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This article aims to show that imagology is a promising method for analysing images of the European Other and the Turkish Self as expressed in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's novel "Huzur" (1948; trans. "A Mind at Peace", 2007). The narrative challenges the rhetoric of early Turkish nationalism by promoting a synthesis of the national present with both the melancholically evoked Ottoman heritage and with European cultures. At the same time, the novel's protagonists stand for diverse and often contradicting conceptions of Self and Other and thus provide an insight into the various identity conflicts present in Republican Turkey.
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.
The chapter explores the dimension of the living present as a form of temporal reduction, looking at its manifestation in literary texts. Bazzoni proposes here a focus on the living present as different from a still, eternal moment, and contrasts the experience of the living present with the reduction at play in trauma. Finally, the author discusses the affective, ethical, and political dimensions of the temporality of the living present as a site of subjectivation, which effects a counter-reduction of normative discourses.
In her contribution, "Of Birds and Men: Lessons from Mark Cocker's 'Crow Country,'" Michaela Keck discusses strategies for teaching Mark Cocker's encounters with the often-ignored members of the corvid family in "Crow Country" (2007). Part natural history, part pastoral, and part personal memoir, "Crow Country" raises and explores questions central to HAS regarding both dichotomies such as self / other, human / animal, and subject / object, as well as the potential and limitations of anthropocentrism and the narratives humans construct about other animals. As Cocker's twenty-first-century account of the rooks in East Anglia demonstrates, these corvids are neither domesticated nor companion animals. Since students will be familiar with crows and might even consider them a nuisance at times, Cocker's text offers new perspectives for thinking about so-called "trash animals." However, crows are also famous for their cognitive skills and cooperative capacities, and are therefore particularly suitable agents for challenging human-animal distinctions and simple notions of species boundaries. Keck's paper engages with "Crow Country" as an entry point to teaching core questions of HAS, exploring the ways in which Cocker's narrative draws students' attention to the de-/constructions of the birds' natural and cultural history and, conversely, of human animality and/or difference. Focusing on rooks as social constructs and agents, as well as rooks anthropomorphized and reconfigured, Michaela Keck illuminates the role of human-bird relationships in current Anthropocene contexts.
This chapter explores medieval exegetical and affective characterizations of the birthplace of Christ. It focuses in particular on evocations of this birthplace as an exposed, liminal location and argues that the radical exposure endured by Christ at the moment of his birth was crucial to medieval understandings of the significance of the Incarnation. But it also points out that its condition of openness is always in a dialectical relationship with its capacity to enclose and protect.
To what extent does cultural distance interfere with or limit literary experience? What kind of intimacy is needed to make a text into a work? This essay seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the writings of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. In doing so, it suggests that the challenges of cultural distance may be most acute when dealing with texts from homo-linguistic literary environments, and that we might overcome these challenges by undertaking a world literary criticism that attends to localized fields and materials without forgetting the charge of particular works.
During the Black Revolution, LeRoi Jones used a radical adaptation of Dante to express a new militant identity, turning himself into a new man with a new name, Amiri Baraka, whose experimental literary project culminated in "The System of Dante's Hell" in 1965. Dante’s poem (specifically, John Sinclair's translation) provides a grid for the narrative of Baraka's autobiographical novel; at the same time, the Italian poet's description of hell functions for Baraka as a gloss on many of his own experiences. Whereas for Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, Dante marks a way into the world of European culture, Baraka uses Dante first to measure the growing distance between himself and European literature and then, paradoxically, to separate himself totally from it. Baraka's response to the poet at once confirms and belies Edward Said's claim that Dante's "Divine Comedy" is essentially an imperial text that is foundational to the imperial discipline of comparative literature. That Baraka can found his struggle against imperialist culture, as he sees it, on none other than this specific poem suggests the extent to which it is a richer and more complex text than even Said imagined. To see exactly how Baraka does this, Dennis Looney proposes to read several extended passages from "The System of Dante's Hell" to take stock of its allusiveness to the Italian model. For all the critical attention to Baraka, surprisingly no one has undertaken the necessary work of sorting out his allusions to Dante in any systematic way.
'Dante and Ireland', or 'Dante and Irish Writers', is an extremely vast topic, and to cover it a book rather than an essay would be necessary. If the relationship between the poet and Ireland did not begin in the fourteenth century - when Dante himself may have had some knowledge of, and been inspired by, the "Vision of Adamnán", the "Vision of Tungdal", and the "Tractatus de purgatorio Sancti Patricii" - the story certainly had started by the eighteenth, when the Irish man of letters Henry Boyd was the first to produce a complete English translation of the "Comedy", published in 1802. Even if one restricts the field to twentieth-century literature alone, which is the aim in the present piece, the list of authors who are influenced by Dante includes Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and Heaney - that is to say, four of the major writers not only of Ireland, but of Europe and the entire West. To these should then be added other Irish poets of the first magnitude, such as Louis MacNeice, Ciaran Carson, Eiléan Ní Cuilleanáin, and Thomas Kinsella. Therefore Piero Boitani treats this theme in a somewhat cursory manner, privileging the episodes he considers most relevant and the themes which he thinks form a coherent and intricate pattern of literary history, where every author is not only metamorphosing Dante but also rewriting his predecessor, or predecessors, who had rewritten Dante. Distinct from the English and American Dante of Pound and Eliot, an 'Irish Dante', whom Joyce was to call 'ersed irredent', slowly grows out of this pattern.
Bild und Leidenschaft
(2010)
This experience, listening to the radio version of "The Green Hills of Earth" was the first form in which I encountered a problem that in the following years continued to haunt much of the work I have done ever since. This problem has a double aspect, since it involves both 'the visibility of the invisible' and, inseparably linked to it, that of the 'invisibility of the visible'. Far from excluding each other, as opposites are commonly expected to do, 'visibility' and 'invisibility' seem here to be inextricably linked, although not simply the same. The prominence, in the story, of repetition and recurrence, indeed of doubling, suggests that another term should be introduced to describe this curious relationship of non-exclusive opposition, that of 'divisibility'. Visibility divides itself into what is visible and what is invisible. And given the fact that this is also a question of life and death, of living and dying, the process of divisibility can be said to produce not just appearances, but 'apparitions' (which in English, unlike its 'false friend' in French, signifies 'ghosts' and not just appearances). Listening to the radio in that darkened bedroom, I think what I experienced was something like the apparition of such divisibility, by which the invisible seemed to become visible, but only by making the visible invisible. Much later I learned that this was a phenomenon - if one can call it that - quite familiar to philosophers and aestheticians who generally tried to interpret it with the use of words such as "fantasy" and "imagination": what Kant, for example, in 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' calls "productive" as distinct from "reproductive imagination", which does not merely reproduce what one sees but which produces representations of things that were never seen (and perhaps could never be seen). But I never felt that such concepts were capable of accounting for the strange capacity of those invisible 'images' to produce feelings whose intensity seemed in direct proportion to their indistinct and relatively indeterminate - non-objective - quality.
Law and literature: that is a sufficiently broad subject to warrant reference to the Fontane character Effy Briest’s "wide field." Indeed, the sites where law and literature encounter each other, where they border on each other, merge, converge, overlap, or where they relate as opposites, even finding themselves as rivals or enemies seem legion. In contrast to the intentions of Effy Briest in that famous novel, my reference to this line is not intended to abort further inquiries; instead I want to chart the field in question with the aim of developing a preliminary typology of the ways in which law and literature have been engaged and have engaged one another. Against the background of this overview, I want to turn to a much smaller field. This small field - a plot of long fallow farmland, to be exact, located between two adjacent, perfectly maintained wheat fields in a fictive Swiss village - will serve as an example or test site for "law and literature" as they emerge in Gottfried Keller’s narrative 'Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe', from his mid-nineteenth century collection of novellas 'Die Leute von Seldwyla'. Whether and how the case study of that small field at the centre of Keller’s story can make a case for the larger field of "law and literature" remains to be seen.