction of these images.
Images, the main object of imagological analysis, are by nature value-charged. Despite this fact, previous research has neglected the axiological foundations of imagology. This article discusses in brief some fundamental axiological questions of imagological investigations. The here analysed corpus includes an eighteenth-century visual-textual source (the so-called "Leopold-Stich"), and a famous imagological handbook ("Imagology", by Beller and Leerssen). The analysis starts with the problem of value connotations of the signifier of geocultural spaces and continues with a cluster of questions concerning the nature of value of imagotypical representations. The final part examines two relevant imagological phenomena—diachronic changes in evaluation of certain geocultural spaces and a somewhat opposite phenomenon of evaluative apriorism.
Imagological analysis can be fruitfully applied to political discourse, most importantly the discourse of international antagonism and national self-positioning used in government decision-making circles. Historians studying that discourse have tended to see its rhetoric of national characterization merely as a distracting accompaniment to actual, factually driven policies and developments. This, it is argued here, questionably presupposes that those policies were never driven by anything but cerebral reasons of state (such as these are seen by latter-day historians); it makes us unduly heedless of an important historical corpus throwing light on the force of emotive and national prejudice in policymaking.
With this volume, the editors Katharina Edtstadler, Sandra Folie, and Gianna Zocco propose an extension of the traditional conception of imagology as a theory and method for studying the cultural construction and literary representation of national, usually European characters. Consisting of an instructive introduction and 21 articles, the book relates this sub-field of comparative literature to contemporary political developments and enriches it with new interdisciplinary, transnational, intersectional, and intermedial perspectives. The contributions offer [1] a reconsideration and update of the field's methods, genres, and theoretical frames; [2] trans-/post-national, migratory, and marginalized perspectives beyond the European nation-state; [3] insights into geopolitical dichotomies such as Orient/Occident; [4] intersectional approaches considering the entanglements of national images with notions of age, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity/race; [5] investigations of the role of national images in visual narratives and music.