You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Ghosts have made an unexpected reappearance in German literature since 1989. Catherine Smale reads this as symptomatic of writers' attempts to renegotiate their personal and collective identity in the wake of German reunification. Focusing on two major authors from the former GDR, Christa Wolf and Irina Liebmann, Smale examines the ways in which their work adopts notions of haunting in its creative engagement with the double legacy of Socialism and National Socialism. The ghost has long been regarded as a vehicle for making manifest taboo or unauthorized memories. However, Smale goes further, demonstrating how the human subject is destabilized by the return of the phantom and is itself rendered insecure and spectral. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical reference, from the psychoanalytic concept of intergenerational phantoms to Derridean hauntology, Smale's study highlights the particular challenge which Wolf and Liebmann pose to the familiar understanding of how German writers have confronted their country's troublesome past.Catherine Smale is Lecturer in German at King's College London.
Vividly illustrates the originality and energy of the Divine Comedy, for readers old and new, through Dante's singular language.
Offering a sweeping transatlantic perspective, this book explains the current obsession with automobiles by delving deep into the motives of early car users. It provides a synthesis of our knowledge about the emergence and persistence of the car, using a broad range of material including novels, poems, films, and songs ...
The volume examines the proliferation of inventorying models and practices as cultural techniques of knowledge organization and production during the long nineteenth century. While inventories are still broadly treated as raw data and unprocessed source materials, the book shows how they function as complex media formats, intersecting and interfering with other material techniques to produce, store, distribute, organize and process cultural information. How do inventories work against and in dialogue with other media of collection, storage and retrieval such as catalogs, indexes, bibliographies, and archives; what new media configurations do techniques of inventorying enable and how, in turn, are such techniques shaped by the media channels and formats they employ; what is at stake in the critical effort of "taking stock", whether as commercial, bureaucratic, literary, historiographical, or scientific operations; finally, what do such operations tell us specifically about the production and circulation of knowledge in the German nineteenth century?
A cutting‑edge media history on a perennially fascinating topic, which attempts to answer the crucial question: Who is in charge, the servant or the master? Though classic servants like the butler or the governess have largely vanished, the Internet is filled with servers: web, ftp, mail, and others perform their daily drudgery, going about their business noiselessly and unnoticed. Why then are current‑day digital drudges called servers? Markus Krajewski explores this question by going from the present back to the Baroque to study historical aspects of service through various perspectives, be it the servants' relationship to architecture or their function in literary or scientific contexts. At the intersection of media studies, cultural history, and literature, this work recounts the gradual transition of agency from human to nonhuman actors to show how the concept of the digital server stems from the classic role of the servant.
There is growing interest in the internationality of the literary Gothic, which is well established in English Studies. Gothic fiction is seen as transgressive, especially in the way it crosses borders, often illicitly. In the 1790s, when the English Gothic novel was emerging, the real or ostensible source of many of these uncanny texts was Germany. This first book in English dedicated to the German Gothic in over thirty years redresses deficiencies in existing English-language sources, which are outdated, piecemeal, or not sufficiently grounded in German Studies.
Common boundaries between the physical reality and rising digital media technologies are fading. The age of hyper-reality becomes an age of hyper-aesthetics. Immersive media and image technologies – like augmented reality – enable a completely novel form of interaction and corporeal relation to and with the virtual image structures and the different screen technologies. »Augmented Images« contributes to the wide range of the hyper-aesthetic image discourse to connect the concept of dynamic augmented images with the approaches in modern media theory, philosophy, perceptual theory, aesthetics, computer graphics and art theory as well as the complex range of image science. This volume monitors and discusses the relation of images and technological evolution in the context of augmented reality within the perspective of an autonomous image science.
From TIFF files to TED talks, from book sizes to blues stations - the term "format" circulates in a staggering array of contexts and applies to entirely dissimilar objects and practices. How can such a pliable notion meaningfully function as an instrument of classification in so many industries and scientific communities? Comprising a wide range of case studies on the standards, practices, and politics of formats from scholars of photography, film, radio, television, and the Internet, Format Matters charts the many ways in which formats shape and are shaped by past and present media cultures. This volume represents the first sustained collaborative effort to advance the emerging field of format studies.