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This essay collection examines the dynamics of memory organization and the way it varies among different media and modes of discourse in post-unification Germany. German unification has put the post-war period into a historical perspective. Such a rupture raises questions concerning the appropriate commemoration, preservation and reinterpretation of the past. The processes of reorientation after unification influenced the self-perception of literary authors as well as the social role, position and status of German literature. They also affected the way writers viewed the competition in which they found themselves pitted against visual and electronic media as rival windows on the past. In the...
By its very nature the clown, as represented in art, is an interdisciplinary phenomenon. In whichever artform it appears - fiction, drama, film, photography or fine art - it carries the symbolic association of its usage in popular culture, be it ritual festivities, street theatre or circus. The clown, like its extended family of fools, jesters, picaros and tricksters, has a variety of functions all focussed around its status and image of being "other." Frequently a marginalized figure, it provides the foil for the shortcomings of dominant discourse or the absurdities of human behaviour. Clowns, Fools and Picaros represents the latest research on the clown, bringing together for the first time studies from four continents: Europe, America, Africa and Asia. It attempts to ascertain commonalities, overlaps and differences between artistic expressions of the "clownesque" from these various continents and genres, and above all, to examine the role of the clown in our cultures today. This volume is of interest for scholars of political and comic drama, film and visual art as well as scholars of comparative literature and anthropology.
This collection of essays brings together two major new developments in cultural memory studies: firstly, the shift away from static models of cultural memory, where the emphasis lies on cultural products, in the direction of more dynamic models where the emphasis lies instead on the cultural and social processes involved in the ongoing production of shared views of the past; and secondly, the growing interest in the role of the media, and their role beyond that of mere storage, within these dynamics. The specific concern of this collection is linking the use of media to the larger socio-cultural processes involved in collective memory-making. The focus rests in particular on two aspects of ...
The book considers biology in parallel with philosophical structuralism in order to argue that notions of form in the organism are analogous to similar ideas in structuralist philosophy and literary theory. This analogy is then used to shed light on debates among biological scientists from the turn of the 19th century to the present day, including Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Dawkins, Crick, Goodwin, Rosen and West-Eberhard. The book critiques the endorsement of genetic manipulation and bioengineering as keys to solving agricultural and environmental problems, suggesting that alternative models have been marginalized in the promotion of this discourse. Drawing from the work of philosophers including Cassirer, Saussure, Jakobson and Foucault the book ultimately argues that methods based on agroecology, supported by molecular applications (such as marker-assisted selection, MAS), can both advance agricultural development and remain focused on the whole organism.
The Alps have exerted a hold over the German cultural imagination throughout the modern period, enthralling writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and tourists alike. The Draw of the Alps interrogates the dynamics of this fascination. Though philosophical and aesthetic responses to Alpine space have shifted over time, the Alps continue to captivate at an individual and collective level. This has resulted in myriad cultural engagements with Alpine space, as this interdisciplinary volume attests. Literature, photography, and philosophy continue to engage with the Alps as a place in which humans pursue their cognitive and aesthetic limits. At the same time, individuals engage physically wi...
Pseudo-Memoirs redefines the notion of fiction itself, a form that has all too often been understood in terms of its capacity to produce a seeming reality. Rochelle Tobias argues that the verisimilitude of the novel derives not from its object but from the subjectivity at its base. What generates the plausibility of fiction is not the referentiality of its depictions but the intentionality of consciousness. Edmund Husserl developed the idea that consciousness is always intentional in the sense that it is directed outside itself toward something that it does not find so much as it constitutes as an object. Pseudo-memoirs reveal the full implications of this position in their double structure ...
Impresiones de un Surumato en Nuevo México by Manuel Sariñana represents a remarkable literary recovery. For the first time, the novella is presented in its original Spanish and in English, painstakingly translated and annotated by Phillip B. Gonzales. Manuel Sariñana came to the New Mexico territory from Mexico to work as a Spanish-language journalist. While covering politics, he wrote and published Impresiones de un Surumato en Nuevo México as a picaresque work, a common genre in Mexico that uses satire to narrate a drama based on concrete social issues in the author’s immediate vicinity. In his preface, Sariñana makes his intent clear: to address the unseemly manner in which New Mexico’s Democratic Party attempts to gain leverage in elections. But, in a caricature of two immigrant peons, he surreptitiously takes to task how nuevomexicanos look down on people from Mexico. Gonzales provides a critical introduction, an interpretation of Sariñana’s piece, and a historical framework to contextualize the author’s experiences and the events alluded to in the novella. The result brings this important work of fiction to a new generation of readers.
This bold intervention into the debate over the memory and 'post-memory' of the Holocaust both scrutinizes recent academic theories of post-Holocaust trauma and provides a new reading of literary and architectural memory texts related to the Holocaust.
This volume presents the work of internationally renowned scholars from Australia, Germany, Italy, South Africa, the UK and the US. The focus on W.G. Sebald’s writing as that of an expatriate author offers a fresh and productive approach to Sebald scholarship. In one way or another, all 28 essays in this innovative, bi-lingual collection take up the notion of Sebald’s experience as an expatriate writer: be it in the analysis of intertextual, transmedial and generic border crossings, on the “exposure to the other” and the experience of alterity, on the question of identity construction and performance, on affinities with other expatriate writers, on the recurring topics of “home”, “exile”, “dislocation” and “migration”, or on the continuing work of “memory” to work through and to preserve the consciousness of a destructive past that has informed the childhood as much as the adult life-world of the author.
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