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A media history of the material and infrastructural features of networking practices, a German classic translated for the first time into English. Nets hold, connect, and catch. They ensnare, bind, and entangle. Our social networks owe their name to a conceivably strange and ambivalent object. But how did the net get into the network? And how can it reasonably represent the connectedness of people, things, institutions, signs, infrastructures, and even nature? The Connectivity of Things by Sebastian Giessmann, the first media history that addresses the overwhelming diversity of networks, attempts to answer all these questions and more. Reconstructing the decisive moments in which networking ...
How can we approach possible but unknown futures of the study of culture? This volume explores this question in the context of a changing global world. The contributions in this volume discuss the necessity of significant shifts in our conceptual and epistemological frameworks. Taking into account changing institutional research settings, the authors develop pathways to future cultural research, addressing the crucial concerns of the cultural and social worlds themselves. The contributions thereby utilize contact zones within a wide range of disciplines such as cultural anthropology, sociology, cultural history, literary studies, the history of science and bioethics as well as the environmental and medical humanities. Examining emerging inter- and transdisciplinary points of reference, the volume invites scholars in the humanities and social sciences to take part in a conversation about theories, methods, and practices for the future study of culture.
This volume approaches literary representations of post and neocolonialism by combining their readings with respective theoretical configurations. The aim is to cast light upon common characteristics of contemporary texts from around the world that deal with processes of colonization. Based on the epistemic discourses of postimperialism/postcolonialism, globalization, and world literature, the volume’s chapters bring together international scholars from various disciplines in the Humanities, including Comparative Cultural Studies, Slavic, Romance, German, and African Studies. The main concern of the contributions is to conceptualize an autonomous category of a world literature of the colonial, going well beyond established classifications according to single languages or center-periphery dichotomies.
In Hindu India both orality and sonality have enjoyed great cultural significance since earliest times. They have a distinct influence on how people approach texts. The importance of sound and its perception has led to rites, models of cosmic order, and abstract formulas. Sound serves both to stimulate religious feelings and to give them a sensory form. Starting from the perception and interpretation of sound, the authors chart an unorthodox cultural history of India, turning their attention to an important, but often neglected aspect of daily religious life. They provide a stimulating contribution to the study of cultural systems of perception that also adds new aspects to the debate on orality and literality.
Translating and interpreting are unpredictable social practices framed by historical, ethical, and political constraints. Using the concepts of situatedness and performativity as anchors, the authors examine translation practices from the perspectives of identity performance, cultural mediation, historical reframing, and professional training. As such, the chapters focus on enacted events and conditioned practices by exploring production processes and the social, historical, and cultural conditions of the field. These outlooks shift our attention to social and institutionalized acts of translating and interpreting, considering also the materiality of bodies, artefacts, and technologies involved in these scenes.
Coercion and Wage Labour presents novel histories of people who experienced physical, social, political or cultural compulsion in the course of paid work. Broad in scope, the chapters examine diverse areas of work including textile production, war industries, civil service and domestic labour, in contexts from the Middle Ages to the present day. They demonstrate that wages have consistently shaped working people’s experiences, and failed to protect workers from coercion. Instead, wages emerge as versatile tools to bind, control, and exploit workers. Remuneration mirrors the distribution of power in labour relations, often separating employers physically and emotionally from their employees...
Bringing together innovative and internationally renowned experts, this volume provides concise presentations of the main concepts and cutting-edge research fields in the study of culture (rather than the infinite multitude of possible themes). More specifically, the volume outlines different models for the study of culture, explores avenues for interdisciplinary exchange, assesses key concepts and traces their travels across various disciplinary, historical and national contexts. To trace the travelling of concepts means to map both their transfer from one discipline, approach or culture of research to another, and also to identify the transformations which emerge through these processes of...
This volume makes visible the cooperation between the Visegrad Fund and Humboldt University of Berlin. With selections exploring the fields of performance, cinema, and sound, it incorporates ideas from performance theory, film and media studies, art history, philosophy, and literary theory. On the other hand it is the permeability of the media to each other—as well as to other expressive forms such as theatre and happenings, film and photography, voice and writing—that takes center stage. Fifteen essays delve into questions of performativity with concrete examples from Central and Eastern Europe: e.g. Czech, Hungarian, Russian, Slovak, and Soviet cinema; the Polish Academy of Movement, Tot Art, and Orange Alternative; the Hungarian performer Tamás Szentjóby and post-Fluxus phenomena; Polish "hobo poets" like Marcin Świetlicki; works of the French Jean Fautrier, the Czech Mikuláš Medek, and the Slovak Dominik Tatarka on sound and voice; Belarusian and Polish "sung poetry" as intermedial subversion of tradition, and the textual performance of Dezső Kosztolányi’s disappeared voice.
In interdisciplinary projects and research collaborations, participants face multiple demands. However, these expectations encounter a reality that is characterized by time pressure, high demands in one's own discipline, and often increasingly administrative tasks. What can meaningful interdisciplinary work look like in an academic environment? What tasks and constraints do researchers face? And, considering the range of disciplines involved, how can interdisciplinary research projects be designed in a successful way? How does one meaningfully bring different disciplines, their methods, and theories into conversation with each other across the spatial and temporal distance of their subjects?...
Philology, master science of the nineteenth century, has changed so radically over the course of the twentieth century that it is hardly recognizable in the twenty-first. Its scope has been transformed, its methodology contested, and its legitimacy called into doubt. Does it still make sense to speak institutionally and epistemologically of ‘philology’? Does this venerable title continue to signify a truly coherent field, and not a multitude of scattered currents and competing genealogies, differing national characteristics, and inconsistent methodologies? This volume collects answers by a range of young philologists, given at the 11th Annual Columbia University German Graduate Student C...