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The article provides a close reading of the video "Sometimes you fight for the world, sometimes you fight for yourself", dir. by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz (2004, 5'). It reads the video as promoting what it calls a 'queer politics of paradox', that is, a politics that acknowledges desire as a constitutive moment of the political and at the same time challenges the political via a queer understanding of desire in order to make room for the political articulation of the Other. The article argues that a reworking of the political - one that aims at de-centring its hegemonic dynamic and creating space for Otherness - becomes possible if one invites paradox as a specific, anti-identitarian, and agonistic mode of tension to function as a constitutive moment of desire and of the political.
Writing a positive account of utopias has always been a difficult and risky task. Utopias have always already been out of fashion and outside of time. Since 1989 at the latest, visions of utopia appear to have come to an end. Twenty years after Fukayama's 'end of history', this article re-assesses the potentially fruitful roles for utopia’s out-of-timeness. Focusing on the critical potential of utopias through the concept of tension, it argues that utopian thought must be conceptualized through its tensile connections both to the status quo of a given society and to its possible futures.
The article compares the aesthetic notions of the "je ne sais quoi" (as it emerges in the Renaissance and is widely debated in the eighteenth century) and of the 'uncanny' as theorized by Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud in the early twentieth century. Its hypothesis is that both notions, in situating aesthetic experience in a liminal space between pleasure and trouble, can be considered after-images of non-aesthetical notions - notions that belong to the domain of the sacred and have metamorphosed as forms of aesthetic undecidability through the paradigmatic fracture of early modernity. The article focuses on depictions of female figures directing their gaze upward - in the iconography of Sade's Justine, in popular imagery connected with Lourdes apparitions (1858), in medium photography, and in the images taken by Charcot of his hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière - and argues that they become a Warburgian Pathosformel indicating a space of undecidability and 'nonsense' between the subject and otherness.
This article shows that 'tension' cannot be conceived as a specific object of an analysis for which one could determine a precise field of enquiry. Instead, it establishes tension as a specific mode or angle of approach with which any given contingent object or set of objects can be explored. The wideness of its applicability and the specificity of its angle suggest that research on tension can help to unfold a better understanding of a classical ontological question concerning the essential value of actions and relations in the definition of what a thing is. The text follows this line of argumentation by pairing contemporary philosophical sources and specific aesthetic and political examples. Suggesting the possibility of an open classification of different modes of tension, it clarifies the extent to which the essential definition of a thing is bound to the contingent analysis of its transformations.
This article discusses the function of tension in autobiographies written by eighteenth-century doctors George Cheyne, Francis Fuller, Claude Revillon, and the Viscount de Puysegur. It studies how their rhetorical strategies stir tensions in readers through the narration of their own periods of infirmity and search for a remedy. The descriptions of their recoveries offer resolution, legitimate their medical practices, and help diffuse their works. Through the staging of these reversals, the authors suggest a shift in the way the role of medical doctors was perceived as well as a fundamental change in their relationship to illness.
This edited transcript of a presentation by filmmaker/choreographer Laura Taler responds to Heinrich von Kleist's text by taking him on as a dancing partner. It follows a simple structure of proposal and response similar to that found in the movements between leader and follower in Argentine tango. Engaging Kleist's text in the double form of a speech and a tango performance, this critical contribution follows a twofold direction: it questions Kleist's representation of dance as a mechanical activity deprived of any form of intelligence and it refuses his attempt to force the aesthetic experience of dance into a framework that privileges theory over bodily experience. These two classical philosophical positions are questioned and provocatively opposed to the dynamic, situated, and dialogic thought performed within a witty tango interaction.
This article conceptualizes tension as a relation between elements in which at least two forces with different directions are involved. How can this concept of tension be applied to the analysis of the peculiar logic of life in common? The article offers a reading, inspired by the method of conceptual history, of the use of the concept of 'force' in three models of society: Hobbes's political model, the economic model proposed by the thinkers of commercial society, and Durkheim's social theory. The analysis sheds some light on the ways in which the presence of contradictory forces can be taken to be constitutive of the social itself. This observation is then used to suggest that the puzzling fascination exerted by the notion of tension can be better understood if we see it pointing to some fundamental features of our way of collectively inhabiting the world.
Insects, the new food?
(2017)
In many parts of the world it is common to eat insects while in the western world it is regarded as a bizarre habit, even evoking disgust. Is this justified? What if insects were nutritionally similar to our common meat products and have proven to be delicious in blind tests? Insects have an environmental impact which is much less than our common production animals, so why not eat it? If these questions can be answered affirmatively, then the question is: Can we persuade the western consumers to take this psychological barrier? There has been a tremendous interest during the last five years to promote insects as food. There are now close to 200 start-up companies listed. Also, in the scientific world the interest is growing exponentially, testified by the number of articles on edible insects that have appeared during the last 15 years (83 from 2011 to 2015 against 9 from 2001 to 20051). These articles deal with harvesting from nature, environmental benefits, nutritional value, food safety, processing, and consumer attitudes. I will give a short overview of the developments in these different areas.
How is it possible to write about "American" habitus in general, when the United States is socially, geographically, ethically and politically so diverse? "The USA", it has been observed, "is not a country, it is a continent". The social forces and social processes shaping the habitus of Americans are multifarious. There has not, for example, ever been a single elite in the USA as a whole that has succeeded in monopolising the social "model-setting" function to the extent that was common in the history of many Western European countries. For the development of American habitus, Stephen Mennell advances a central proposition: His thesis is that the central historic experience shaping the social habitus of Americans is that of their country constantly becoming more powerful relative to its neighbours. This has had long-term and all-pervasive effects on the way Americans see themselves, on how they perceive the rest of the world, and how others see them.
Nations are signified by their constructed or mythicized cultural memory, since "identity is part of memory discourse". There are shared historical legacies in Southeast European countries, among which the most significant are Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire: "It has been chiefly the Ottoman elements or the ones perceived as such which have mostly given rise to the current stereotype of the Balkans, so that it would not be an exaggeration to say that the Balkans are, in fact, the Ottoman legacy." Contrary to it, the Habsburg legacy and the belonging to the Habsburg Monarchy have mainly not been seen in the same, negative way. Consequently, there are two different understandings of national identity and different strategies in defining self-representation in the (previous) provinces of the two empires, which is also explicated in Southeast European operas. The construction of Croatian national identity is considered through the stage representations of the historical Siege of Szigetvár (1566).
On July 10, 1798, the German ensemble at the Vienna court theater presented the premiere performance of 'Die Hochzeit des Figaro', the first production of Mozart and Da Ponte's 'Le nozze di Figaro' – and indeed of any Mozart-Da Ponte work – at the court theater since Mozart's death and Da Ponte's departure from the imperial capital. A few months later, on December 11, 1798, a new production of Don Giovanni, titled Don Juan, arrived at the court theater stage. On September 19, 1804, a production of Così fan tutte followed, under the title 'Mädchentreue'. Although the productions were not extraordinarily successful in terms of performance numbers, they represented important trends in the Viennese reception of Mozart's operas that were to continue throughout the early nineteenth century. In particular, these productions left behind numerous records about the convoluted processes through which theatrical works were approved, re-approved, and revised before reaching the stage in Vienna around 1800. Particularly prominent among these processes was censorship. Yet, as this article shows, Viennese censors worked in tandem with numerous private and public agents who likewise contributed to the final shape of pre-existing works' adaptations. An examination of the censorial approaches to Mozart's Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte in Vienna around 1800 shows that late Enlightenment censorship was contradictory and multidirectional and should be considered not as a force of restriction but as an element that affected artworks in ways similar to other social, political, and cultural factors, such as patronage, audience structure, and various social and political ideologies.
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.
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 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.
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".
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 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.
In 1983, Brian Henderson published an article that examined various types of narrative structure in film, including flashbacks and flashforwards. After analyzing a whole spectrum of techniques capable of effecting a transition between past and present – blurs, fades, dissolves, and so on – he concluded: "Our discussions indicate that cinema has not (yet) developed the complexity of tense structures found in literary works". His "yet" (in parentheses) was an instance of laudable caution, as very soon – in some ten–fifteen years – the situation would change drastically, and temporal twists would become a trademark of a new genre that has not (yet) acquired a standardized name: "modular narratives", "puzzle films", and "complex films" are among the labels used.
Popularity/Prestige
(2018)
What is the canon? Usually this question is just a proxy for something like, "Which works are in the canon?" But the first question is not just a concise version of the second, or at least it doesn’t have to be. Instead, it can ask what the structure of the canon is - in other words, when things are in the canon, what are they in? This question came to the fore during the project that resulted in Pamphlet 11. The members of that group were looking for morphological differences between the canon and the archive. The latter they define, straightforwardly and capaciously, as "that portion of published literature that has been preserved—in libraries and elsewhere" The canon is a slipperier concept; the authors speak instead of multiple canons, like the books preserved in the Chadwyck-Healey Nineteenth-Century Fiction Collection, the constituents of the six different "best-twentieth century novels" lists analyzed by Mark Algee-Hewitt and Mark McGurl in Pamphlet 8, authors included in the British Dictionary of National Biography, and so forth. [...] This last conundrum points the way out of these difficulties and into a workable model of the structure of the canon. It suggests two different ways of entering the canon: being read by many and being prized by an elite few—or, to use the terms arrived at in Pamphlet 11, popularity and prestige. With these two dimensions, we arrive at a canonical space [...].
Am 6. Juli 1916 notierte Ludwig Wittgenstein in seinem Tagebuch: "Und insofern hat wohl auch Dostojewskij recht, wenn er sagt, dass der, welcher glücklich ist, den Zweck des Daseins erfüllt." Diese Aussage ist eingebettet in Überlegungen zur Beziehung von Ethik und Ästhetik in seinem Tagebuch, die später in den 'Tractatus logicophilosophicus' einfliessen (ab Satz 6.42). Die Figur Dostojewskijs, die am explizitesten solche Sätze aussprach, wie den oben zitierten, ist der Starez Sosima aus den 'Brüdern Karamasow'. Wittgenstein hat diesen Roman so oft gelesen, dass er ihn nahezu auswendig konnte, insbesondere die Reden des Starez Sosima. Obwohl Wittgenstein darauf bestand, dass Ethik "unaussprechbar" ist, deutet er an, dass Literatur das gute Leben "zeigen" kann. Somit überschreitet er die Grenzen der frühen analytischen Philosophie, die sich an mathematischen Wissenschaften orientierte und sich möglichst von der Kunst abzugrenzen suchte.
Des critiques et écrivains de nouvelles ont défendu l'idée que la brieveté et un unique moment de clarté sont les éléments essentiels du format court typique de la nouvelle. Cependant, la nouvelle postcoloniale est plurielle, polyphonique et versatile, et elle a tendance à s'appuyer sur le désaccord culturel, social, et linguistique. Ce chapitre examine la traduction et l'échec de celle-ci dans l'oeuvre de deux nouvellistes prolifiques qui viennent des deux différentes traditions postcoloniales : Nadine Gordimer et Anita Desai. La prémisse de mon argument est que les nouvelles de ces écrivains ont pour la plupart lieu dans des espaces périphériques, par exemple des villages et des avant-postes. Elles dramatisent une forme de processus postcolonial de désengagement des centres de pouvoir en explorant et en remettant en question des hiérarchies discursives. Cette renégociation implique la présence de perspectives multiples et de subjectivités plurielles, de même qu'elle insiste sur des traductions problématiques et des malentendus surgissant en leur sein. Par l'étude de textes de Gordimer et Desai, ce chapitre considère plusieurs formes de malentendus – fausses représentations, mécompréhension, traductions erronées et obstructions linguistiques – qui ses présentent dans deux nouvelles. Il ressort de cette analyse que les malentendus sont susceptibles de devenir les instruments de l'expression d'une résistance dans les sites hégémoniques de la langue et du pouvoir.
Cet article examine le rôle souvent occulté et pourtant essentiel de la traduction comme source d'innovation et de créativité dans l'histoire littéraire et la théorie. Il s'appuie sur plusieurs exemples allant du fameux épisode de la création d'Ève à partir de la "côte d'Adam" dans la Bible de Jérôme, basée sur la traduction fautive du mot hébreu "qaran" en latin et reflétant le biais patriarcal de Jérôme, à la traduction, tronquée du Deuxième Sexe de Simone de Beauvoir (1946) par le zoologiste retraité Howard M. Parshley qui allait néanmoins inspirer des études marquantes de la seconde vague féministe américaine telles que "The Feminine Mystique" (1963) de Betty Friedan et "Sexual Politics" (1970) de Kate Millett. L'exemple le plus développé retrace l'interaction productive de la traduction et de la réécriture dans la fiction d'Angela Carter, de "The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault" (1977) jusqu'à ses célèbres "stories about fairy stories" recueillies dans "The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories" (1979) et "American Ghosts and Old World Wonders" (1992). Je propose de lire les variations de Carter sur "Aschenputtel" dans "Ashputtle or The Mother's Ghost" comme un correctif à sa traduction de la morale de "Cendrillon ou la Petite Pantoufle de Verre" de Perrault. La poétique traductive (translational poetics) de Carter démontre ainsi l'impact crucial de la traduction – y compris des erreurs – sur la démarche de l'écrivain, qui associe la (re)lecture créative inhérente à l'activité de traduction au travail de (ré)écriture jusqu'à en faire la matrice à partir de laquelle elle a élaboré son oeuvre singulière.
In her article, Karin Littau proposes a material or medial turn in the humanities and social sciences to end the neglect of the material basis to every act of communication, including translation. This proposal is warmly welcomed. As a comparatist who has for some time been trying to build bridges between literary studies and book history, I strongly support Littau's point of view – all the more since I am less optimistic regarding the general acceptance of such ideas in the humanities, and especially in literary and translation studies. I am not so sure that McLuhan and the other authorities for the importance of mediality and technicity whom Littau quotes (e.g. Kittler, Ong, and Gumbrecht) have really provoked a "crisis in the self-understanding of the human sciences". For brevity's sake, in my response below, I leave aside literary studies to focus on translation studies.
Koselleck has repeatedly rejected the existence of a collective memory. All memory derives from individual experiences which are not interchangeable. Any person has the right to his own memories, without which he could not live and which cannot be collectivized. Only the conditions under which they are realized and recollected may be referred to as supra-individual. For this reason it is advisable to distinguish between the primary experiences of those who have lived them as a first person and who bind them to their own memories, and the secondary experiences after the fact of those who were not present in the situation which gave rise to the immediate experience. This distinction also applies to memorials. The messages of monuments are open to a double exegesis: they evoke the unmistakable occasions that have led to death. Like primary experiences they are not interchangeable. But, even so, artistic responses to incomparable occasions repeat themselves. There is only a limited repertoire of aesthetic solutions for fixating violent death – which individually is always unique – in the memory.
The object of this study is one of the most ambitious projects of twentieth-century art history: Aby Warburg's 'Atlas Mnemosyne', conceived in the summer of 1926 – when the first mention of a 'Bilderatlas', or "atlas of images", occurs in his journal – and truncated three years later, unfinished, by his sudden death in October 1929. Mnemosyne consisted in a series of large black panels, about 170x140 cm., on which were attached black-and-white photographs of paintings, sculptures, book pages, stamps, newspaper clippings, tarot cards, coins, and other types of images. Warburg kept changing the order of the panels and the position of the images until the very end, and three main versions of the Atlas have been recorded: one from 1928 (the "1-43 version", with 682 images); one from the early months of 1929, with 71 panels and 1050 images; and the one Warburg was working on at the time of his death, also known as the "1-79 version", with 63 panels and 971 images (which is the one we will examine). But Warburg was planning to have more panels – possibly many more – and there is no doubt that Mnemosyne is a dramatically unfinished and controversial object of study.
Patterns and interpretation
(2017)
One thing for sure: digitization has completely changed the literary archive. People like me used to work on a few hundred nineteenth-century novels; today, we work on thousands of them; tomorrow, hundreds of thousands. This has had a major effect on literary history, obviously enough, but also on critical methodology; because, when we work on 200,000 novels instead of 200, we are not doing the same thing, 1,000 times bigger; we are doing a different thing. The new scale changes our relationship to our object, and in fact 'it changes the object itself'.
The Emotions of London
(2016)
A few years ago, a group formed by Ben Allen, Cameron Blevins, Ryan Heuser, and Matt Jockers decided to use topic modeling to extract geographical information from nineteenth-century novels. Though the study was eventually abandoned, it had revealed that London-related topics had become significantly more frequent in the course of the century, and when some of us were later asked to design a crowd-sourcing experiment, we decided to add a further dimension to those early findings, and see whether London place-names could become the cornerstone for an emotional geography of the city.
Literature, measured
(2016)
There comes a moment, in digital humanities talks, when someone raises the hand and says: "Ok. Interesting. But is it really new?" Good question... And let's leave aside the obvious lines of defense, such as "but the field is still only at its beginning!", or "and traditional literary criticism, is that always new?" All true, and all irrelevant; because the digital humanities have presented themselves as a radical break with the past, and must therefore produce evidence of such a break. And the evidence, let's be frank, is not strong. What is there, moreover, comes in a variety of forms, beginning with the slightly paradoxical fact that, in a new approach, not everything has to be new. When "Network Theory, Plot Analysis” pointed out, in passing, that a network of Hamlet had Hamlet at its center, the New York Times gleefully mentioned the passage as an unmistakable sign of stupidity. Maybe; but the point, of course, was not to present Hamlet’s centrality as a surprise; it was exactly the opposite: had the new approach not found Hamlet at the center of the play, its plausibility would have disintegrated. Before using network theory for dramatic analysis, I had to test it, and prove that it corroborated the main results of previous research.
Of the novelties introduced by digitization in the study of literature, the size of the archive is probably the most dramatic: we used to work on a couple of hundred nineteenth-century novels, and now we can analyze thousands of them, tens of thousands, tomorrow hundreds of thousands. It's a moment of euphoria, for quantitative literary history: like having a telescope that makes you see entirely new galaxies. And it's a moment of truth: so, have the digital skies revealed anything that changes our knowledge of literature? This is not a rhetorical question. In the famous 1958 essay in which he hailed "the advent of a quantitative history" that would "break with the traditional form of nineteenth-century history", Fernand Braudel mentioned as its typical materials "demographic progressions, the movement of wages, the variations in interest rates [...] productivity [...] money supply and demand." These were all quantifiable entities, clearly enough; but they were also completely new objects compared to the study of legislation, military campaigns, political cabinets, diplomacy, and so on. It was this double shift that changed the practice of history; not quantification alone. In our case, though, there is no shift in materials: we may end up studying 200,000 novels instead of 200; but, they're all still novels. Where exactly is the novelty?
Different scales, different features. It’s the main difference between the thesis we have presented here, and the one that has so far dominated the study of the paragraph. By defining it as "a sentence writ large", or, symmetrically, as "a short discourse", previous research was implicitly asserting the irrelevance of scale: sentence, paragraph, and discourse were all equally involved in the "development of one topic". We have found the exact opposite: 'scale is directly correlated to the differentiation of textual functions'. By this, we don't simply mean that the scale of sentences or paragraphs allows us to "see" style or themes more clearly. This is true, but secondary. Paragraphs allows us to "see" themes, because themes fully "exist" only at the scale of the paragraph. Ours is not just an epistemological claim, but an ontological one: if style and themes and episodes exist in the form they do, it's because writers work at different scales – and do different things according to the level at which they are operating.
Loudness in the novel
(2014)
The novel is composed entirely of voices: the most prominent among them is typically that of the narrator, which is regularly intermixed with those of the various characters. In reading through a novel, the reader "hears" these heterogeneous voices as they occur in the text. When the novel is read out loud, the voices are audibly heard. They are also heard, however, when the novel is read silently: in this la!er case, the voices are not verbalized for others to hear, but acoustically created and perceived in the mind of the reader. Simply put: sound, in the context of the novel, is fundamentally a product of the novel’s voices. This conception of sound mechanics may at first seem unintuitive—sound seems to be the product of oral reading—but it is only by starting with the voice that one can fully appreciate sound’s function in the novel. Moreover, such a conception of sound mechanics finds affirmation in the works of both Mikhail Bakhtin and Elaine Scarry: "In the novel," writes Bakhtin, "we can always hear voices (even while reading silently to ourselves)."
The concept of length, the concept is synonymous, the concept is nothing more than, the proper definition of a concept ... Forget programs and visions; the operational approach refers specifically to concepts, and in a very specific way: it describes the process whereby concepts are transformed into a series of operations—which, in their turn, allow to measure all sorts of objects. Operationalizing means building a bridge from concepts to measurement, and then to the world. In our case: from the concepts of literary theory, through some form of quantification, to literary texts.
We would study not style as such, but style 'at the scale of the sentence': the lowest level, it seemed, at which style as a distinct phenomenon became visible. Implicitly, we were defining style as a combination of smaller linguistic units, which made it, in consequence, particularly sensitive to changes in scale—from words to clauses to whole sentences.
The nineteenth century in Britain saw tumultuous changes that reshaped the fabric of society and altered the course of modernization. It also saw the rise of the novel to the height of its cultural power as the most important literary form of the period. This paper reports on a long-term experiment in tracing such macroscopic changes in the novel during this crucial period. Specifically, we present findings on two interrelated transformations in novelistic language that reveal a systemic concretization in language and fundamental change in the social spaces of the novel. We show how these shifts have consequences for setting, characterization, and narration as well as implications for the responsiveness of the novel to the dramatic changes in British society.
This paper has a second strand as well. This project was simultaneously an experiment in developing quantitative and computational methods for tracing changes in literary language. We wanted to see how far quantifiable features such as word usage could be pushed toward the investigation of literary history. Could we leverage quantitative methods in ways that respect the nuance and complexity we value in the humanities? To this end, we present a second set of results, the techniques and methodological lessons gained in the course of designing and running this project.
If there is one thing to be learned from David Foster Wallace, it is that cultural transmission is a tricky game. This was a problem Wallace confronted as a literary professional, a university-based writer during what Mark McGurl has called the Program Era. But it was also a philosophical issue he grappled with on a deep level as he struggled to combat his own loneliness through writing. This fundamental concern with literature as a social, collaborative enterprise has also gained some popularity among scholars of contemporary American literature, particularly McGurl and James English: both critics explore the rules by which prestige or cultural distinction is awarded to authors (English; McGurl). Their approach requires a certain amount of empirical work, since these claims move beyond the individual experience of the text into forms of collective reading and cultural exchange influenced by social class, geographical location, education, ethnicity, and other factors. Yet McGurl and English's groundbreaking work is limited by the very forms of exclusivity they analyze: the protective bubble of creative writing programs in the academy and the elite economy of prestige surrounding literary prizes, respectively. To really study the problem of cultural transmission, we need to look beyond the symbolic markets of prestige to the real market, the site of mass literary consumption, where authors succeed or fail based on their ability to speak to that most diverse and complicated of readerships: the general public. Unless we study what I call the social lives of books, we make the mistake of keeping literature in the same ascetic laboratory that Wallace tried to break out of with his intense authorial focus on popular culture, mass media, and everyday life.
In the last few years, literary studies have experienced what we could call the rise of quantitative evidence. This had happened before of course, without producing lasting effects, but this time it’s probably going to be different, because this time we have digital databases, and automated data retrieval. As Michel’s and Lieberman’s recent article on "Culturomics" made clear, the width of the corpus and the speed of the search have increased beyond all expectations: today, we can replicate in a few minutes investigations that took a giant like Leo Spitzer months and years of work. When it comes to phenomena of language and style, we can do things that previous generations could only dream of.
When it comes to language and style. But if you work on novels or plays, style is only part of the picture. What about plot – how can that be quantified? This paper is the beginning of an answer, and the beginning of the beginning is network theory. This is a theory that studies connections within large groups of objects: the objects can be just about anything – banks, neurons, film actors, research papers, friends... – and are usually called nodes or vertices; their connections are usually called edges; and the analysis of how vertices are linked by edges has revealed many unexpected features of large systems, the most famous one being the so-called "small-world" property, or "six degrees of separation": the uncanny rapidity with which one can reach any vertex in the network from any other vertex. The theory proper requires a level of mathematical intelligence which I unfortunately lack; and it typically uses vast quantities of data which will also be missing from my paper. But this is only the first in a series of studies we’re doing at the Stanford Literary Lab; and then, even at this early stage, a few things emerge.
This paper is the report of a study conducted by five people – four at Stanford, and one at the University of Wisconsin – which tried to establish whether computer-generated algorithms could "recognize" literary genres. You take 'David Copperfield', run it through a program without any human input – "unsupervised", as the expression goes – and ... can the program figure out whether it's a gothic novel or a 'Bildungsroman'? The answer is, fundamentally, Yes: but a Yes with so many complications that it is necessary to look at the entire process of our study. These are new methods we are using, and with new methods the process is almost as important as the results.
BLACK KIRBY is a collaborative "entity" that is the creative doppelganger of artists / designers John Jennings and Stacey "Blackstar" Robinson. The manifestation of this avatar is an exhibition and catalog1 of primarily visual artworks-on-paper that celebrate the groundbreaking work of legendary comics creator Jack Kirby regarding his contributions to the pop culture landscape and his development of some of the conventions of the comics medium.
BLACK KIRBY also functions as a highly syncretic mythopoetic framework by appropriating Jack Kirby’s bold forms and revolutionary ideas combined with themes centered around AfroFuturism social justice, Black history, media criticism, science fiction, magical realism, and the utilization of Hip Hop culture as a methodology for creating visual expression. This collection of work also focuses on the digital medium and how its inherent affordances offer much more flexibility in the expression of visual communication and what that means in its production and consumption in the public sphere. In a sense, BLACK KIRBY appropriates the gallery as a conceptual "crossroads" to examine identity as a socialized concept and to show the commonalities between Black comics creators and Jewish comics creators and how they both utilize the medium of comics as space of resistance. The duo attempts to re-mediate "Blackness" and other identity contexts as "sublime technologies" that produce experiences that sometime limit human progress and possibility. This paper / presentation will examine some of the themes of this inaugural exhibition of this new artistic team and share the processes involved with the ideation, execution, and installation of the exhibition.
The emotional state of being moved, though frequently referred to in both classical rhetoric and current language use, is far from established as a well-defined psychological construct. In a series of three studies, we investigated eliciting scenarios, emotional ingredients, appraisal patterns, feeling qualities, and the affective signature of being moved and related emotional states. The great majority of the eliciting scenarios can be assigned to significant relationship and critical life events (especially death, birth, marriage, separation, and reunion). Sadness and joy turned out to be the two preeminent emotions involved in episodes of being moved. Both the sad and the joyful variants of being moved showed a coactivation of positive and negative affect and can thus be ranked among the mixed emotions. Moreover, being moved, while featuring only low-to-mid arousal levels, was experienced as an emotional state of high intensity; this applied to responses to fictional artworks no less than to own-life and other real, but media-represented, events. The most distinctive findings regarding cognitive appraisal dimensions were very low ratings for causation of the event by oneself and for having the power to change its outcome, along with very high ratings for appraisals of compatibility with social norms and self-ideals. Putting together the characteristics identified and discussed throughout the three studies, the paper ends with a sketch of a psychological construct of being moved.
Stories can elicit powerful emotions. A key emotional response to narrative plots (e.g., novels, movies, etc.) is suspense. Suspense appears to build on basic aspects of human cognition such as processes of expectation, anticipation, and prediction. However, the neural processes underlying emotional experiences of suspense have not been previously investigated. We acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data while participants read a suspenseful literary text (E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman") subdivided into short text passages. Individual ratings of experienced suspense obtained after each text passage were found to be related to activation in the medial frontal cortex, bilateral frontal regions (along the inferior frontal sulcus), lateral premotor cortex, as well as posterior temporal and temporo-parietal areas. The results indicate that the emotional experience of suspense depends on brain areas associated with social cognition and predictive inference.
Emotional competence has an important influence on development in school. We hypothesized that reading and discussing children’s books with emotional content increases children’s emotional competence. To examine this assumption, we developed a literature-based intervention, named READING and FEELING, and tested it on 104 second and third graders in their after-school care center. Children who attended the same care center but did not participate in the emotion-centered literary program formed the control group (n = 104). Our goal was to promote emotional competence and to evaluate the effectiveness of the READING and FEELING program. Emotional competence variables were measured prior to the intervention and 9 weeks later, at the end of the program. Results revealed significant improvements in the emotional vocabulary, explicit emotional knowledge, and recognition of masked feelings. Regarding the treatment effect for detecting masked feelings, we found that boys benefited significantly more than girls. These findings underscore the assumption that children’s literature is an appropriate vehicle to support the development of emotional competence in middle childhood.
This psychophysiological study is the first to examine the relationship between emotional tears and emotional piloerection (i.e., goosebumps). Although both phenomena have been related to peak states of being moved, details about their temporal occurrence and the associated levels of physiological arousal have remained unknown. In our study, we used emotionally powerful film scenes that were self-selected by participants. Our findings show that even within peak moments of emotional arousal, a gradation of intensity is possible. The overlap of tears and goosebumps signifies a maximal climax within peak moments. On the side of the stimulus, we found that displays of prosocial behavior play a crucial role in the elicitation of tears and goosebumps. Finally, based on the results of a formal film analysis of the tears-eliciting clips provided by our participants, as compared to randomly extracted, equally long control clips from the same films, we show how the technical and artistic making of the clips was optimized for the display of social interaction and emotional expressions.
The present paper aims to elucidate the conceptual structure of the aesthetics of literature.Following Fechner's "aesthetics from below" (1876) and adopting a method introduced by Jacobsen, Buchta, Kohler, and Schroeger (2004), we asked 1544 German-speaking research participants to list adjectives that they use to label aesthetic dimensions of literature in general and of individual literary forms and genres in particular (novels, short stories, poems, plays, comedies). According to our analyses of frequency, mean list rank, and the Cognitive Salience Index, beautiful and suspenseful rank highest across all target categories. For plays/comedies, funny and sad turned out to be the most relevant terms; for novels and short stories, suspenseful, interesting and romantic; and for poetry romantic, along with the music-related terms harmonious, rhythmic, and melodious. A comparison of our results with analogous studies for visual aesthetics and music yielded a comprehensive map of the distribution of aesthetic appeal dimensions across sensory modalities and aesthetic domains, with poetry and music showing the greatest overlap.
This study explored the organization of the semantic field and the conceptual structure of moving experiences by investigating German-language expressions referring to the emotional state of being moved. We used present and past participles of eight psychological verbs as primes in a free word-association task, as these grammatical forms place their conceptual focus on the eliciting situation and on the felt emotional state, respectively. By applying a taxonomy of basic knowledge types and computing the Cognitive Salience Index, we identified joy and sadness as key emotional ingredients of being moved, and significant life events and art experiences as main elicitors of this emotional state. Metric multidimensional scaling analyses of the semantic field revealed that the core terms designate a cluster of emotional states characterized by low degrees of arousal and slightly positive valence, the latter due to a nearly balanced representation of positive and negative elements in the conceptual structure of being moved.
The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles
(2017)
It is a common experience—and well established experimentally—that music can engage us emotionally in a compelling manner. The mechanisms underlying these experiences are receiving increasing scrutiny. However, the extent to which other domains of aesthetic experience can similarly elicit strong emotions is unknown. Using psychophysiology, neuroimaging and behavioral responses, we show that recited poetry can act as a powerful stimulus for eliciting peak emotional responses, including chills and objectively measurable goosebumps that engage the primary reward circuitry. Importantly, while these responses to poetry are largely analogous to those found for music, their neural underpinnings show important differences, specifically with regard to the crucial role of the nucleus accumbens. We also go beyond replicating previous music-related studies by showing that peak aesthetic pleasure can co-occur with physiological markers of negative affect. Finally, the distribution of chills across the trajectory of poems provides insight into compositional principles of poetry.
The present volume documents the twofold character of the conference 'Science meets Comics' with the first part focusing on comics as a format for communicating complex topics and the second part addressing food in the age of the Anthropocene as one such example for complex topics. The overall objective of the symposium was to deal with the results and suggestions of the presentations and discussions, to find possible pathways on how to feed the world in the future and to co-produce the final chapter of the scientific comic 'Eating Anthropocene' together with all artists participating in the project. In order to sum up the framing, contents and design process of the comic as well as to highlight its Anthropocene context we below provide a slightly abridged version of the preface of our comic book.
Interview mit Katerina Teaiwa über ihr Buch zu den Umweltschäden und schweren Menschenrechtsverletzungen auf der Insel Ocean Island (Banaba) aufgrund des Phosphatabbaus durch Besatzungs- und Kolonialmächte.
Our daily food consumption is slowly but surely turning into the largest environmental threat. The agricultural sector consumes 70% of the water used by humankind. The production of meat consumes enormous amounts of water compared to plants. Innovations in the area of food production are lately summarized as AgTech, agricultural technology. This encompasses all sorts of areas, ranging from drone-controlled tractors to printed hamburgers. Specifically the challenge of making use of the limited areas available in cities and maximizing crop yields has seen a recent boom in novel approaches – and quite a bit of investor finance.
Human-induced environmental change represents one of the major challenges of current and future generations. To evaluate the anthropogenic impacts on the biosphere, the concept of Planetary Boundaries was developed, indicating that in case of four out of nine environmental indicators a transgression of corresponding boundaries has already taken place: Biodiversity loss, climate change, land-system change, and biogeochemical flows. Further, paleoclimate research has shown that the earth´s environment has been relatively stable for the last 12,000 years. Researchers assume that this, in geological terms, very short period – called Holocene – is now already again replaced by a new geological era: the Anthropocene, due to the tremendous impacts humans had on earth.
In Japan, most contemporary readers expect comics, or manga, to be entertaining fiction ('story manga'), magazine-based, and targeted at age- and gender-specific demographics. These narratives eventually reappear in bound book editions ('tankōbon'), after they have proven to be popular to an extent that would warrant print runs of more than 5,000 copies. Due to the central role of magazines as first site of publication since the 1960s, genre specificity has been essential – for editors, readers, and artists alike. While manga's traditional genres have been gender- and age-specific, thematic genres such as SF, horror and comedy, or recently also blog-like essay manga, come to the fore whenever the otherwise prevalent categories forfeit efficacy. But there is one genre which does not comply with these categories, i.e. gakushū manga, educational or instructional comics.
A comic can tell the story of almost anything: a single atom, the entire solar system, the past, future events, dreams and thoughts. All this, and more, can be depicted. When presenting facts, a certain artistic licence can be deployed if, for instance, the author wants to emphasise important details; likewise, aspects he or she deems irrelevant can be left out. Moreover, questions and issues can be laid out that are difficult or even impossible to portray photographically or cinematically. However, when the cartoon strip sets out its version of information, events, objects and people, it can also result in a distortion of reality. The graphic may not always make clear exactly how something looks or the precise way in which something happened. And even where documentary images exist, the comic strip representation of the non-fictional is always coloured by artistic interpretation.
There is no doubt that factual discourse exists in comics – the kind of communication that intends to be understood as a reference to a shared and actual reality. Factual comics are not, however, common. While the formal structure of comics clearly allows for factuality, the historical specificity of its aesthetics seems to introduce a non-binding but plausible 'drift' of the art form, ultimately pulling away from reality and towards fiction. This does not prevent factual comics, but it allows for subversive remnants in their aesthetic make-up. One of these is a 'parasitic imagination', which might be understood in the context of Michel Serres' concepts of the parasite. It opens up cartoonish depictions for tertiary significations beyond the drawing and its ultimate real reference. Rather than avoid this basic vehicle of comic book discourse, the 'challenge to factual comics' must be how to employ them in the service of the intended communication.
Beyond Illustration
(2017)
Sophisticated science reported on in comics. The once unthinkable is here as comics are being leveraged and enthusiastically welcomed into forums that would have been off limits not long ago. It's an exciting time of change. But in this headlong dash forward, I want to offer a pause for consideration, and suggest that we ask, what are the things that comics do uniquely compared to other forms of representation? And from there, let us explore how we can best take advantage of comics' particular affordances to do with comics things only comics can do.
In October 2015, the Cluster of Excellence 'Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory' at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin staged a symposium entitled Science meets Comics. Academics from various disciplines converged along with artists from all over the world in order to discuss the future of global nutrition – and the medium of the comic strip as a communication tool for the complex issues in this field. The open two-day symposium was followed by a closed, three-day workshop wherein the artists and cluster members took up the issues raised at the symposium and worked on possible directions for the future.
In Britain in the late 1880s, two pop cultural icons had an extraordinary meeting: one, Ally Sloper, the fictional star of comic books and stage productions and the other Jack the Ripper, the real-life serial killer who was instantly fictionalised on page and stage as the bogeyman of the moment. The aim here is to explore the way in which this dynamic developed, with a focus on a single issue of 'Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday' (October 20, 1888), which appeared at the point in time when it was first realised that the killings were being done by a lone individual, and when panic was at its peak. What was at stake politically in the comic’s reaction? What can it tell us about Victorian attitudes to fear, death, and poverty? About the status of women? Finally, about law and order, and the social contract that existed between citizen and police?
In this article I read Jaime Cortez's graphic novel 'Sexile' as an intervention into linear narratives of crossing such as the "victim-rescuing narrative" (Shaksari) or the "transsexual narrative" (Bhanji). 'Sexile' celebrates the resourcefulness and creativity with which the denizens of the borderlands craft homes in the no-man’s land between departures and impossible arrivals. I argue that it is both the story that Sexile (re)tells as well as the format of the graphic novel that make 'Sexile' a life-affirming, useful, and challenging monument to life in the borderlands of national and gendered belonging.
Monsters are no rarity in the history of U. S.-American comics, but in Ken Dahl's eponymous small press comic they assume a articular function: His morphing monsters tell a story about how being a carrier of the herpes virus leads to incessant worry and social isolation. Dahl's narrative exposes the instability of the body's boundaries, and that of the distinction between illness and health. This chapter reads Monsters through traditions and theorizations of the Monstrous and Grotesque, as well as cultural histories of medicine that have shed light on discourses of contagion and (in-)visibility of illness. It is the idiosyncrasies of the comics medium and its history, and those of Dahl's stylistic choices, that enable a particularly tangible representation of social and personal illness experience.
This essay on the nature of the boundary of the comics form is an analysis of US Congressman John Lewis’s autobiography March, which recounts his early days as a civil rights leader and is in the form of a comic or "graphic novel". A few key examples are examined in which normally distinct images and textual elements blend together thereby bringing into question the nature of the boundary in a more general sense as it functions in the comics. Some of the formal elements of the graphic novel analyzed by the essay include its symbolic composition, arrangement of panels and images, treatment of light and dark areas, deployment of racialized icons, and blurring of temporalities and history.
Th¬e main principle of holism – "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" – can be traced back to ancient philosophical studies. Although the term itself was coined by Jan Christiaan Smuts in 1926, the earliest formulations can already be found in Taoism, in the philosophy of Lao Tzu, as well as in Aristotle's 'Metaphysics'. However, a complete and profound sense of the principle has only been revealed in such theories as Gestalt psychology (Kurt Koffka, Max Wertheimer and others), the general systems theory (Ludwig von Bertalanffy), and the theory of complexity (synergetics) as formulated by the Moscow school of synergetics (Sergey Pavlovich Kurdyumov), to name just a few. ¬inking in this direction, from the whole to the parts (subsystems), is quite unusual for classical science which, in its course of analysis, usually moves from distinct parts to the whole. In synergetics, according to Hermann Haken, order parameters determine how parts (subsystems) of complex systems behave. A select few order parameters, as Haken says, encompass the complex behavior of diverse parts and, therefore, lead to enormously reducing the complexity in a description of a given system.
'Synergetics', a fascinating interdisciplinary science initially proposed by Hermann Haken in the late 1960s, is a framework for understanding the interaction effects of very large complex systems, with an emphasis on explaining how self-organized macroscopic phenomena can emerge as a result of these underlying interactions. An especially exciting aspect is that entirely new and distinct properties of the system can emerge somewhat spontaneously. e approach has seen great success in a host of fields ranging from physics and chemistry to brain science and economics.
If reductionism and a search for deterministic, predictive 'laws' of nature represented the dominant research strategy – and world view – of the scientific community during the 20th century, 'emergence' has become a major theme, if not the dominant approach in the 21st century, reflecting a major shift of focus toward the study of complexity and complex systems. However, this important 'climate change' in the scientific enterprise has been accompanied by much confusion and debate about what exactly emergence is. How do you know it when you see it? Or don't see it? What are its defining properties? Is it possible to predict emergence? And is there more to emergence than meets the eye? Beyond these meta-theoretical issues, there is a deep question that is often skirted, or even ignored. How do we explain emergence? Why does emergence emerge? Here, I will briefly recount the history of this important concept and will address some of the many questions that surround it. I will also consider the distinction between reductionist and holistic approaches to the subject, as well as the distinction between epistemological and ontological emergence (that is, the ability to deduce or predict emergence versus the concrete reality of an emergent phenomenon). I will argue that living systems are irreducibly emergent in both senses and that biological evolution has quintessentially been a creative emergent process that is fully consistent with modern (Darwinian) evolutionary theory. Furthermore, as I will explain, novel 'synergies' of various kinds have been responsible for the 'progressive' evolution of more complex living systems over time. e selective advantages associated with emergent, synergistic effects have played a major causal role in the evolutionary process.
We may consider narratology - the structural study of narratives - in two ways, each of them implying a slightly different 'before' and 'after'. First, this important endeavor in 20th century literary studies may be regarded as the study of a specific narrative 'logic', the formal structures that unite all narratives, fictional and factual, literary and non-literary. Secondly, narratology may be regarded as the study of specific 'texts' with specific cultural functions - storehouses of 'memory' on the one hand and, on the other, 'meaning-generating devices' integrating human action with time and place, ending up in cognition, identity, values, pragmatic norms, etc. In spite of the fact that both trends diminish the role of the specific medium of a given narrative, focusing instead on a general logic or on general functions, both of them refer 'de facto' to literature as a primary field of study; moreover, they are both children, twins one might argue, of the linguistic turn at the turn of the last century, and they both 'de facto' constantly refer to language as a primary field of study. This paradigmatic shift emphasized a specific medium and its specific logic in a general perspective without losing grip of the specificity. A lesson may be learned if we quickly repaint the history and perspective of this turn in a few broad strokes.
In the beautifully situated villa of the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin overlooking Lake Wannsee, the Third International Colloquium for Beckett Translators took place from 3rd to 6th October 1998. The financing had been realized with the help of the European Commission and the Berlin Senate for Science, Research and Culture.
The point of my explanation is simply that in its "deep-structure" even 'A Handful of Dust' (and 'a fortiori', as we shall see, other novels by Waugh) attaches itself to the mode of the historical novel, which is only in a very qualified way the descendant of the epic, as Lukacs would have us believe.
I shall take a look at a cluster of problems: the relation between fictional and actual worlds, between fictionality and narration, between action and rationality, between action and agent or subject, and between world, enunciation and subject in light of two important theoretical works, both from 1991. My choice of references is not entirely arbitrary: their basic approach shows certain similarities that underline the shortcomings of both in dealing with literature, in spite of the stimulating arguments they unfold. But they also show marked differences that allow us to develop their argument further. The books are Paisley Livingston's 'Literature and Rationality' and Marie-Laure Ryan's 'Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory'.
Though one should be very careful with reaching conclusions about the social views conveyed in 'The Beach of Falesá', and there are many opinions on the story's social message, one of them is "the exposure of white racism" (Menikoff 1984,57) and imperialism. The logical question, why this country, which is declaring itself a bulwark against the world's imperialism, would disapprove of such novel, reasonably appears. And the censoring of it could seem a complete non sequitur. Which 'ideas' could make this novel not suitable for an average Soviet reader in the eyes of the Soviet censorship?
Tagungsbericht: Playing False : representations of Betrayal
16. bis 17. September 2011, Lincoln College, Oxford University
From antiquity through the present, from the political sphere to the most personal relationships, betrayal is a ubiquitous and multifaceted phenomenon. Because of its many forms, however, betrayal demands an intensive examination within an interdisciplinary forum that transcends the narrower, political or literary spheres of betrayal, and that strives to address the multiplicity of its representations, rather than reducing it to a single definition. It is precisely such a forum that the conference, "Playing False: Representations of Betrayal" created, which Dr. Betiel Wasihun and Kristina Mendicino organized.
The following essay in comparative literature focuses on three comedies that perhaps satisfy the aforementioned conditions, namely Ludvig Holberg's 'Mascarade' of 1724, Carlo Goldoni's 'I Rusteghi' of 1760, and Georg Büchner's 'Leonce und Lena' of 1836. My interest is typological, not genealogical, i.e. I do not claim that the later authors knew the earlier dramas; for the three authors belong to different cultures and write their texts in different languages - Danish, Venetian, and German. Still, even if am not interested in the question, I cannot exclude such knowledge either. There are similarities not only in the main structure, but also in the details; and Holberg is possibly known to Goldoni and certainly to Büchner.
Comparatists have always had misgivings about the concept of comparison. The status accorded to comparison within Comparative Literature is far from dear. Although the discipline's very name derives from the concept, we are not quite sure what comparison refers to. Does it define what we do? Does it delineate a field of study, a range of objects?
Benjamin's early reception in the United States can be broken into eight phases: 1) a few notices of his work in the 1930s; 2) the appearance of two major works, without translation, in the 'Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung', when it was published in New York and mimeographed in Los Angeles; 3) several reports of his suicide along with the death of other Jewish and left-wing writers who fell victim to Nazi terror; 4) scattered use of his work in the late 1940s and 1950s; 5) a growing realization in the early 1960s that American literary and cultural criticism was missing something of significance by neglecting Benjamin's work; 6) the appearance in the 1960s of competing portraits of Benjamin by four of his surviving friends, including Hannah Arendt, who edited and introduced the first collection of his writings in English; 7) an uncanny repetition of the earlier neglect, as a significant number of Benjamin's texts are published in Great Britain during the 1970s and early 1980s but remain unavailable in the States; 8) the beginning of a sustained critical engagement with Benjamin in the late 1970s.
At the forefront of those who tenaciously pondered this issue are, I would claim, Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Benjamin and Wittgenstein both are philosophers of language who tried to establish in unique ways the doctrine of resemblance respectively: "Lehre vom Ähnlichen" and "[Lehre der] Familienähnlichkeit." What they see and find in language are not communication and mutual understanding but instead one of the weirdest phenomena in/of the world, viz., resemblance (likeness) in/of language. This phenomenon, I would insist, indicates the correlation of appearing and disappearing, of differentiating and integrating, and of dividing and imparting of language as such. For Benjamin and Wittgenstein, to sum up, language is a paradigmatic paradoxical site of (dis)appearance, differentiating integrity, and divisive imparting. For this reason, it is worthwhile to pin down where their thoughts on language converge and where they diverge.
To explicate what distinguishes pain, Benjamin elaborates: "Of all corporeal feelings, pain alone is like a navigable river which never dries up and which leads man down to the sea. [...] Pain [...] is a link between worlds. This is why organic pleasure is intermittent, whereas pain can be permanent. This comparison of pleasure and pain explains why the cause of pain is irrelevant for the understanding of man's nature, whereas the source of his greatest pleasure is extremely important. For every pain, even the most trivial one, can lead upward to the highest religious suffering, whereas pleasure is not capable of any enhancement, and owes any nobility it possesses to the grace of its birth - that is to say, its source. (SW I, 397)" In these important lines, pain's unique strength is linked not to its origin (this is reserved for pleasure), but rather to the way that its strenuous flow throughout the suffering body has the power to lead it to infinite heights. In contrast to pleasure, which is forever seeking out its sources, pain manifests itself most consummately when it is intensified; it fulfills itself most deeply by gradually reenforcing its own fortitude. To make sense of pain, therefore, we must understand the nature of its 'movement': and in Benjamin's metaphor of the "navigable river" - its flow. In what follows, I develop Benjamin's idea of the nature of pain as manifested in the internal law of its ,ow in two other of Benjamin's texts: 'Berlin Childhood Around 1900' (1934) and 'Thought Figures' (1933).
One of the cruxes of Walter Benjamin’s work is the tension between an indebting and an expiating "memoria", i. e. the afflicting and the salvific insistence of history within the present moment. On the one hand, memory inscribes itself onto spaces and bodies in the violent and painful fashion of Kafka's "Penal Colony" apparatus. On the other hand, it can, in the form of rememoration ('Eingedenken'), sublate these very inscriptions. This sublation usually involves some form of redemptive, timely (re-)verbalization, but Benjamin’s conception of it varies. To gain a better insight into this inherent, varying tension, the article will take a closer look at the connection between pain, memory and law-positing violence in some Benjaminian texts, occasionally relating them to the historical background of his discussion.
Walter Benjamin had a revealing fascination with the legend of a Chinese artist who entered his painting and disappeared in it. In his writings this character becomes an emblematic figure that enables the philosopher to discuss the nature of representation in its various infections (in games and in painting, in theater and in cinema); to explore the status of the image and of the threshold that simultaneously separates and connects image and reality; to analyse the different bodily (i. e. "aesthetic") attitudes of the beholder in his/her close or distant relationship to the image; to investigate the manifold implications of empathy ('Einfühlung ') toward the figurative world; and finally, to approach a peculiar kind of dialectics, namely the "Chinese". My paper aims at considering such varied aspects in Benjamin's interpretation of the Chinese painter, understanding it as a true "dialectical image" that in its 'non-coincidentia oppositorum' provokes not only significant hermeneutic oscillations, but even a radical inversion of its fundamental meaning.
If we take Benjamin's definitions to their logical conclusion, then the monad and the reproduced copy are set unequivocally into binary opposition, as we, the masses capable and most needful of action, are implicitly denied the potential for liberation through aesthetic experience. This denial could not have been his long-term intention. When we take into account the breadth of his writings in response to Fascism, and we look at the artistic movements, Dada in particular, that Benjamin defines as 'politicizing art,' it seems as though we risk too narrow a reading of Benjamin's theories by assuming the aura can be, or must be, done away with. Rather, I would argue that this moment of auratic interaction is crucial to effectively politicizing art at all. Mechanically-produced art, in order to function politically, must allow its audience the space necessary to step back, awaken their 'Geistesgegenwart', and take action 'before' the present moment is finished and past. The elimination of aura - as per Benjamin’s own definitions of aura - neuters the interaction this awakening requires. While Benjamin provides the framework and asks the right questions, when determining what will allow his definitions to realize their aims most fully, I submit that he draws his line in the wrong place.
The flourishing of literature and thought during the age of Goethe may have inspired German nationalism in the 1930s, but Walter Benjamin identified other values in the period worth defending. 'Deutsche Menschen' is a short collection of edited letters by well-known German authors which Benjamin published in 1936 under the pseudonym Detlef Holz in order to hide his Jewish identity. In his inscription to Scholem's copy of the book, Benjamin wrote, "May you, Gerhard, find a chamber in this ark - which I built when the Fascist flood started to rise - for the memories of your youth," and in his sister’s copy Benjamin wrote, "This ark, built after a Jewish model, for Dora - From Walter." This essay considers what Benjamin may have meant by those inscriptions. Looking beyond discussions of "German," "Jewish," and even "German-Jewish" identity, this essay explores Benjamin's descriptions of his letter collection, asking how he conceptualized and framed it at first and how it may have changed between 1931 and 1936. The categories of tradition and agency will be my focus, which I will develop in the context of Benjamin's other writings and his particular interests in quotation and materialism. &e formation and reception of 'Deutsche Menschen' reveal a complex, ambitious project that combines many of Benjamin's ideas and goals.
"I Am a Hottentot" : africanist mimicry and green xenophilia in Hans Paasche and Karen Blixen
(2014)
Claims that industrialized western countries must reform their environmental practices have often been made with reference to less-developed non-western societies living in greater "harmony" or "balance" with the natural world. Examples of what I call green xenophilia (from the Greek "xenos", meaning strange, unknown or foreign, and "philia", meaning love or attraction), are myriad, wide-ranging and culturally dispersed. They range from the appearance of the iconic "crying Indian" in anti-pollution TV and newspaper spots in the months leading up to the first Earth Day on April 22 1970 to numerous environmentalist individuals' and groups' use of the fabricated "Chief Seattle's Speech" as an authoritative touchstone of ecological consciousness, and from the British Schumacher College's endorsement of India as a source of simplicity, holism, humility, vegetarianism etc. to leading deep ecologists' advocacy of East Asian religions (especially Buddhism, Jainism and Taoism) as "biocentric" alternatives to "anthropocentric" Christianity (Rolston 1987; Dunaway 2008; Krupat 2011; Corrywright 2010). Invocations of non-western cultures, identities and worldviews have proved potent heuristic devices, enabling greens both to critique the status quo and to gesture (however schematically) towards the possibility of alternatives. Pervasive media-borne ideas and images like "the Green Tibet" (Huber 1997) and "the ecological Indian" (Krech 1999) have given environmentalist ideas about the good life physical incarnation, making them seem less remote and abstract. Yet the prevalence of xenophile dis course has also made environmentalism vulnerable to recurrent accusations of romantic primitivism, orientalism and exoticism, as western greens have sometimes (though not always) appeared to buttress traditional socio-cultural norms in the very act of challenging them (Guha 1989; Lohmann 1993; Bartholomeusz 1998). What is gained and what is risked when western greens speak about, with, for or as "the other"? In this essay I engage with two early-twentieth-century North European writers, the German Hans Paasche (1881-1921) and the Dane Karen Blixen (1885-1962), whose works bring this question to the forefront. Critical of European industrialization, and awkwardly positioned vis-a-vis their upper-class social milieus, Paasche and Blixen wrote as self-made "Africans", testing the limits between colonialism, anti-colonialism and emergent forms of environmentalism and green" lifestyle reform. More precisely, Paasche in "Die Forschungsreise des Afrikaners Lukanga Kukara ins Innerste Deutschland" ("The African Lukanga Mukara's Research Joumey into the Innermost of Germany" (1912-1913) and Blixen in "Out of Africa" (1937) deploy the ambiguous form of mimicry that Susan Gubar labels "racechange", impersonating or appropriating culturally other voices and perspectives on animals, food, physical embodiment and human-natural relations (Gubar 1997). Paasche and Blixen, I argue, used their considerable intercultural insight to construct images of Africa that they hoped would stand in redemptive contrast to the humanly and environmentally ruinous beliefs and practices of European modernity. I am interested in the acts of ethnic and textual self-alienation that these writers perform because they highlight the discursive, ethical and political ambiguities of green xenophilia - ambiguities that can be explored from different positions within the developing field of ecocritical studies.
The present article analyzes a prominent yet relatively understudied contact space among Native American, New Zealand Maori, and aboriginal Taiwanese literatures: the struggle of indigenous peoples to negotiate optimal relationships between themselves and the natural world, particularly in light of capitalist modernity and globalization. Many indigenous narratives draw sharp distinctions between native peoples and outsiders, predictably portraying the former as protectors and the latter as destroyers of both nature and indigenous local cultures. The Native American Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan's (1947-) novel 'People of the Whale' (2008), the Maori writer Patricia Grace's (1937-) novel 'Patiki' (1986), and the aboriginal Taiwanese writer Topas Tamapima's short story "Zuihou de lieren" are no exception. But these texts also problematize notions of the so-called "ecological native." They do so most conspicuously by revealing the ambiguous relationships those peoples believed closest to nature have with the nonhuman world, that is to say their environmental ambiguity ('ecoambiguity') (Thornber 2012).
Ecocriticism started out in the early 1990s in the framework of American literary studies - in the Anglo sense that equates "America" with the "United States." In fact, the new field's first professional organization, the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, was founded as an offshoot of academic interest focused on a particular region of the United States, in the backroom of a casino in Reno, Nevada, during the 1992 annual convention of the Western Literature Association. During its first decade, the bulk of ecocritical attention focused on American literature as shaped by Thoreau and British literature as shaped by Wordsworth - a limited but powerful concentration on nature writing in the genres of poetry, nonfiction prose, and the noveI, with particular attention to Native American literature. By the turn of the millennium, in a story that has by now been told repeatedly, interest in the literature-environment nexus had grown and diversified enough that ecocriticism almost literally exploded into a much broader research area encompassing multiple historical periods (from the Middle Ages to postmodernism), genres (from poetry to the graphic novel and narrative film), and regions: the Caribbean, Latin America, East Asia, and Western Europe all emerged as new areas of ecocritical exploration. New encounters between postcolonial theory and ecocritical analysis proved particularly productive for both fields: linking historical exploration and political ecology with literary analysis, the emergent "poco-eco" matrix opened new perspectives on the connections and disjunctures between imperialism, ecological crisis, and conservation. Over the last few years, the concept of "Environmental Humanities" has increasingly co me to accompany and to superimpose itself as an umbrella term on ecocriticism and comparable research areas in neighboring disciplines: environmental history, environmental anthropology, environmental philosophy, cultural geography, and political ecology. Driven by the impulse to connect environmental research across the humanities, to justify humanistic research at institutions often prone to cut first in the humanities, and to bring the knowledge generated through humanistic research into the public sphere, environmentally oriented scholars have used the term "Environmental Humanities" as a shorthand for what they hope will be a new vision of their discipline. As of this writing, the concept remains somewhat more aspirational than real. While ecocritics and environmental philosophers have long collaborated in Australia, and environmental historians and ecocritics sometimes collaborate in the United States, the disciplines that make up the Environmental Humanities have to date largely pursued their own disciplinary trajectories. But there are signs that the tide may have begun to turn. Various universities and research organizations have started programs in the field. The Swedish environmental historian Sverker Sörlin published a brief outline of the new interdisciplinary matrix in the journal 'BioScience' in 2012, and a longer manifesto followed from the editorial collective of the newly established journal 'Environmental Humanities' at Macquarie University in Australia (Rose et al. 2012). Another journal focusing on the environmental humanities began publication in early 2014 from the University of Oregon under the title 'Resilience'.
The world in a 'Zeitschrift'
(2015)
The relaunching of the Jahrbuch 'Komparatistik' in 2015 takes place at a time of ferment in comparative literary studies, as a discipline long focused primarily on Western Europe seeks to reconsider its position in a global landscape, and in the process to rethink the contours of European literature itself. Here I would like to discuss one new manifestation of this rethinking: the founding of the 'Journal of World Literature', which will be debuting in 2016. Published in Amsterdam by Brill, with its managing editors located in Leuven and in Göttingen, the 'JWL' represents a European initiative in comparative and world literary studies, and the journal has a global presence as well. It is overseen by an international board of editors (myself among them), and it has an association with the Institute for World Literature, a Harvard-based program supported by five dozen institutions around the world, which will be responsible for one of its quarterly issues each year. Global in outlook and outreach, the 'JWL' can equally be thought of as carrying on an originally German project: to embody the potentially vast field of comparative and world literature within the pages available in a scholarly journal. To this end, very different approaches were tried in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by two foundational journals: the 'Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum', published in Cluj from 1877-88 by the Transylvanian scholars Hugo Meltzl and Sámuel Brassai, and the 'Zeitschrift für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte', founded in 1886, published in Berlin under the editorship of Max Koch. Probably the very first journals in the field – the French 'Revue de littérature comparée', for example, dates only from 1921 – these pioneering journals divided up the literary territory in very different ways. Meltzl and Brassai’s 'Acta' reflected an idealistic globalism grounded in a radical multilingualism, whereas Koch opted for a more pragmatic but markedly nationalistic conception of the field. The new 'Journal of World Literature' will need to draw on the strengths of each approach even as its editors seek to avoid the pitfalls of both.
The reception of Reinhart Koselleck's oeuvre in Scandinavia has not been unified. This differences are due in part to the different languages and the rather different academic cultures in the Nordic countries. While German is widely read and understood in Denmark, it is less popular in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The need for translations and mediation through other languages differs from country to country, which makes a common Nordic reception hard to assess. Moreover, the scholars who have been instrumental in the reception and elaboration of Koselleck's thought have not typically worked within a single, delineated national space, making the notion of national receptions itself difficult to defend. This trouble with national and regional reception might even lead one to ask if the foundation of the History of Political and Social Concepts Group (known since 2012 as the History of Concepts Group) at the Finnish Institute in London in 1998 was a specifically Finnish endeavor or a Nordic one. Although the meeting was co-initiated by Kari Palonen and hosted by Henrik Stenius, the director of the Institute at the time, the group’s outlook was from the very beginning an international one. Similarly confounding are the conditions surrounding the only intellectual biography about Koselleck to date. It was written by the Danish scholar Niklas Olsen as his PhD thesis at the European University Institute and later published as a book by an American publishing house. In this respect, it can hardly be seen as a distinctly Danish or Scandinavian effort. Still, there has been a strong Scandinavian element within the international reception of Koselleck and 'Begriffsgeschichte'. As a result, scholars have produced translations of Koselleck's writings, publications inspired by his 'Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe', and theoretical projects that attempt to expand the limits of conceptual history. Institutionally, conceptual history has been very visible in the Nordic countries. The History of Concepts Group has held conferences in Copenhagen (2000), Tampere (2001), Uppsala (2006), and Helsinki (2012). The international summer school in conceptual history took place in Helsinki (2005–2012) and since then has convened in Aarhus and Copenhagen. By contrast, the irst conference in Germany did not take place until 2014 in Bielefeld.
The Future of the Noosphere
(2014)
In this article, a Koselleckian approach to the issue of time will be employed. In Koselleck's view, modernity has been characterized by a multiplicity of synchronous times, or as Helge Jordheim puts it, by "multiple temporalities". By temporality, Koselleck means something different than epochs or periodizations. More precisely, Jordheim asserts, Koselleck uses this term to reach for experiences of time, such as "progress, decadence, acceleration, or delay, the 'not yet' and the 'no longer', the 'earlier' or 'later than', the 'too early' and the 'too late', situation and the duration". Especially pertinent for this article is Koselleck's category of a horizon of expectations (Erwartungshorizont), understood as perceived prospects for the future. In both the noosphere and the Anthropocene discussion, the notion of an Age of Man seems to merge different timescales into one another, or, as stated by one of the most prominent scientists in the early debate, "The division of historical and geological time is levelled out for us". This article examines the temporality implied in the noosphere concept in order to formulate a specific question regarding the Anthropocene. The article is thus intended to contribute to the on-going examination of the Anthropocene concept by way of historicising its temporality.
This introductory analysis on the subject of werewolves in the Greek and Roman worlds in its legendary, mythical, scientific and medical dimension emphasizes an intrinsic combination of negative and positive aspects, human and non-human factors, and ancient and modern components, laying the groundwork for the study of the gendered duplicity of the werewolf's Self in the modern and contemporary literature of southern and northern Italy. In this presentation of the werewolf motif on the Italian literary panorama from the 19th to the 21st century through an overview of short stories and novels, we will examine the writers who have combined ancient rural legends with metropolitan reveries to underscore the complexity and obscure double life of the werewolf.
Nolan brings a fairly recognizable style to all his movies, often described as "dark" or "gritty." The tone is relentlessly serious, and the narratives are infused with the ambiguity and pessimism of film noir. His protagonists are, without exception, tortured, obsessed men, struggling with the loss of loved ones or past mistakes. Not only do these men face an uncaring world with murky morality, their sense of self is also unstable. To go along with the faulty memories and self-deceptions of his characters, Nolan also has a knack for misleading his audience with convoluted narratives. As Fisher puts it, he specializes in puzzles that can't be solved. 'Inception', to my mind, makes an excellent showcase for all these themes. Therefore, through an examination of its use of space and architecture as metaphors for the mind, I aim to determine the concept of the malleable self that underlies all of Nolan's movies.
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.
The three 'Materialienbände' - 'Schnitte'; 'Rom, Blicke'; and 'Erkundungen für die Präzisierung des Gefühls für einen Aufstand' - that Rolf Dieter Brinkmann produced in the early 1970s have, in the last decade, gradually come to be recognized as central statements of a radically new cultural formation. A peculiar feature of this recognition, though, is the relative puzzlement that lingers over the question as to the 'form' of these volumes. That the three objects resist generic classification is by now a truism of the Brinkmann literature; yet even the construction of a cultural field within which the volumes might be compared to other works has remained elusive. The essay that follows, based largely on a reading of 'Rom, Blicke', is an attempt to construct precisely that cultural field.
It is no accident that the figuration of rewriting as copying is an image from "One Way Street". This apparently casual assemblage of small, rather belletristic texts - still some of the least explored terrain in all of Benjamin - is in important ways the key to all of Benjamin’s later writing, and especially that writing based on the form of the "Denkbild" or figure of thought. In what follows, I will concentrate on one set of paired examples in order to demonstrate in a more focused way the practice of rewriting and its effects: on the relationship between "Berlin Childhood around 1900" and "One Way Street".
Walter Benjamin's 9th thesis on the concept of history is his most-quoted and -commented text. As it is well known, his idea of the "Angel of History" appears as a commentary on Paul Klee’s famous watercolor titled 'Angelus Novus'. I think it is necessary to open another way of interpretation through the connection of Benjamin’s Angel of History with the political iconography of Berlin, the city where he was born and lived for many years and about which he wrote in his memories of childhood, his Berlin chronicles and radio programs. I shall begin the historical narrative of Berlin's political iconography with a figure to which Benjamin paid little attention: the Goddess Fortune.
Walter Benjamin's best-known comment regarding nihilism - "to strive for such a passing away [for nature is messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away] [...] is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism" (SW III, 306) - occurs at the conclusion of his "Theological-Political Fragment" (1920–1921). In this pithy fragment Benjamin challenged the distinction between the political and the theological by pointing out the necessary relation - even codependence - of historical time and messianic time, the secular and the redemptive. The focus is the temporal dimension that dictates one’s "rhythm of life," on the one hand, and politics - its formative power - on the other. Benjamin’s translation of such abstract principles into different systems - the secular and the religious, the abstract and the particular, the collective and the individual - have confused scholars for many years. The result was often a misreading of Benjamin’s last sentence, connecting politics to nihilism and identifying the maker with his method. In order to reverse such readings, this chapter moves in four consecutive stages. I begin with the "temporal-rhythmic" principle, relating it to Benjamin's notion of Nihilism as a method. Second, I consider the specific meanings of "Nihilism" during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which I identify with the idea of a temporal 'stasis'. Third, I track down Benjamin’s uses of Nihilism and demonstrate that they reflect a certain methodological approach rather than a solution to a problem. Finally, commenting directly on contemporary interpreters of Benjamin who see him as a "nihilist" or an "anarchist," I show that Benjamin focused on the temporal and critical dimensions in order to 'overcome' nihilism and stasis.
Although Walter Benjamin was never timid when it came to writing, one practice he consistently avoided was that of creating neologisms. It is therefore with all the more reluctance that I find myself compelled to resort to something similar, in order to sum up a motif that has imposed itself over the years in my reading of Benjamin. What is involved is, to be sure, not exactly a neologism, since it does not involve the creation of a new word, but rather the highlighting of a word-part, a suffix (eine Nachsilbe). In English, to be sure, this suffix, when spoken, is indistinguishable from a word: what distinguishes it from a word is not audible, but only legible: a hyphen, marking a separation that is also a joining, a 'Bindestrich' that does not bind it to anything in particular and yet that requires it to be bound to something else. The suffix in question thus sounds deceptively familiar, since it coincides, audibly, with the word "abilities". However, unlike that word, its first letter - which purely by accident happens to be the first letter of the alphabet--is preceded by a dash. When written in isolation, this gives it a somewhat bizarre appearance, to be sure, since suffixes are not usually encountered separately from the words they modify. But this bizarre appearance pales when compared to its German 'original'. If the book of essays to be published in English under the title, "Benjamin’s -abilities," is ever translated into German - "back" into German I was tempted to write, since German here is of course the language in which Benjamin wrote and in which I generally read him - then its title, were it to be entirely faithful to the English, would indeed have to involve the creation of a neologism. For translated back into German, the German title would require its readers to "read, what was never written", namely: "Benjamins -barkeiten" (written, "Bindestrich- b--kleingeschrieben").
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.
Before turning to the essay on the experiment from 1793, which is unavoidable when discussing series, but does not exhaust the varied functions of seriality in Goethe’s morphology, a few words about the purpose of reconstructing Goethe’s practice of seriality are necessary. I want to argue that Goethe’s morphology is the site of a massive transformation of the notion of form, the scope and implications of which resurface after long latency at the beginning of the 20th century, for example, with Georg Simmel’s sociological notion of form-processes and the related idea of "reciprocity" ('Wechselwirkung') (cf. 265). My interest lies in interpreting what looks like a theory of organisms and nature as a more general theory of formation and transformation.
In a letter to Scholem, dated 22 December, 1924, Benjamin famously writes of the manuscript that was to become his 'Trauerspiel' book: "[I]ndessen überrascht mich nun vor allem, daß, wenn man so will, das Geschriebene fast ganz aus Zitaten besteht" (GS I.3, 881). Much has been made of the mosaic-like citational technique to which Benjamin refers here; his "Zitatbegriff" is said, for example, to subtend the theory of a "mikrologische Verarbeitung" of "Denkbruchstücken" into "Ideen" that Benjamin develops as his theory of representation in the "Erkenntniskritische Vorrede", which in turn figures the relation between individual phenomena and their "ideas" in astral terms. Because, however, the 'Trauerspiel' book is so often understood only on this theoretical level, e.g. as either an early articulation of Benjamin’s "avant garde" and "messianic" philosophy of history (Jäger, Kany, and Pizer) or as a performance of his systems of allegory (Menninghaus) and "constructivism" (Schöttker), his "Zitierpraxis" and the actual citations that form large parts of 'Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel' have seldom been read for the purchase they provide on the vexed status of the period and concept that was the book’s direct subject, namely, the German Baroque.
I would like to start off my cultural-historical intervention with a trouvaille from the 'Denktagebuch', a sort of intellectual notebook, of Hannah Arendt, the famous German-Jewish philosopher (1906–1975). Arendt's publications include a most profound book on the 'Human Condition' (1958, in German 'Vita activa', 1960) in which she develops the idea of 'acting / Handlung' as the crucial realm of intersubjectivity and humanity. This realm is based in the space between human beings, a literal 'inter-est' of togetherness. It is only in this space, only in the relationship to others, that the full sense of the Self, including the involuntary expressions of the person, manifests itself. It is the same realm in which the moral, social and political life is created. In the notebook of the 44-year-old Arendt one comes across the following entry: "In nichts offenbart sich die eigentümliche Vieldeutigkeit der Sprache [...] deutlicher als in der Metapher. So habe ich zum Beispiel ein Leben lang die Metapher 'es öffnet sich mir das Herz' benutzt, ohne je die dazu gehörende physische Sensation erfahren zu haben. Erst seit ich die physische Sensation kenne, weiss ich, wie oft ich gelogen habe [...]. Wie aber hätte ich je die Wahrheit der physischen Sensation erfahren, wenn die Sprache mit ihrer Metapher mir nicht bereits eine Ahnung von der Bedeutsamkeit des Vorgangs gegeben hätte?" (Notebook II, 22 December 1950, Arendt 2002, 46) The entry discusses the mutual transferral between mind and body by reflecting the role of language as a mediator for minding the body and the embodiment of the mind. Since the phrase of the 'open heart' belongs to a register of long-established metaphors, these reflections concern the comprehension of body-metaphors and their role for a 'shared meaningful space of experiences' (Gallese 2009a, 527), i.e. language as transmitter of experiences and memory in cultural history.
Slovenian partisan film is a term which denotes films glorifying Slovenian communist-led guerrilla fighters (so-called 'partisans'), who resisted the German and Italian occupying forces during WW II. These films were made during the decades of communist rule in post-war Yugoslavia and were an important part of the official ideological propaganda. Since the fall of communism in 1989 and Slovenia's secession from former Yugoslavia two years later, however, partisan films have fallen into complete neglect. This is regrettable since they not only represent an important (and not necessarily unattractive) part of Slovenian film history but also allow unique insights into the complexities of the official ideology during the decades of communist rule in the country (1945−89). Namely, the existing ideology was not as simple as might have seemed from the outside: while the Slovenian Communist party had no problems with class issues (class inequalities were regarded according to the Marxist agenda as bad and everything was actually done to eliminate them), there were many important areas of social life that were neglected or dealt with in ideologically relatively ambivalent terms.
The nascent field of neuropsychoanalysis positions itself as a putative bridge between two »historically divided disciplines«. In this chapter, we address this attempt to bridge these two disciplines, through considering a particular scientific and conceptual debate that is taking place within this new field. Neuropsychoanalysis is a diverse and loosely defined interdisciplinary field that comprises the efforts of researchers and clinicians within several branches of both psychoanalysis and the neurosciences to construct a shared space of inquiry in which clinical concepts and findings can be correlated with neuronal data and models. While researchers differ in how they conceptualize the specific contours of this shared space, they tend to converge in their desire to figure out how Freudian concepts might be anchored through neurobiological and anatomico-functional investigations.