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This volume pays homage to Monika Seidl, a key figure of cultural studies at the University of Vienna's Department of English and American Studies and spotlights her many achievements in the field. The Festschrift on the occasion of her retirement reflects on cultural studies as a discipline, its history and possible futures, aspects of care as in crisis and as practiced by Monika Seidl, and engages with her academic work in articles of different styles by contributors including Magdalena Berger, Lawrence Grossberg, Sabine Harrer, Roman Horak, Christian Huck, Thomas Kühn, Elisabeth Lechner and Judith Kohlenberger, Barbara Maly-Bowie, Timo Frühwirth and Sandra Mayer, Anette Pankratz, Annegret Pelz, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Julia Pühringer, Susanne Reichl, Ranthild Salzer and John Storey. It includes a preface by Alexandra Ganser.
Why discuss birth and death when they lie outside discourse? And why look at them together when they are so much unlike each other, one the moment of fresh beginnings, joys, and the relative certainties of existence, the other the moment of life’s end, grief, and the relative uncertainties of non-existence? Because it turns out that both events, while virtually unrepresentable, have spawned a host of representations, narratives, rites, and attempts at making sense of them; and because they may have more similarities than appears at first sight. The 13 interdisciplinary articles collected in this volume prove that looking at the two phenomena in tandem throws into sharp relief the distinct patterns and functions of each, while also highlighting some of the fundamental historical developments, cultural functions, and socio-political issues shared by both. The contributions take stock of the discourses of birth and death prevalent in British (and Western) culture, probing into the way the two phenomena have been subjected to strategies of medialisation, commodification, and bio-politics.
Cases of Intervention offers new perspectives on the case study as a research tool with a long-standing tradition in British cultural studies. Despite this significance, it has hardly ever been explicitly reflected upon as a method, but in this volume it takes centre stage. Scholars from interdisciplinary fields have written succinctly on diverse topics; the eleven case studies are comprehensible and lucid applications of theoretical approaches to topics such as the “British” cup of tea, CCTV and monarchs on film. This book will give readers the opportunity to discover the broad spectrum of approaches that make British cultural studies an indispensable discipline for discourses in academia and beyond. Each case study presented here illuminates the relationship between cultural practices and theory. By choosing cases embedded in everyday life, the focus of each contribution is on the potential of pragmatic intervention.
During the last fifty years, the writing of history underwent two massive transformations. First, powered by Marxism and other materialist sociologies, the great social history wave instated the value of social explanation. Then, responding to new theoretical debates, the cultural turn upset many of those freshly earned certainties. Each challenge was profoundly informed by politics - from issues of class, gender, and race to those of identity, empire, and the postcolonial. The resulting controversies brought historians radically changed possibilities - expanding subject matters, unfamiliar approaches, greater openness to theory and other disciplines, a new place in the public culture. History Made Conscious offers snapshots of a discipline continuously rethinking its charge. How might we understand "the social" and "the cultural" together? How do we collaborate most fruitfully across disciplines? If we take theory seriously, how does that change what historians do? How should we think differently about politics?
For long periods in history, the Austrian capital found itself on the geographical edge of western civilisation. Yet from the 18th century on, Vienna has been a vibrant centre of European culture. This city is the scene of the formidable meeting of the two outstanding intellectuals that are at the core of this book. The warm relationship between W.H. Auden, the celebrated British-American poet (1907-1973), and his fellow expatriate, the Welsh-Austrian journalist, translator and writer Stella Musulin (1915-1996) lasted while Auden resided in the nearby small town of Kirchstetten starting in 1958. It was here that the poet was laid to rest in the autumn of 1973. This book is based on the unpub...
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 is a comprehensive and articulate intorduction to the emerging field of microlearning. In public institutions, in small and medium-sized enterprises and in informal contexts we are all dealing with increasingly complex learning requirements, more fragmented knowledge, demands for greater cultural flexibility, and rapid technological change. As a result, new approaches are required, focusing on microcontent, medial fluency and spaces of learning.
The cultural politics creating and consuming Latina/o mass media. Just ten years ago, discussions of Latina/o media could be safely reduced to a handful of TV channels, dominated by Univision and Telemundo. Today, dramatic changes in the global political economy have resulted in an unprecedented rise in major new media ventures for Latinos as everyone seems to want a piece of the Latina/o media market. While current scholarship on Latina/o media have mostly revolved around important issues of representation and stereotypes, this approach does not provide the entire story. In Contemporary Latina/o Media, Arlene Dávila and Yeidy M. Rivero bring together an impressive range of leading scholars...
As before, the book presents a clear and critical survey of competing theories of and various approaches to popular culture. Its breadth and theoretical unity, exemplified through popular culture, means that it can be flexibly and relevantly applied across a number of disciplines. Also retaining the accessible approach of previous editions, and using appropriate examples from the texts and practices of popular culture.
Premised on the belief that a social and an ecological agenda are compatible, this collection offers readings in the ecology of left and radical writing from the Romantic period to the present. While early ecocriticism tended to elide the bitter divisions within and between societies, recent practitioners of ecofeminism, environmental justice, and social ecology have argued that the social, the economic and the environmental have to be seen as part of the same process. Taking up this challenge, the contributors trace the origins of an environmental sensibility and of the modern left to their roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, charting the ways in which the literary ...