Published by De Gruyter

Culture & Conflict

Edited by: Isabel Capeloa Gil, Catherine Nesci and Paulo de Medeiros

ISSN: 2194-7104

Overview
Volumes

Culture and conflict inevitably go hand in hand. The very idea of culture is marked by the notion of difference and by the creative, fraught interaction between conflicting concepts and values. The same can be said of all key ideas in the study of culture, such as identity and diversity, memory and trauma, the translation of cultures and globalization, dislocation and emplacement, mediation and exclusion. This series publishes theoretically informed original scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural studies as well as media, visual, and film studies. It fosters an interdisciplinary dialogue on the multiple ways in which conflict supports and constrains the production of meaning, on how conflict is represented, how it relates to the past and projects the present, and how it frames scholarship within the humanities.

Editors:
Isabel Capeloa Gil, Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal; Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK, Catherine Nesci, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

Editorial Board:
Arjun Appadurai, New York University,
Claudia Benthien, Universität Hamburg,
Elisabeth Bronfen, Universität Zürich,
Bishnupriya Ghosh, University of California, Santa Barbara,
Joyce Goggin, Universiteit van Amsterdam,
Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University,
Ansgar Nünning, Universität Gießen,
Naomi Segal, University of London, Birkbeck College,
Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Universidade Estadual de Campinas,
António Sousa Ribeiro, Universidade de Coimbra,
Roberto Vecchi, Universita di Bologna,
Samuel Weber, Northwestern University,
Liliane Weissberg, University of Pennsylvania,
Christoph Wulf, FU Berlin,
Longxi Zhang, City University of Hong Kong

Interdisciplinary research

Author / Editor information

I. Capeloa Gil, Catholic University of Portugal; P. de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK, C. Nesci, University of California.

Supplementary Materials

Stylesheet

Topics

Book Open Access 2024

Postcolonial Theory and Crisis

Paulo de Medeiros, Sandra Ponzanesi

Volume 25 in this series

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In the millennial transition the prefix ‘post’ had come to signify more and more not just

the realisation of a ‘coming after’ but also of the impossibility of not seeing the present as still very much working through the wounds of the past. Yet with the appearance of pseudo-concepts such as ‘post-truth’ after an equally imaginary ‘death of History’, the logic of the ‘post’, itself always already under questioning, may appear to have outlived its usefulness. How to make sense of postcolonial theory in Europe in the present? One way might be to renew its significance as world conflicts have entered a new ‘post-imperial phase’ with the return of ideologies of empire in various parts of the world. The essays in this volume address those questions at both a conceptual, theoretical level, and through the analysis of specific case studies. In the Introduction Paulo de Medeiros and Sandra Ponzanesi review the main questions outlined above in relation to the current debates in the Humanities from their respective disciplinary perspectives. The volume is organised in four sections, each containing four chapters. Even though all the chapters present a reflection on Postcolonial Theory and Crisis, some focus more specifically on aspects of the crisis in a global perspective such as humanitarian crisis and the role of mediatization of conflicts, to issues related to human rights, refugees, migrancy, environmental crisis to questions of memory and postmemory as well as the critique of art and utopian thought.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.0000/9783111005744
ISBN:: 9783111005744
ISBN:: 9783111006178
ISBN:: 9783111005713
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: Topics in Cultural Studies
Subject:: Postcolonial Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: History
Subject:: Topics in History
Subject:: Colonial and Postcolonial History
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2023

Figures of Radical Absence

Blanks and Voids in Theory, Literature, and the Arts

Alexandra-Ecaterina Irimia

Volume 24 in this series

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What is there to see in invisible artworks, empty books, or blank screens? How do formal absences generate meaning? Constructing an argument by way of montage, this book is an annotated inventory of textual, visual, and conceptual figures of absence. Spanning different media, it reveals a creative tradition that uses absence not as a negative aesthetic category, but as a productive state of radical indeterminacy with its own politics and poetics.

Although post-structuralism highlighted the importance of what is offstage, lost, forgotten, hidden or discarded, silent or silenced, the poetics and politics of absence (much like its ethics and aesthetics) have rarely been discussed across media and disciplines. This book proposes the concept of ‘radical absence’ to describe a certain tradition of resistance to ontology, predication, and representation, contesting their reliance on a metaphysics of presence. Apophatic speech, empty signifiers, and figural voids are some of the figures through which radical absence becomes apparent with unprecedented intensity in twentieth-century theory, literature, film, and the arts. Phantasmatic and outrageous, such figures play with creative strategies of dematerialization, irony, and other forms of discursive undoing. Therefore, absence becomes more than a simple theme; it reflects back on the medium and the meaning-making conditions under which it operates. Elusive and imprecise as an object of study, absence requires more subtle and flexible epistemological frameworks than have been available to date. This monograph proposes we think of it not only as a counter-concept for presence, but also – and perhaps more productively – as infinite spacing, deferral, fragmentation, and displacement.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150581
ISBN:: 9783111150581
ISBN:: 9783111150703
ISBN:: 9783111149158
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2023

Global Failure and World Literature

Reading the Contemporary Quest Novel

Karen Borg Cardona

Volume 23 in this series

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While the contemporary era has witnessed a series of spectacular failures with severe and widespread global consequences, failure is still broadly understood on an individual level, while its broader causes and consequences receive little attention. This book reconceptualises failure as a method for characterising and critiquing systems and institutions on both a global and a local level. It defines global failure as comprising global inequality, economic crisis, and ecological disaster, and as a condition which informs and is informed by localised failure. It examines the negotiation between global and local failure in narratives of failed quests by four contemporary authors: Cormac McCarthy, Julia Kristeva, Michael Ondaatje, and Basma Abdel Aziz. As a genre, the quest narrative is associated with the idea of hard-won success. The failed quest narrative, or the narrative of the failed quest, is therefore the ideal vehicle through which to examine the socio-political and institutional conditions of failure. Primarily a contribution to the field of world literature, this book is also relevant to those with an interest in the contemporary novel, failure studies, and the quest narrative.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111133997
ISBN:: 9783111133997
ISBN:: 9783111135106
ISBN:: 9783111132532
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2023

Myth in the Modern Novel

Imagining the Absolute

Liisa Steinby

Volume 22 in this series

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Myth in the Modern Novel: Imagining the Absolute posits a twofold thesis. First, although Modernity is regarded as an era dominated by science and rational thought, it has in fact not relinquished the hold of myth, a more "primitive" form of thought which is difficult to reconcile with modern rationality. Second, some of the most important statements as to the reconcilability of myth and Modernity are found in the work of certain prominent novelists. This book offers a close examination of the work of eleven writers from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, representing German, French, American, Czech and Swedish literature. The analyses of individual novels reveal a variety of intriguing views of myth in Modernity, and offer an insight into the "modernizing" transformations myth has undergone when applied in the modern novel. The study shows the presence of the "subconscious", the mythic layer, in modern western culture and how this has been dealt with in novelistic literature.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026503
ISBN:: 9783111026503
ISBN:: 9783111026343
ISBN:: 9783111027005
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: Topics in Cultural Studies
Subject:: Religion
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Subject:: Topics in Literary Studies
Subject:: Mythology and Folk Literature
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2022

Asymmetric Ecologies in Europe and South America around 1800

Susanne Schlünder, Rolando M. Carrasco

Volume 21 in this series

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This volume proposes new ways of understanding the historical semantics of the relationship between humans and nature in South America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The authors in this volume use the notion of asymmetry to discuss the representations of and forms of knowledge about nature circulating in, and about, colonial and postcolonial South America. They argue that the production of knowledge about the American natural space widened the power gap between the Europeans colonizers and the local population. This gap, therefore, rests on what we call 'asymmetric ecologies': Eurocentric epistemic orders excluded forms of indigenous, mestizo, and Creole knowledge about nature. By looking at literary as well as non-literary sources, such as natural histories, travel narratives, encyclopaedias or medical writing, the essays in this volume trace the origins of new theoretical paradigms (ecocriticism, biopolitics, transarea studies, etc.), and examine the regional cultural, identity, and epistemic conflicts that undercut the Eurocentric narrative of enlightened modernity.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733211
ISBN:: 9783110733211
ISBN:: 9783110733365
ISBN:: 9783110738186
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Subject:: Romance Literature
Subject:: Hispanic Literature
Subject:: 18th Century
Subject:: 19th Century
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2021

Post-imperial Literature

Translatio Imperii in Kafka and Coetzee

Vladimir Biti

Volume 20 in this series

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This book proposes a new departure point for the investigation of transnational literary alliances: the traumatic constellation of translatio imperii, which followed the dissolution of the East-Central European empires in the 1920s and the crumbling of the West European colonial empires in the 1950s. To prevent their breakdown, the former transitioned from a ‘sovereign’ to a ‘disciplinary’ mode of administration of their peripheries, the latter from the merciless assimilation of their colonial constituencies to their affirmative regeneration. This book treats Franz Kafka as the writer of the first transition, prefiguring J. M. Coetzee as the writer of the second. In a series of close readings, it investigates the particular ways in which the restructuring of power relations between the agencies in their fictions is a response to the delineated post-imperial reconfiguration of the new countries’ governmental techniques. By displacing their narrative authority beyond the reach of their readers, they laid bare the sudden withdrawal of transcendental guarantees from the world of human commonality. This entailed an unstable and elusive configuration of their fictional worlds as a key feature of post-imperial literature.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110732245
ISBN:: 9783110732245
ISBN:: 9783110737288
ISBN:: 9783110732313
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: History
Subject:: Topics in History
Subject:: Colonial and Postcolonial History
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: 20th Century
Subject:: German Literature
Subject:: 20th Century
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2021

The Apocalyptic Dimensions of Climate Change

Jan Alber

Volume 19 in this series

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Climate change and the apocalypse are frequently associated in the popular imagination of the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together climatologists, theologians, historians, literary scholars, and philosophers to address and critically assess this association. The contributing authors are concerned, among other things, with the relation between cultural and scientific discourses on climate change; the role of apocalyptic images and narratives in representing environmental issues; and the tension between reality and fiction in apocalyptic representations of catastrophes. By focusing on how figures in fictional texts interact with their environment and deal with the consequences of climate change, this volume foregrounds the broader social and cultural function of apocalyptic narratives of climate change. By evoking a sense of collective human destiny in the face of the ultimate catastrophe, apocalyptic narratives have both cautionary and inspirational functions. Determining the extent to which such narratives square with scientific knowledge of climate change is one of the main aims of this book.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110730203
ISBN:: 9783110730203
ISBN:: 9783110734850
ISBN:: 9783110730289
ISBN:: 9783111269764
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2021

Negotiations of Migration

Reexamining the Past and Present in Contemporary Europe

Annimari Juvonen, Verena Lindemann Lino

Volume 18 in this series

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At a time when migration is mostly discussed in terms of “conflict” and “crisis”, it is decidedly important to acknowledge the discursive traditions, narrative patterns, and conceptual categories that continue to inform how migration is represented, analyzed and theorized in contemporary Europe. This volume focuses on the potential of artistic and critical practices to challenge hegemonic framings of migration and embrace the ambivalence inherent in migration as a conflictual, often violent, yet also liberating uprooting. By placing special emphasis on “peripheral” perspectives and subject positions, the volume provides new insights into topics such as belonging and exclusion, the “migrant crisis”, and memory. By bringing into dialogue creative practices and academic discourses, it explores how new modes of seeing and theorizing may emerge through experiences and representations of migration. Situated within the field of literary and cultural studies, it complements historical and social analyses in the emerging interdisciplinary field of migration studies.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110712018
ISBN:: 9783110712018
ISBN:: 9783110711950
ISBN:: 9783110712094
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: Topics in Cultural Studies
Subject:: Society
Subject:: Other Topics
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2021

Questioning the Canon

Counter-Discourse and the Minority Perspective in Contemporary German Literature

Christine Meyer

Volume 17 in this series

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To what extent do minority writers feel represented by the literary canon of a nation and its body of "great works"? To what extent do they adhere to, or contest, the supposedly universal values conveyed through those texts and how do they situate their own works within the national tradition? Building on Edward W. Said’s contrapuntal readings and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reflections on the voice of the subaltern, this monograph examines the ways in which Rafik Schami, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zaimoglu have re-read, challenged, and adapted the German canon. Similar to other writers in postcolonial contexts, their work on the canon entails an inquiry into history and a negotiation of their relation to the texts and representations that define the "host" nation. Through close analyses of the works of these non-native German authors, the book investigates the intersection between politics, ethics, and aesthetics in their work, focusing on the appropriation and re-evaluation of cultural legacies in German-language literature. Opening up a rich critical dialogue with scholars of German Studies and Postcolonial Theory, Christine Meyer provides a fresh perspective on German-language minority literature since the reunification.

Watch our talk with the editor Christine Meyer here: https://youtu.be/bIOn-8q5QIU

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110674392
ISBN:: 9783110674392
ISBN:: 9783110674422
ISBN:: 9783110674361
ISBN:: 9783111258430
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: German Literature
Subject:: 20th Century
Subject:: 21st Century
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2020

Terrorizing Images

Trauma and Ekphrasis in Contemporary Literature

Charles Ivan Armstrong, Unni Langas

Volume 16 in this series

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It is broadly accepted that “terrorizing” images are often instrumentalized in periods of conflict to serve political interests. This volume proposes that paying attention to how images of trauma and conflict are described in literary texts, i.e. to the rhetorical practice known as “ekphrasis”, is crucial to our understanding of how such images work. The volume’s contributors discuss verbal images of trauma and terror in literary texts both from a contemporary perspective and as historical artefacts in order to illuminate the many different functions of ekphrasis in literature. The articles in this volume reflect the vast developments in the field of trauma studies since the 1990s, a field that has recently broadened to include genres beyond the memoir and testimony and that lends itself well to new postcolonial, feminist, and multimedia approaches. By expanding the scholarly understanding of how images of trauma are described, interpreted, and acted out in literary texts, this collected volume makes a significant contribution to both trauma and memory studies, as well as more broadly to cultural studies.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110693959
ISBN:: 9783110693959
ISBN:: 9783110692907
ISBN:: 9783110694031
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Comparative Literary Studies
Subject:: Topics in Literary Studies
Subject:: Other Topics
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2020

The Many Voices of Europe

Mobility and Migration in Contemporary Europe

Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Nicole Shea

Volume 15 in this series

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This volume explores the rich, evolving body of contemporary cultural practices that reflect on a European project of diversity, new dynamics between and across cultures in Europe, and its interactions with the world. There have been calls across Europe for both traditional national identities and new forms of identity and community, assertions of regionalized identity and declarations of multiculturalism and multilingualism. These essays respond to this critical moment by analyzing the literature of migration as a (re)writing of European subjects. They ask fundamental questions from a variety of theoretical and critical standpoints: How do migrants write new identities into and against old national (meta)narratives? How do they interrogate constructions of identity? What kinds of literary experiments are emerging in this unstable context, e.g. in the graphic novel and avant-garde film?
This collection makes a unique contribution to contemporary European literary studies by taking an interdisciplinary, transnational and comparative perspective, thereby addressing readers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and stimulating new research on the ambitious writing and thinking taking place across the borders of Europe today.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110645781
ISBN:: 9783110645781
ISBN:: 9783110646108
ISBN:: 9783110615265
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2019

Narratives of Annihilation, Confinement, and Survival

Camp Literature in a Transnational Perspective

Anja Tippner, Anna Artwińska

Volume 14 in this series

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The concept of “camp narratives” rather than “Holocaust narratives” or “Gulag narratives” is based on the assumption that literary accounts of camp experiences share common traits, aesthetically as well as thematically. The book presents readings of camp literature that underscore the similarities between texts about Soviet gulag camps, Nazi camps and about other camp experiences. While literature about Nazi concentration camps still serves as a point of reference for camp narratives in the same way that the Holocaust serves as a point of reference for other genocidal operations, socialist labor and penal camps have become transnational lieux de mémoire in their own right since 1989. This volume intends to provide a theoretical frame as well as an overview of several important European camp literatures and case studies of iconic camp narratives and to take a comparative and transnational perspective on the genre of the camp narrative.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110631135
ISBN:: 9783110631135
ISBN:: 9783110630985
ISBN:: 9783110764567
ISBN:: 9783110628241
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Comparative Literary Studies
Subject:: Topics in Literary Studies
Subject:: Individual Motifs, Motif Research
Subject:: Other Topics
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2019

Zeitgeist – How Ideas Travel

Politics, Culture and the Public in the Age of Revolution

Maike Oergel

Volume 13 in this series

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This book investigates the emergence of the modern concept of zeitgeist, the notion of a pervasive contemporary coherence, in the late 18th century. It traces zeitgeist’s descent from genius saeculi and investigates its association with public spirit and public opinion before surveying its prominence around the Wars of Liberation in Germany and during the politically restless 1820s in England. This trajectory shows that zeitgeist emerged from the 18th-century discourses about culture and the public functioning of social collectives. Under the impact of the French Revolution the term came to describe social processes of political and cultural challenge. Zeitgeist was discussed as a social dynamic in which emerging elites disseminate new ideas which find enough public approval to influence cultural and political behaviour and practice. These findings modify the view that zeitgeist eludes critical grasp and is mainly invoked for manipulative purposes by showing that the zeitgeist discussions around 1800 contributed to the formation of modern politics and capture key aspects of how ideas are disseminated within societies and across borders, providing a way of reading history horizontally.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110631531
ISBN:: 9783110631531
ISBN:: 9783110630930
ISBN:: 9783110736731
ISBN:: 9783110630664
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: Topics in Cultural Studies
Subject:: Society
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: 18th Century
Subject:: German Literature
Subject:: 18th Century
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2018

The Enemy in Contemporary Film

Martin Löschnigg, Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż, Knowledge Unlatched

Volume 12 in this series

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While filmic representations of ‘enemies’ are legion, film studies have so far neglected the way in which filmic mediations of enemy images have contributed to shaping cultural memories.

The present volume investigates the (de)(re)constructions of enemy images in international film since the 1970s. The three parts deal with (re)configurations of the enemy in contemporary global cinemas, analysing films on the two world wars, on regional military conflicts, ethnic, racial and gender conflicts, socio-political conflicts and forms of terrorism. The essays concentrate on film aesthetics and contemporary (geo)politics, on filmic renderings of identity crises caused by troubled national pasts, and on the way films explore the collective psychological mechanisms at play in the construction, perpetuation or problematizing of enemy images.

The volume aims to show how in spite of the diversity of national cinemas, moving images are constitutive of national collectivities by rendering conflicts involving an external or internal enemy as the defining points in national or communal histories. It also points out how the dynamics of internalism and exteriority (of ‘we’ and ‘they’) has proved vital in this process.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110591217
ISBN:: 9783110591217
ISBN:: 9783110589924
ISBN:: 9783110709087
ISBN:: 9783110590036
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: Genres and Media in Cultural Studies
Subject:: Film
Subject:: Topics in Cultural Studies
Subject:: Other Topics
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2018

Disruption in the Arts

Textual, Visual, and Performative Strategies for Analyzing Societal Self-Descriptions

Lars Koch, Tobias Nanz, Johannes Pause, European Research Council (ERC)

Volume 11 in this series

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The volume examines from a comparative perspective the phenomenon of aesthetic disruption within the various arts in contemporary culture. It assumes that the political potential of contemporary art is not solely derived from presenting its audiences with openly political content, but rather from creating a space of perception and interaction using formal means: a space that makes hegemonic structures of action and communication observable, thus problematizing their self-evidence. The contributions conceptualize historical and contemporary politics of form in the media, which aim to be more than mere shock strategies, which are concerned not just with the ‘narcissistic’ exhibition of art as art, but also with the creation of a new common horizon of experience. They combine the analysis of paradigmatic works, procedures and actions with reference to theoretical debates in the fields of literature, media and art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The essay-collection shows how textual, visual, auditive or performative strategies disclose their own ways of functioning, intervene in automated processes of reception and thus work on stimulating a sense of political possibilities.
The editors acknowledge support from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP 7/ 2007–2013), ERC grant agreement no. 312454.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580082
ISBN:: 9783110580082
ISBN:: 9783110579758
ISBN:: 9783110565867
Subject:: Arts
Subject:: Arts, general
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2017

Narrative(s) in Conflict

Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Clemens Ruthner

Volume 10 in this series

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Narrative/s in Conflict presents the proceedings of an international workshop, held at the Trinity Long Room Hub Dublin in 2013, to a wider audience. This was a cross-disciplinary cooperation between the comparative research network 'Broken Narratives' (University of Vienna), the research strand 'Identities in Transformation' (Trinity College Dublin) and the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at the University of Giessen.

What has brought this informal network together is its credo that theories of narrative should be regarded as an integral part of cultural analysis. Choosing exemplary case studies from early Habsburg days up to the the wars and genocides of the 20th century and the post-9/11 'War on terror', our volume tries to analyze the relation between representation and conflict, i.e. between narrative constructions, social/historical processes, and cultural agon. Here it is crucial to state that narratives do not simply and passively 'mirror' conflicts as the conventional ‘realistic’ paradigm suggests; they rather provide a symbolic, sense-making matrix, and even a performative dimension. It even can be said that in many cases, narratives make conflicts.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110556858
ISBN:: 9783110556858
ISBN:: 9783110555905
ISBN:: 9783110555646
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Subject:: Narratology
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2016

9/11: Culture, Catastrophe and the Critique of Singularity

Diana Gonçalves

Volume 9 in this series

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Even though much has been said and written about 9/11, the work developed on this subject has mostly explored it as an unparalleled event, a turning point in history. This book wishes to look instead at how disruptive events promote a network of associations and how people resort to comparison as a means to make sense of the unknown, i.e. to comprehend what seems incomprehensible. In order to effectively discuss the complexity of 9/11, this book articulates different fields of knowledge and perspectives such as visual culture, media studies, performance studies, critical theory, memory studies and literary studies to shed some light on 9/11 and analyze how the event has impacted on American social and cultural fabric and how the American society has come to terms with such a devastating event. A more in-depth study of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close draws attention to the cultural construction of catastrophe and the plethora of cultural products 9/11 has inspired. It demonstrates how the event has been integrated into American culture and exemplifies what makes up the 9/11 imaginary.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110477689
ISBN:: 9783110477689
ISBN:: 9783110473131
ISBN:: 9783110477245
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2016

Rousseau Between Nature and Culture

Philosophy, Literature, and Politics

Anne Deneys-Tunney, Yves Charles Zarka, Karen Santos da Silva

Volume 8 in this series

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Rousseau has been seen as the inventor of the concept of nature; in this collective volume philosophers and literary specialists from France and the United States examine how Rousseau's philosophy can be reinterpreted from the point of view of a constant dialectical debate between nature and culture. In this, Rousseau is our true contemporary.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110457186
ISBN:: 9783110457186
ISBN:: 9783110456677
ISBN:: 9783110764574
ISBN:: 9783110450750
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Romance Literature
Subject:: French Literature
Subject:: 18th Century
Subject:: Literary History
Subject:: Philosophy
Subject:: History of Philosophy
Subject:: Modern Philosophy
Subject:: 18th and 19th Century Philosophy
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2016

Tracing Global Democracy

Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma

Vladimir Biti

Volume 7 in this series

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Focused on the recently hotly debated topic at the crossroads of various human and social sciences, this book investigates the emergence of the cosmopolitan idea of literature and its impact on the reconfiguration of the European and non-European political spaces. The birthplace of this idea is its designers’ traumatic experience as induced by the disconcerting condition of their abode.The thesis is that the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s cosmopolitan projects that grow out of such deep frustrations trace the twentieth century’s global democracy. This hidden origin of cosmopolitan projects dismantles the usual European representation of modernization as universal progress as myopic. Rather than being a generous action of prominent subjects such as Voltaire, Kant, and Goethe, or Bakhtin, Derrida and Deleuze, cosmopolitanism is an enforced reaction of the instances dispossessed by injury that search for the ways of healing it. Yet as soon as their remedy establishes itself as the ground for universal reconciliation, it risks suppressing other’s trauma, i.e. turns from politics into a police. Articulating the author’s position in the recent debates on the structure of democracy, the epilogue suggests an alternative strategy.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110457643
ISBN:: 9783110457643
ISBN:: 9783110455755
ISBN:: 9783110457063
ISBN:: 9783110577822
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: Topics in Cultural Studies
Subject:: Society
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Social Sciences
Subject:: Sociology
Subject:: Culture
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2015

The Cultural Life of Money

Isabel Capeloa Gil, Helena Gonçalves da Silva, Knowledge Unlatched

Volume 6 in this series

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The book discusses how culture simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the economy. Over the past few years, as the world has staggered from one financial crisis to another, the neat separation of economics and culture has been consistently challenged. To understand the current state of affairs, it has become increasingly necessary to understand the conjuncture that rules the production of value in economic systems, how money shapes social relations and affects discursive practices. By discussing the vocabulary, by understanding the rhetoric and interpreting the narratives, be it of crisis, austerity, growth, welfare, neo-liberalism or socialism, new modes of imaging the economic system may be made possible. The book is structured in four chapters dealing with theory and conjuncture (“Philosophies of Money”), with the visual arts and investment (“The Arts and Finance”), with literary representation and narrativity (“Literature and Money Matters”) and with the cognitive impact of fiduciary representation (“Cognitive Moneyscapes”). This collection analyses the process whereby a material icon invested with the symbolical power to rule social exchange becomes an explanatory narrative determining the way societies produce meaning.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110420890
ISBN:: 9783110425697
ISBN:: 9783110420890
ISBN:: 9783110634549
ISBN:: 9783110420999
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: Topics in Cultural Studies
Subject:: Other Topics
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2014

Narrating Poverty and Precarity in Britain

Barbara Korte, Frédéric Regard

Volume 5 in this series

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Poverty and precarity have gained a new societal and political presence in the twenty-first century's advanced economies. This is reflected in cultural production, which this book discusses for a wide range of media and genres from the novel to reality television. With a focus on Britain, its chapters divide their attention between current representations of poverty and important earlier narratives that have retained significant relevance today.
The book's contributions discuss the representation of social suffering with attention to agencies of enunciation, ethical implications of 'voice' and 'listening', limits of narratability, the pitfalls of sensationalism, voyeurism and sentimentalism, potentials and restrictions inherent in specific representational techniques, modes and genres; cultural markets for poverty and precarity. Overall, the book suggests that analysis of poverty narratives requires an intersection of theoretical reflection and a close reading of texts.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365740
ISBN:: 978-3-11-036793-5
ISBN:: 978-3-11-036574-0
ISBN:: 9783110764604
ISBN:: 9783110391367
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: History
Subject:: Topics in History
Subject:: Cultural History
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature, general
Subject:: Topics in Literary Studies
Subject:: Individual Motifs, Motif Research
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2014

The National Habitus

Ways of Feeling French, 1789–1870

Marie-Pierre Le Hir

Volume 4 in this series

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Stories about border crossers, illegal aliens, refugees that regularly appear in the press everywhere point to the crucial role national identity plays in human beings' lives today. The National Habitus seeks to understand how and why national belonging became so central to a person's identity and sense of identity. Centered on the acquisition of the national habitus, the process that transforms subjects into citizens when a state becomes a nation-state, the book examines this transformation at the individual level in the case of nineteenth century France. Literary texts serve as primary material in this study of national belonging, because, as Germaine de Staël pointed out long ago, literature has the unique ability to provide access to "inner feelings." The term "habitus," in the title of this book, signals a departure from traditional approaches to nationalism, a break with the criteria of language, race, and ethnicity typically used to examine it. It is grounded instead in a sociology that deals with the subjective dimension of life and is best exemplified by the works of Norbert Elias (1897–1990) and Pierre Bourdieu (1931–2002), two sociologists who approach belief systems like nationalism from a historical, instead of an ethical vantage point. By distinguishing between two groups of major French writers, three who experienced the 1789 Revolution firsthand as adults (Olympe de Gouges, François René de Chateaubriand and Germaine de Staël) and three who did not (Stendhal, Prosper Mérimée, and George Sand), the book captures evolving understandings of the nation, as well as thoughts and emotions associated with national belonging over time. Le Hir shows that although none of these writers is typically associated with nationalism, all of them were actually affected by the process of nationalization of feelings, thoughts, and habits, irrespective of aesthetic preferences, social class, or political views. By the end of the nineteenth century, they had learned to feel and view themselves as French nationals; they all exhibited the characteristic features of the national habitus: love of their own nation, distrust and/or hatred of other nations. By underscoring the dual contradictory nature of the national habitus, the book highlights the limitations nation-based identities impose on the prospect for peace.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110363067
ISBN:: 978-3-11-036291-6
ISBN:: 978-3-11-036306-7
ISBN:: 9783110559231
ISBN:: 9783110391534
Subject:: History
Subject:: Topics in History
Subject:: Cultural History
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Romance Literature
Subject:: French Literature
Subject:: 18th Century
Subject:: 19th Century
Subject:: Topics in Literary Studies
Subject:: Individual Motifs, Motif Research
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2012

The Architecture of Modern Culture

Towards a Narrative Cultural Theory

Wolfgang Müller-Funk

Volume 3 in this series

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These collected essays contain fundamental contributions to contemporary cultural analysis and theory as well as exemplary interpretations of film, literature and other media. Central issues of current cultural studies are addressed: cultural narratives, cultural identity, collective memory and post-colonial thinking. The oeuvre of cultural and literary critic Wolfgang Müller-Funk encompasses historic analyses such as readings of Broch, Canetti and Musil, and the heritage they passed on. Other essays move from the beginning of the 20th to the 21st century and address questions of space, time and globalization discussing, for example, Walter Benjamin and 9/11.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110283051
ISBN:: 978-3-11-028288-7
ISBN:: 978-3-11-028305-1
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: Cultural Theory
Subject:: General Cultural Theory
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: German Literature
Subject:: 20th Century
Subject:: Literary Theory
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2012

Plots of War

Modern Narratives of Conflict

Isabel Capeloa Gil, Adriana Martins

Volume 2 in this series

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Plots of War: Modern Narratives of Conflict discusses the dynamics of change and transformation that underlie the troubled project of modernity and shows how deeply it has been shaped by war and violence. The narrative of war, the emplotment of violence in historic and mainly in symbolic terms, is deeply embedded in the construction of individual and collective memories, but it also helps to shape the mediation of future conflicts.What is ultimately at stake here is the complex figuration and mediation of the violence of war in ever more hyper-mediated ways with direct consequences to the production of identities and processes of cultural memory.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110283037
ISBN:: 978-3-11-028287-0
ISBN:: 978-3-11-028303-7
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Theory
Subject:: Topics in Literary Studies
Subject:: Individual Motifs, Motif Research
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2012

Panic and Mourning

The Cultural Work of Trauma

Daniela Agostinho, Elisa Antz, Cátia Ferreira

Volume 1 in this series

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‘Panic’ and ‘mourning’ are two pivotal constructs that often emerge and interplay under circumstances of conflict, violence, crisis, and catastrophe, both natural and man-made. Whereas panic tends to crop up during the experience of violent events, mourning, on the other hand, relates to the aftermath of a brutal disruption and to the way humans try to make sense of it retrospectively. Conversely, violent events can leave a thread of panic in their aftermath, while mourning can be unsettled, interrupted or even refuelled by another catastrophic incident.

From an international and inter-disciplinary outlook, this volume wishes to address questions at the interface of panic and mourning and their impact on practices in literature, media, and the arts. Since violent events take place within cultures that will draw from their traditions, memories and systems of beliefs in order to process them, the authors of this book aim precisely at discussing the effects of calamity upon the cultural structure and the way literary, artistic and media practices not only reproduce individual and collective anxieties but also generate knowledge and reshape the cultural formation within which they emerge.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110283143
ISBN:: 978-3-11-028309-9
ISBN:: 978-3-11-028314-3
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: Topics in Cultural Studies
Subject:: Emotions
Subject:: General Cultural Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter