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Writing the Reader
The history of the novel is also a history of shifting views of the value of novel reading. This study investigates how novels themselves participate in this development by featuring reading as a multidimensional cultural practice. English novels about obsessive reading, written in times of medial transition, serve as test cases for a model that brings together analyses of form and content.
Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion
Despite its unabated popularity with audiences, slapstick has received rather little scholarly attention, mostly by scholars concentrating on the US theater and cinema traditions. Nonetheless, as a form of physical humor slapstick has a long history across various areas of cultural production. This volume approaches slapstick both as a genre of situational physical comedy and as a mode of communicating an affective situation captured in various cultural products. Contributors to the volume examine cinematic, literary, dramatic, musical, and photographic texts and performances. From medieval chivalric romance and nineteenth-century theater to contemporary photography, the contributors study treatments of slapstick across media, periods and geographic locations. The aim of a study of such wide scope is to demonstrate how slapstick emerged from a variety of complex interactions among different traditions and by extension, to illustrate that slapstick can be highly productive for interdisciplinary research.
Facing Poetry
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) is known in intellectual history for having established the discourse of philosophical aesthetics with his "Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus" (Reflections on Poetry) and "Aesthetica" (Aesthetics), which consists of two books and is considered Baumgarten’s most important work. But this book amends that history. It shows that Baumgarten's aesthetics is a science of literature that demonstrates the value of literature to philosophy. Baumgarten did not intend to pursue such a task, but in working on his philosophical texts and lectures, he ends up analyzing, synthesizing, and contextualizing literature. He thereby treats it not as belles lettres or as a moral institution but rather as an epistemic object. His aesthetics is thus the first modern literary theory, and his articulation of this theory would never again be matched in its complexity and systematicity. Baumgarten’s theory of literature has never been discovered. It waits latently to take its place in intellectual history.
Precarity in European Film
This volume brings together renowned scholars and early career-researchers in mapping the ways in which European cinema —whether arthouse or mainstream, fictional or documentary, working with traditional or new media— engages with phenomena of precarity, poverty, and social exclusion. It compares how the filmic traditions of different countries reflect the socioeconomic conditions associated with precarity, and illuminates similarities in the iconography of precarious lives across cultures. While some of the contributions deal with the representations of marginalized minorities, others focus on work-related precarity or the depictions of downward mobility. Among other topics, the volume looks at how films grapple with gender inequality, intersectional struggle, discriminatory housing policies, and the specific problems of precarious youth. With its comparative approach to filmic representations of European precarity, this volume makes a major contribution to scholarship on precarity and the representation of social class in contemporary visual culture.
Die heile Familie
Die Vorstellung der bürgerlichen Kleinfamilie als ‚heiler‘, oft als schlicht ‚natürlicher‘ Formation hat sich tief in das Sprechen über Familien eingegraben. Der Band fragt nach den Bausteinen dieser Erzählung in juristischen und literarischen Texten der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts und der Gegenwart. Der Mythos „Familie“ entsteht auch im Austausch beider Diskurse als machtvolle Erzählung – und wird gleichzeitig von Beginn an massiv in Frage gestellt. Die noch heute hitzig geführten Debatten zu traditionellen oder progressiven Familienformen, insbesondere zum so genannten Kindeswohl, werden in ihrer Widersprüchlichkeit dann verständlicher, wenn man die divergierenden Traditionslinien der Diskurse kennt. Neben den juristischen Texten werden literarische Beispiele u. a. von Adalbert Stifter, Wilhelm Raabe, Clemens J. Setz, John von Düffel und Peter Wawerzinek gelesen.
Before Photography
Recent years have seen a wealth of new scholarship on the history of photography, cinema, digital media, and video games, yet less attention has been devoted to earlier forms of visual culture. The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic proliferation of new technologies, devices, and print processes, which provided growing audiences with access to more visual material than ever before. This volume brings together the best aspects of interdisciplinary scholarship to enhance our understanding of the production, dissemination, and consumption of visual media prior to the predominance of photographic reproduction. By setting these examples against the backdrop of demographic, educational, political, commercial, scientific, and industrial shifts in Central Europe, these essays reveal the diverse ways that innovation in visual culture affected literature, philosophy, journalism, the history of perception, exhibition culture, and the representation of nature and human life in both print and material culture in local, national, transnational, and global contexts.
Kontrafaktik der Gegenwart
Nicht-realistisches Erzählen ist hochpopulär, wurde aber häufig des politischen Eskapismus verdächtigt. Diese Studie bietet einen fiktionstheoretischen Zugang zum Erzählverfahren der Kontrafaktik und zeigt dessen Nähe zum politischen Schreiben auf. Analysen kontrafaktischer Werke von Christian Kracht, Kathrin Röggla, Juli Zeh und Leif Randt demonstrieren die Vielfalt und Relevanz politischer Realitätsvariationen in der Gegenwartsliteratur.
Schriftstellerreden 1880–1938
In the period between 1880 and 1938, public speaking saw a remarkable rise in popularity among German-language writers. This study offers the first in-depth examination of this hitherto neglected phenomenon of writers' speeches, treating them as an independent genre with its own interdiscursive and media-specific characteristics. It does so by focussing on the intellectual role of writers within the Austro-German historical context. It comes with instructive statistics as well as web access to an index of over 1,400 speeches by 123 authors.
Text als Ereignis
Die Rede vom Ereignis enthält vielfache Konnotationen: die der Flüchtigkeit und Unwiederholbarkeit, die des Kontingenten und Überraschenden, die des Einschneidenden und Epochemachenden, auch die des Neuen und Spektakulären. Der Sammelband fokussiert die Kategorie des Ereignishaften in der Literatur. Es werden die vielfältigen Strategien beschrieben, mit deren Hilfe Schriftsteller Ereignishaftigkeit in bzw. mit ihren Texten erzeugen, indem sie Erwartungen und/oder Strukturen unterbrechen, stören oder aufheben und zugleich den Text als ein präsentisches Geschehen inszenieren. Im Unterschied zur älteren Diskussion um den Ereignisbegriff wird die Ebene der Programme und Praktiken verstärkt in den Blick genommen. In seiner Komplexität bietet der Ereignisbegriff für die Literaturwissenschaft ein noch ungenutztes Potential. Er erlaubt zum einen vertiefte Einblicke in das Funktionieren literarischer Evolution. Zum anderen ermöglicht er es, die in diesem Zusammenhang relevanten Modi einer auf den gegenwärtigen Augenblick bezogenen Selbstpräsentation, wie sie insbesondere moderne literarische Texte auszeichnen, angemessener zu verstehen und zu beschreiben.
