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The oeuvre of contemporary Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi is characterized by an approach that gives precedence to process over product and combines conceptual art with vernacular traditions, making her pictures happily imperfect. Starting with Kawauchi's transmedial concept of the image, often positioned between word and image and mainly materialized through photo books, I propose that Kawauchi's photographs are imperfect thanks to her experimentation with technical mistakes, the vernacular subject-matter of everyday snapshots, seriality, sequencing, and format variation, elliptical visibility, the aesthetics of color, and a non-linear temporality. Imperfection, furthermore, emphasizes the materiality of the medium, and removes photography from the referent-centered documentary domain by way of aesthetic, rather than semiotic, significance. Imperfection also activates different modes of reception, emphasizing emotional involvement and participant viewing.
'Inbuilt errans' points to the core of the concept, namely the semantic entanglement of errantry and error. Errans as the erroneous wandering or the drifting error complicates the celebration of movement, fluidity, flexibility, or even 'queering'. The rigid or stubborn aspect of errans, its erroneousness on the other hand not only accompanies but also enables its errancy. The 'rigidity' (as rigidity in flux) requires scare quotes in order to mark the ways in which these qualities might collapse when a question of 'to whom?' is posed. Through an eclectic errantry through a personal anecdote, a meme video, an ethnographic note, as well as medical history and queer theory, this text theorizes, with the help of the 'inbuild errans' of the human body, that is, its orifices, a 'radical indifference' that points to an unplanned, ambiguous, and weak while at the same time strategic, rigid, and powerful form of resistance.
This paper begins with a Bakhtinian reflection on Javanese shadow puppet theatre (wayang kulit), and explores errancy through carnival laughter embodied and performed by the wise, grotesque figures of clown-servants (punakawan). I argue, however, that here the real subversive power lies not in a combative position that erupts in a social revolution but in offering an alternative way of thinking and being, a deviation from the philosophical (Platonic) obsession for truth and heroic/historic gestures that claim to overcome ignorance and hegemonic/normative structures. Responding to the critique of so-called feudal elements in 'Javanism', I explore how the Javanese mantra, 'manunggaling kawula gusti' (the union of servant and lord), incessantly rehearsed in the stories and life of the people, reveals neither blindness nor self-dissimulation.
The principles of ERRANS are introduced by considering two radically different contexts: Within academic publishing, the literary form of the edited collection is as common as it is denigrated and rarely reflected upon. The account being offered (within an edited collection) seeks to not only reinterpret the status of the genre, but argues in favor of a curatorial errancy within scholarly communication. Yet errancy has also become a crucial touchstone in management and leadership studies, whether as 'disruptive innovation' or 'VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) worlds', inviting a different consideration of the relationship between capitalism and its political and artistic critiques than the one offered by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello - one which does not consider itself untouched by the errant logics it discerns in its 'subjects'.
This chapter considers the role of prolegomena and authorial interventions in constraining and contextualizing orally derived saga narratives in high medieval Iceland. It examines the question of whether prolegomena were intended to be included in oral renditions of the sagas and, if so, in whose 'voice' they were understood to be spoken. The 'openness' of a saga text - the extent of editorial freedom enjoyed by those concerned with extracting it from the oral milieu - has been much discussed; however, less attention has historically been paid to the freedom which the written texts then afforded any would-be reciter for emending or adapting their content when reading them aloud to a live audience. Prolegomena provide our most instructive source of contemporary commentary on how the written sagas should be understood and transmitted, and they therefore represent distinct and important critical texts in their own right, which inform our understanding of how 'open' or 'fixed' medieval Icelanders understood these extant written sagas to be.
This essay interprets Dante's "Commedia" as an 'open work' (Eco). It grounds its open-endedness in its representations of interruption: from fictional obstacles in the protagonist's path in the "Inferno" to the narrator's anxiety over unfinishedness in the "Paradiso". Taking its cue from Boccaccio's creative rewriting of Dante's life, the essay resists the pressure of 'total coherence' embedded in (and often projected onto) the "Commedia", in order to reclaim the material vulnerability of the text and of its author.
This chapter makes the case for a literary history that accounts for the multilingual nature of medieval Denmark, giving particular attention to Danish, German, and Latin. It relates such a project to current research interests such as crossing the boundaries of national philologies; demonstrates the need for it by reviewing existing surveys of the period; and outlines some lines of enquiry, including the translation and transmission of texts, that it could pursue.
This chapter explores medieval exegetical and affective characterizations of the birthplace of Christ. It focuses in particular on evocations of this birthplace as an exposed, liminal location and argues that the radical exposure endured by Christ at the moment of his birth was crucial to medieval understandings of the significance of the Incarnation. But it also points out that its condition of openness is always in a dialectical relationship with its capacity to enclose and protect.
In "The Book of Margery Kempe", the protagonist shifts between identities and geographies as a nomadic subject, dispersed across compassionate responses to violence that unusually include a recognition of animal suffering. The "Life" of Christina the Astonishing also seizes on the nonhuman aspects of extreme affective experience as her bodily transformations participate in a process of becoming animal. Both texts reflect a medieval fascination with the devotional body as a zone of closure and opening where transhuman and interspecies associations can be safely explored.
Practices of rewriting and mouvance are central to medieval culture, but have been neglected by contemporary scholarship. This paper highlights how collaborative forms of writing such as religious song engage with complex theological thought, opening up a discourse from which the laity had previously been excluded. Using forms which defy conventional author-based aesthetic norms, these songs explore poetic practices which are both collective and inclusive.
Openness and intensity : Petrarch's becoming laurel in "Rerum vulgarium fragmenta" 23 and 228
(2022)
Our paper offers a comparative reading of Rvf 23 and 228, which describe the poetic subject's transformation into (23), or implantation with (228), the laurel tree that normally represents the poet's beloved, Laura. Bringing Petrarch's poems into dialogue with philosophical works that consider the nature of plant existence as a form of interconnectedness and porosity to the outside, we argue that the becoming tree these poems stage is a form of desire to be understood not as lack but as intensity.
This essay follows the productive discussion of Giorgio Agamben's "The Open: Man and Animal" that took place as part of the 'Openness in Medieval Culture' conference at the ICI Berlin. The essay attempts to develop a speculative notion of openness within Agamben's work, in particular by connecting the question of openness to the question of the promise: the promise of the resolution of the question of man and animal ("The Open"); the promise of the Franciscans' vow, or 'sacramentum' ("The Highest Poverty"); and the promise of language ("The Sacrament of Language").
The monastic enclosure
(2022)
The moral and physical enclosure of monks and nuns is central to the founding documents of Western monasticism. But even there it encountered the need for monasteries to interact with their societies, through recruits, hospitality, and the monastic economy. The increasing intensity of this tension is traced through key reforming texts, until later English visitations open up religious houses to closer scrutiny, ironically aided by inmates' quandary over whether to conceal or reveal their secrets.
This article draws on the nearly 1800 letters which survive from the Benedictine convent of Lüne, near Lüneburg in northern Germany, and were written between c. 1460 and 1555. It explores the textual and visual strategies which nuns in the later Middle Ages used to negotiate their enclosed status. It suggests that the language and imagery of openness were a means for the nuns to remind those outside the convent wall of their presence and purpose in life.
A small, blind-tooled volume sits on a table covered in green baize: one clasp is open, the other is closed; and a slip of paper emerges from it reading 'Veritas odium parit' ('truth breeds hatred'). This detail occurs in the foreground of a portrait by Hans Holbein of a young man identified as the Cologne patrician Hermann von Wedigh III (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). A study of the physical features of the book and of the history of the brief text - actually an ancient and then Erasmian adage - leads to a new interpretation of the painting in the context of humanist friendship. The book is seen to be a multivalent simile for the work of art authored by the artist as well as for the sitter himself, raising questions about the implications for these of a medium that can be opened and closed. The half-open condition of the book is understood to reflect the complementary pressures of openness and closedness, accessibility and intimacy, that characterized the Renaissance republic of letters.
Das zusammengesetzte chinesische Wort 東西 hat die Doppelbedeutung von 'Ost-West' und 'Ding' bzw. 'Objekt'. In der Gedichtsammlung des Hongkonger Schriftstellers Leung Ping-kwan mit dem Titel 東西 ('Dong-Xi', Ost-West-Angelegenheiten) erscheinen der Osten und der Westen jeweils als eine Erweiterung des anderen, wobei ihre anhaltenden Interaktionen eine vitale Welt offenbaren, die unaufhörlich im Entstehen begriffen ist. Umgekehrt erweisen sich das Globale und das Lokale nicht nur als geografische Signifikanten, sondern auch als zeitliche Indikatoren von Sinneswahrnehmungen, Erinnerungen, Erfahrungen, Gefühlen und Vorstellungen, deren dynamisches Zusammenspiel eine poetische Welt fortwährend erschafft und wieder auflöst. Leungs Lyrik, die die traditionelle poetische Form des 'Dinggedichts' aufgreift, versucht durch die Würdigung alltäglicher Objekte, deren Formen, Gerüche und Farben im modernen Leben oft ignoriert werden, zu einer Wiederverzauberung der Welt zu gelangen. Leungs Dinggedichte führen uns in eine Welt, in der Objekte von ihrer Funktionalität gelöst und mit einer eigenen Sensibilität versehen werden. Dabei verändert sich auch die Sensibilität der Leser:innen. Leungs Dinggedichte können als Inbegriff von 'Sinngemeinschaften' gelesen werden, deren Zusammenhalt von der Bereitschaft der Mitglieder zur Offenheit für Andersartigkeit sowie zur eigenen Veränderung abhängt.
La plupart des théories de la littérature mondiale ont émergé pendant les années de l'ascension de la mondialisation néolibérale et supposent que cette ascension se poursuivra. En conséquence, l'avenir du roman mondial suscite une grande inquiétude, compte tenu de l'hégémonie de l'anglais et de la mondialisation d'un modèle culturel particulier. Des événements plus récents, que ce soit le Brexit et l'élection de Donald Trump ou la pandémie de COVID-19, remettent en cause l'inéluctabilité de la mondialisation de diverses manières, même s'ils laissent présager des avenirs encore plus inquiétants. Cependant, ces défis propres à la mondialisation peuvent présenter de nouvelles opportunités pour le roman mondial: des opportunités de raconter des crises globales dans des contextes glocaux.
Der sizilianische Dichter und Romanautor Giuseppe Bonaviri - 1924 in Mineo bei Catania geboren und 2009 in Frosinone nahe Rom verstorben - gründete 1984 den öffentlichen Gedichtpark "Il libro di pietra" (dt. "Das Buch aus Stein") in Arpino, dem Geburtsort des berühmten Staatsmannes, Redners und Rhetorikers Marcus Tullius Cicero. Zu diesem Anlass schenkte der seit 1980 wiederholt für den Nobelpreis vorgeschlagene, sein Leben lang auch als Arzt tätige und schon früh nach Mittelitalien ausgewanderte Schriftsteller der Stadt Arpino das Gedicht "Il bianchissimo vento" (1984, dt. "Der weißeste Wind"), das dort noch heute als Gründungsgedicht in Stein gemeißelt im öffentlichen Raum permanent ausgestellt ist. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht Bonaviris europäisches, kollaborativ angelegtes Kulturprojekt als Blaupause eines literarischen Glokalisierungsformats unter den Aspekten seiner Transkulturalität, dekolonialisierten Literarizität, weltliterarischen Parametern und kommunikativen Transmedialität. Bonaviris lokal verwurzeltes und zugleich kosmopolitisch ausgerichtetes, postmodernes Kulturkonzept verweist durch seine vielfältigen Synergieeffekte nicht nur auf die zeitlose Relevanz von Literatur und Lyrik, sondern auch auf die Schlüsselrolle einer transkulturell wirkungsmächtigen Kreativität und zukunftsorientierten 'humanitas'.
Structural anthropology remains a hidden influence in Frantz Fanon's theory of the 'sociogenesis' of mental illness. This chapter outlines how Fanon's belief in the therapeutic capacity of 'socialization' critically absorbs Claude Lévi-Strauss's examination of the link between 'madness' and the symbolic structure of society. These innovations, Chamberlin argues, pushed Fanon to institute 'semihospitalization' as a radically dialectical method of treatment in his final role as a clinician at the Neuropsychiatric Day Centre in Tunis (1958–60).