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"Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic methods, Michael Jackson explores a variety of contemporary topics, including 9/11, episodes from the war in Sierra Leone and its aftermath, the marginalization of indigenous Australians, the application of new technologies, mundane forms of ritualization, the magical use of language, the sociality of violence, the prose of suffering, and the discourse of human rights. Throughout this compelling work, Jackson demonstrates that existentialism, far from being a philosophy of individual being, enables us to explore issues of social existence and coexistence in new ways, and to theorise events as the sites of a dynamic interplay between the finite possibilities of the situations in which human beings find themselves and the capacities they possess for creating viable forms of social life."--BOOK JACKET.
The figure of the barbarian has captivated the Western imagination from Greek antiquity to the present. Since the 1990s, the rhetoric of civilization versus barbarism has taken center stage in Western political rhetoric and the media. But how can the longevity and popularity of this opposition be accounted for? Why has it become such a deeply ingrained habit of thought that is still being so effectively mobilized in Western discourses? The twenty essays in this volume revisit well-known and obscure chapters in barbarism's genealogy from new perspectives and through contemporary theoretical idioms. With studies spanning from Greek antiquity to the present, they show how barbarism has function...
Poetic critique – is that not an oxymoron? Do these two forms of behavior, the poetic and the critical, not pull in different, even opposite, directions? For many scholars working in the humanities today, they largely do, but that has not always been the case. Friedrich Schlegel, for one, believed that critique worthy of its name must itself be poetic. Only then would it stand a chance of responding adequately to the work of art. Taking Schlegel’s idea of poetische Kritik as a starting point, this volume reflects on the possibility of drawing these alleged opposites closer together. In light of current debates about the legacy of critique, it investigates whether a concept such as poetic critique (or poetic criticism) lends itself to enriching our intellectual practice by engaging with the poetic potential of criticism and the critical value of art and literature.
Figures of Chance II: Chance in Theory and Practice proposes a multidisciplinary analysis of cultural phenomena related to notions of chance and contingency. Alongside its transhistorical companion volume (Figures of Chance I), it considers how the projective and predictive capacity of societies is shaped by representations and cultural models of a reality that is understood, by varying degrees, to be contingent, unpredictable, or chaotic. This volume reevaluates the role played by figurative representations of chance in contemporary discourses about chance and contingency. Written by seven interdisciplinary teams, and encompassing philosophy, literature, history of science, sociology, mathematics, cognitive science, information science, and art history, this text puts scientific conceptions of chance into dialogue with their contemporary literary and artistic representations. It thus brings out the central role played by art in the human perception of chance, and in our methods for projecting the future, in order to better understand contemporary human attitudes in the face of risk.
Ancient religions are definitely complex systems of gods, which resist our understanding. Divine names provide fundamental keys to gain access to the multiples ways gods were conceived, characterized, and organized. Among the names given to the gods many of them refer to spaces: cities, landscapes, sanctuaries, houses, cosmic elements. They reflect mental maps which need to be explored in order to gain new knowledge on both the structure of the pantheons and the human agency in the cultic dimension. By considering the intersection between naming and mapping, this book opens up new perspectives on how tradition and innovation, appropriation and creation play a role in the making of polytheist...
"If psychoanalysis is the return of repressed antiquity, distorted to be sure by modern desire, yet still bearing the telltale traces of the ancient archive, then would not our growing distance from the archive of antiquity also imply that we are in the process of losing our grip on psychoanalysis itself, as Freud conceived it?"—from Chapter 1As he developed his striking new science of the mind, Sigmund Freud had frequent recourse to ancient culture and the historical disciplines that draw on it. A Compulsion for Antiquity fully explores how Freud appropriated figures and themes from classical mythology and how the theory and practice of psychoanalysis paralleled contemporary developments ...
Das Lessing Yearbook, offizielles Organ der Lessing Society mit Sitz in Cincinnati, Ohio, ist ein weltweit anerkanntes, wichtiges Forum für alle Wissenschaftler, die sich – in englischer und deutscher Sprache – mit Literatur, Kultur und Gedankengut Deutschlands im 18. Jahrhundert beschäftigen. Guy Stern zum 100. Geburtstag. Mit Beiträgen von Tilman Venzl zum Manuskript und zur Dramaturgie der Minna von Barnhelm; Susan Morrow über Bilder und Illusionen in Lessings Laokoon; Joseph Haydt über Ironie und Wahrheit in Lessings theologischen Schriften; Till Kinzel über Jaspers und Lessing; Katherine Goodman über Luise Gottscheds Panthea und die Freidenker; Gabriel Cooper über anti-jüdische Stereotype im 18. Jahrhundert; Stefanie Stockhorst und Sotirios Agrofylax über Zeitschriften als aufklärerische Praxis; Hamilton Beck zur Rezeption Hippels im 19. Jahrhundert, und ein Forum zu Intersektionalität und Aufklärungsforschung.
Railroads, telegraphs, lithographs, photographs, and mass periodicals--the major technological advances of the 19th century seemed to diminish the space separating people from one another, creating new and apparently closer, albeit highly mediated, social relationships. Nowhere was this phenomenon more evident than in the relationship between celebrity and fan, leader and follower, the famous and the unknown. By mid-century, heroes and celebrities constituted a new and powerful social force, as innovations in print and visual media made it possible for ordinary people to identify with the famous; to feel they knew the hero, leader, or "star"; to imagine that public figures belonged to their private lives. This volume examines the origins and nature of modern mass media and the culture of celebrity and fame they helped to create. Crossing disciplines and national boundaries, the book focuses on arts celebrities (Sarah Bernhardt, Byron and Liszt); charismatic political figures (Napoleon and Wilhelm II); famous explorers (Stanley and Brazza); and celebrated fictional characters (Cyrano de Bergerac).
This book is about transitions, the manifold and dynamic process of change and exchange, variety and variation, difference and diversity, migration and globalisation. Contributions emphasize issues of race and ethnicity in the American cultural context, look at class-based, gender-oriented, religious, political, historical, social, and cultural negotiations, and question the meaningfulness of distinctions and boundaries in today's fast-changing world. Contributions include analyses of historical changes from Brown vs. Board of Education to 9/11, examinations of cultural transitions from regional identity to migratory artists, as well as explorations of literary adaptations ranging from Affrilachian poetry to cyberspace narrativity.
This book examines how Shakespeare’s plays resurface in current complex TV series. Its four case studies bring together The Tempest and the science fiction-Western Westworld, King Lear and the satirical dynastic drama of Succession, Hamlet and the legal thriller Black Earth Rising, as well as Coriolanus and the political thriller Homeland. The comparative readings ask what new insights the twenty-first-century remediations may grant us into Shakespeare’s texts and, vice versa, how Shakespearean returns help us understand topical concerns negotiated in the series, such as artificial intelligence, the safeguarding of democracy, terrorism, and postcolonial justice. This study also proposes that the dramaturgical seriality typical of complex TV allows insights into the seriality Shakespeare employed in structuring his plays. Discussing a broad spectrum of adaptational constellations and establishing key characteristics of the new adaptational aggregate of serial Shakespeare, it seeks to initiate a dialogue between Shakespeare studies, adaptation studies, and TV studies.