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Rehabilitation II
(2019)
Recitation : lyric time(s) I
(2019)
What is the time of the lyric? For Augustine, the recitation of a hymn illustrates the workings of time in the human mind; for Giorgio Agamben, the poem itself exemplifies the structure of what he defines as 'messianic time'. By focusing on Dante's sonnet 'Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare' and looking at the double act of the recitation of the poem and the "re-citation" of prior gestures, the temporality of both the single poem and lyric discourse will come into focus.
Recherche II : anamnesis
(2019)
The temporal loop of Proust's "Recherche" complicates the unidirectional understanding of anamnesis in psychoanalysis, which, in turn, allows for a renewed reading of the temporality of the "Recherche", highlighting the intrinsic link between artistic 'research' and unconscious affect - at the same time origin, motif, and destination.
The text considers recirculation as a process through which both visual and cultural imagery are put in motion over and over again in the current information age, especially in the context of post-Internet art. Hito Steyerl's writings and thoughts on the 'poor image', namely the low-resolution digital image bound to a perpetual wandering or 'circulationism', here serve as major reference points for the development of the argument.
Recherche I
(2019)
Recherche, (re-)search: do I research to find something not yet found or do I re-search back to find something that has been lost? These two directionalities structure Proust's "À la recherche du temps perdu" and are reflected in its reception. But what if they only seem mutually exclusive, yet really are one and the same thing?
On the one side there is book culture, centered on the printed book as a material object; on the other digital culture, centered on what is displayed on a screen, by now more often than not that of a mobile phone. In the cultural imaginary, the two practices are separated by far more than just media technology. The girl in Delevingne's picture, in choosing to read a book rather than participate in the social media arena, opts (as the black-and-white blocking of the caption neatly reflects) for a commendable type of media use: She sharpens her intellect and exercises her imagination, she digs deep rather than staying on the surface, and she engages – in a seemingly disinterested manner – with valuable content rather than obsessing over how to present herself in the best light. Her absorption is a badge of honor, much different from the 'bad' absorption of digital media users, a recurring trope that is artistically represented, for example, in the much-acclaimed surrealist photo series "SURFAKE" by the French photographer Antoine Geiger, which represents mobile phone users whose faces are sucked into their devices.
In this article, I will argue for a different notion of adaptation as a form of appropriation that allows a more productive analysis of the literary works of German author Rainald Goetz. Therefore I will draw on a specific understanding of pop music, which derives from Diedrich Diederichsen 'Über Pop-Musik' (On pop music). According to Diederichsen, pop-music is not limited to certain kinds of music, but moreover to the practices pop-music entails.
The discipline of adaptation studies has come a long way from its academic inception in novel-to-film studies. Since George Bluestone's seminal 1957 study Novels into Film, often regarded as the starting point of modern day Anglo-American adaptation studies, the discipline has seen a continual widening of its methodology as well as of the material scholars are willing to regard as adaptations. Particularly since the turn of the 21st century and the increasing institutionalization of the discipline as distinct from literary or film studies, adaptation scholars have widened the scope to include a broad range of media, encompassing not only the traditional adaptations from novels and drama into film, but also novelizations of various other media, video game and comic adaptations, TV series, opera, theme parks and tie in vacations, and many more. Others have included the study of media franchises as dependent on adaptation. As part of this redefinition of the discipline, scholars have also widened their discussion to bring to the centre aspects that were not originally the main focus of adaptation researchers' comparative textual analyses, including industrial structures, legal frameworks, and, most frequently and emphatically, questions of intertextuality and the cultural and ideological embeddedness of adapted texts.
The adaptation of disaster: representations of environmental crises in climate change fiction
(2019)
In light of climate change, the attempt to overcome the gap between the 'Two Cultures' appears more urgent than ever. With climate change being only one of the environmental crises marking the so-called Anthropocene, knowledge production and representations are constantly challenged. The very reason that led to the idea of proclaiming a new geological epoch can be taken as evidence for the collapse of the Cartesian dichotomy between nature and culture. The Anthropocene marks an epoch in Earth's history in which the human species has become a geological force. That is, the effects of industrialized civilization are now forming geological strata that irreversibly change the face of the planet and its future. However, if nature and culture cannot be meaningfully distinguished anymore, how, one might ask, is a divide within academia still of concern? Would it not naturally perish with the insight that what has been regarded as nature has now been thoroughly pervaded by remnants of human actions? To the contrary, the persistence of the gap between the sciences and the humanities is one of the main reasons that complicates the representation and, ultimately, hinders the understanding of the problems which characterize the new epoch. Inability or unwillingness to change behavior on a collective level will most probably lead to environmental, political and social disaster on an unprecedented scale.
In the early 21st century, scientists once more declared God a delusion and announced the end of faith, boosting the current critique of religious belief known as 'New Atheism'. Yet the contemporary British and Irish novel engage with religion in various forms, and religion has indeed "returned", Andrew Tate argues, "to the study of literature". The Bible in particular proves a rich source for novelists as different as Colm Tóibín, Zadie Smith, and Philip Pullman among others. Where Colm Tóibín's 'The Testament of Mary' (2012) offers a fictional memoir by the mother of God, depicting the Virgin Mary as "a powerful, unsparing figure" ('Guardian'), Zadie Smith's 'NW' (2012) describes the lives of its two female protagonists against the backdrop of the stories of Mary and Elizabeth in the Gospel of Luke. And Philip Pullman's bestselling trilogy 'His Dark Materials' (1995- 2000) is a re-writing of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' (1667) that "only really makes sense" according to Tate "if the reader has a detailed knowledge of the biblical scriptures against which it writes". Despite being written from a very critical, ironic or atheist stance, all these novels rely on the Bible as an intertext in crucial ways. The Bible, in other words, is once more living up to its ancient reputation as "the Book of Books", "the Urtext of Western literature".
Since ethnic stereotyping gained new political virulence in the current ethnopopulist climate, the three-day conference, organized by five researchers from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna, aimed to promote academic discussion on new perspectives on imagology. In twenty-six presentations, international scholars shared their findings on strategies of Othering within a transdisciplinary framework of different theoretical approaches from postcolonial theory to gender studies, from intermediality to musicology, in order to fathom the boundaries of imagological research today. An additional poster session gave students the opportunity to present their research on hetero- and auto-stereotypes within literature.
Media and abstraction
(2019)
The question to be discussed in this essay concerns the relation between different media and the distinction between concrete and abstract entities or objects. [...] But what is the motivation for this paper? To put it bluntly - there seems to be a certain tendency in recent media studies to reject abstract entities and objects. And this comes as no surprise, given the insistence on materiality in media studies (but is materiality really identical to concreteness?).
The chapter engages the nature-culture divide with the generative ambivalences of weathering in both language and physics. Taking the different uses of the enantiosemic and ambitransitive verb as indicative of the human's fraught relationship with its environment and itself, it analyses multiple ways in which 'weathering' can involve subject-object relations, objectless subject-predicate relations, or even subjectless processes, and proposes to think them with mechanics, thermodynamics, and chaos theory.
Where Haas sees the narrative dividing into "Streberwitz" and "Kriegsdarstellung" I see something more like a division between 'Witz' and 'Krieg' per se. The point and the provocation of the novel, in my view, is that Kehlmann declines to bring these two strata together, or rather: that he first insists on bringing them together, by forcing Tyll and the Thirty Years War to inhabit the same work, and then refuses to synthesize them into anything like a higher unity. The irony of the fool, in Tyll, does not acquire gravity or depth by virtue of its relationship to a reality whose hidden truths it emphatically does not reveal; and the reality of war does not find redemption or sublimation in art.
Over the six months in which Vajiko Chachkhiani's "Living Dog Among Dead Lions" was exhibited at the Georgian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, heavy rain was pouring inside the installation. This artificially generated process provokes thoughts on the nature of the here and now as well as of the afterlife and of the future appearance of the hut's water-sensitive insides. Eventually, the spaces and furniture exposed to rain and water stagnation will begin to rot and disintegrate, and mould and moss might grow over them. Its viewers feel caught between what they see and what they hope to see; between their perceptions and expectations, in an exceptional time zone where 'natural' weathering is being performed as a subject of meditative observation.
It has been mostly forgotten today that Varlam Shalamov had once identified himself as a passionate supporter of the so-called 'nauchno-khudozhestvennaia literatura'. This term is derived from the Russian term for fiction ('khudozhestvennaia literatura') and can be translated as "scientific-fictional literature" but also as "scientific-artistic literature." Hence all of the advocates of the term, including Shalamov, emphatically insisted not only on the "fictionality" ('khudozhestvennost' '), but also on the "skill" or "art" ('iskusstvo') - the "artistic" qualities - as a fundamental element of the new genre, without which its goals could not be achieved. [...] But what kind of genre was this sort of literature, now mostly forgotten, for which Shalamov had so much hope? To answer this question, Matthias Schwartz reconstrucs the conditions in the late 1920s and early 1930s that motivated Maxim Gorky and the then famous children's book author Samuil Marshak, on the eve of the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, to launch this compound adjective, 'nauchno-khudozhestvennaia literatura', and to create a new type of literature located at the intersection of literary fiction and science journalism. In highlighting the main arguments around this literature, Schwartz elaborates how difficult and disputed its constitution was in the course of the gradual establishment of Socialist Realism as the singular aesthetic doctrine for literary production and why it did not succeed in establishing itself as a separate literary genre until the postwar period. In the last section Schwartz analyzes the characteristics of one of the most emblematic works written in this literary field before briefly returning to a more generalizing conclusion and taking a look at the modest afterlife of the genre since the Thaw period.
The resistance of aesthetics consists in the mode of experience that art affords, which promotes individual consciousness and political awareness by exploding the dualisms with which we tend to simplify things: centralization and decentralization, totality and fragmentation, communism and neoliberal capitalism, dictatorship and democracy. Although the formal complexity and ambiguous compositions met in works by the likes of Picasso, Woolf, and Schönberg most obviously support this sort of experience, it can be drawn out of all art to various degrees. Indeed, what distinguishes these modernists from the artists who came before and after them is how they set aesthetic experience as the aim of artistic production. But no work of art can be reduced either to the whole or to the sum of its parts; either to systematicity or to formlessness. Strictly speaking, the opposing ideals of classical and critical aesthetics are not two distinct aesthetic positions, but the theoretical limits between which art unfolds. By analogy, totalitarian governance and social atomism are not oppositional political materializations, but the two extremes at which politics ends.