Birgit Neumann

Gabriele Rippl

Examining a range of contemporary Anglophone texts, this book opens up postcolonial and transcultural studies for discussions of visuality and vision. It argues that the preoccupation with visual practices in Anglophone literatures addresses the power of images, vision and visual aesthetics to regulate cultural visibility and modes of identification in an unevenly structured world. The representation of visual practices in the imaginative realm of fiction opens up a zone in which established orders of the sayable and visible may be revised and transformed. In 12 chapters, the book examines narrative fiction by writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, David Dabydeen and NoViolet Bulawayo, who employ word-image relations to explore the historically fraught links between visual practices and the experience of modernity in a transcultural context. Against this conceptual background, the examination of verbal-visual relations will illustrate how Anglophone fiction models alternative modes of re-presentation that reflect critically on hegemonic visual regimes and reach out for new, more pluralized forms of exchange.

Intermedial Aesthetics

Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literature

This handbook offers students and researchers compact orientation in their study of intermedial phenomena in Anglophone literary texts and cultures by introducing them to current academic debates, theoretical concepts and methodologies. By combining theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring, it introduces students and scholars alike to a vast field of research which encompasses concepts such as intermediality, multi- and plurimediality, intermedial reference, transmediality, ekphrasis, as well as related concepts such as visual culture, remediation, adaptation, and multimodality, which are all discussed in connection with literary examples. Hence each of the 30 contributions spans both a theoretical approach and concrete analysis of literary texts from different centuries and different Anglophone cultures.

Literature – Image – Sound – Music

Handbook of Intermediality

Therese Steffen

Philipp Schweighauser

Tiina Kirss

Margit Sutrop

Exploring life writing from a variety of cultural contexts, Haunted Narratives provides new insights into how individuals and communities across time and space deal with traumatic experiences and haunting memories. From the perspectives of trauma theory, memory studies, gender studies, literary studies, philosophy, and post-colonial studies, the volume stresses the lingering, haunting presence of the past in the present. The contributors focus on the psychological, ethical, and representational difficulties involved in narrative negotiations of traumatic memories. Haunted Narratives focuses on life writing in the broadest sense of the term: biographies and autobiographies that deal with traumatic experiences, autobiographically inspired fictions on loss and trauma, and limit-cases that transcend clear-cut distinctions between the factual and the fictional. In discussing texts as diverse as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Vikram Seth’s Two Lives, deportation narratives of Baltic women, Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Ene Mihkelson’s Ahasveeruse uni, the contributors add significantly to current debates on life writing, trauma, and memory; the contested notion of “cultural trauma”; and the transferability of clinical-psychological notions to the study of literature and culture.

Life Writing in an Age of Trauma

Haunted narratives

Exploring life writing from a variety of cultural contexts, Haunted Narratives provides new insights into how individuals and communities across time and space deal with traumatic experiences and haunting memories. From the perspectives of trauma theory, memory studies, gender studies, literary studies, philosophy, and post-colonial studies, the volume stresses the lingering, haunting presence of the past in the present. The contributors focus on the psychological, ethical, and representational difficulties involved in narrative negotiations of traumatic memories. Haunted Narratives focuses on life writing in the broadest sense of the term: biographies and autobiographies that deal with traumatic experiences, autobiographically inspired fictions on loss and trauma, and limit-cases that transcend clear-cut distinctions between the factual and the fictional. In discussing texts as diverse as Toni Morrison's Beloved, Vikram Seth's Two Lives, deportation narratives of Baltic women, Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, Joy Kogawa's Obasan, and Ene Mihkelson's Ahasveeruse uni, the contributors add significantly to current debates on life writing, trauma, and memory; the contested notion of “cultural trauma”; and the transferability of clinical-psychological notions to the study of literature and culture.

Haunted Narratives

Christian Emden

The relationship between different media has emerged as one of the most important areas of research in contemporary cultural and literary studies. But how should we conceive of the relationship between texts and images today? Should we speak of collaboration, interaction or competition? What is the role of literary, historical and scientific texts in a culture dominated by the visual? What is the status of images as cultural artefacts? Are images forms of representation? Do they simulate reality or do they intervene in the material world? And how do literature and cultural theory - themselves essentially textual discourses react to the much-discussed visual turn within Western culture? Does the concept of `intermediality' allow literary, historical and cultural scholars to envisage a more general theory of media? Addresssing these questions from a programmatic point of view, the articles in this volume investigate the effects of different forms of representation in modern European and American literature, media and thought.

Studies in Intermediality

ImageScapes

Susi Kotzinger

Der vorliegende Band dokumentiert das vom Konstanzer Graduiertenkolleg Theorie der Literatur im Oktober 1992 an der Universität Konstanz veranstaltete Symposium Zeichen zwischen Klartext und Arabeske, an dem SpezialistInnen aus verschiedenen kulturwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen teilnahmen. Klartext und Arabeske stecken das Feld ab für die zu problematisierenden Zeichenbegriffe. Auf welch unterschiedliche Weisen unvereinbare Aufzeichnungsmodelle gegeneinander-geführt werden und miteinander konkurrieren, wird anhand verschiedener Objektbereiche und Methoden dargestellt: Kombinatorische Textgenerierung, Kryptographie, Kalligraphie, Bild-Schrift-Relationen, Arabeskisierung des Textes im strukturellen und semantischen Bereich, Rematerialisierung und Energetisierung von Zeichen. Zwei prinzipiell zu unterscheidende Ausrichtungen bestimmen die Konzeption des Bandes. Die ersten drei Teile, Kombinatorik - Alphabet, Schrift - Bild und Kryptographie - Latenz sind unter dem Aspekt der Doppeltextualität und Mehrfachkodierung zum ersten Teil des Bandes zusammenzufassen. In den Teilen 4 und 5, Ornament - Zeichen und Zeichen-Körper - Energetik, dagegen steht in der Zusammenführung unterschiedlicher Codes darüberhinaus der Begriff des Zeichens generell auf dem Spiel. Im Namen des Ornamentbegriffs Arabeske werden Remotivierungs- und Renaturalisierungsstrategien im Hinblick auf eine arabeske Semantik verfolgt, die Semiosen aller Art immer wieder infrage stellt und energetisch 'überschießt'. Diese globale Einteilung in zwei Blöcke versteht sich als systematische Gewichtung, wobei die gegenseitige Abhängigkeit der Teile untereinander immer mitreflektiert wird.

Konferenz des Konstanzer Graduertenkollegs "Theorie der Literatur" veranstaltet im Oktober 1992

Zeichen zwischen Klartext und Arabeske

Michael C. Frank

für Aleida Assmann

Arbeit am Gedächtnis

Stefan Helgesson

The Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures is the first globally comprehensive attempt to chart the rich field of world literatures in English. Part I navigates different usages of the term ‘world literature’ from an historical point of view. Part II discusses a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to world literature. This is also where the handbook’s conceptualisation of ‘Anglophone world literatures’ – in the plural – is developed and interrogated in juxtaposition with proximate fields of inquiry such as postcolonialism, translation studies, memory studies and environmental humanities. Part III charts sociological approaches to Anglophone world literatures, considering their commodification, distribution, translation and canonisation on the international book market. Part IV, finally, is dedicated to the geographies of Anglophone world literatures and provides sample interpretations of literary texts written in English.

Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures

Torsten Hoffmann

ein (neues) Leitmedium?

Bilder

Beschreibungs-Kunst untersucht literarische Beschreibungstechniken wie Ekphrasis und Pikturalismus in sogenannten Ikontexten der anglo-amerikanischen AutorInnen Henry James, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, H. D., D. H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, A. S. Byatt und Charles Simic. Den zwischen 1880 und 2000 entstandenen Romanen, Erzählungen und Gedichten liegt eine intermediale Poetik zugrunde, die Text und Bild zusammenbringt. Wenn es um die Bestimmung der spezifischen Eigenarten unterschiedlicher Medien und die Analyse ihres Zusammenspiels geht, erhalten solche literarischen Texte, die ihre eigene Medialität reflektieren, eine besondere Relevanz. Sie tragen in besonderem Maße dazu bei, den Ort der Literatur und die Rolle der Schrift in unserer Gesellschaft auszuloten. Zu diesen Texten gehören die in Beschreibungs-Kunst untersuchten Beispiele, die auf vielfältige Weise mit ihrem medial Anderen, den Bildern, interagieren.

zur intermedialen Poetik angloamerikanischer Ikontexte (1880-2000)

Beschreibungs-Kunst

Simone Winko

Wer sagt, welche Literatur es wert ist, dass wir sie lesen? Das Handbuch zeigt alle Instanzen des Literaturbetriebs, in denen Wertungen von Literatur und Kanonbildungen vorkommen von der Literaturkritik über das Verlagswesen bis zu den Literaturhäusern und Museen. Die Ausführungen zu den Kanongeschichten aller größeren Nationalliteraturen verdeutlichen, wie ein literarischer Kanon entsteht und sich verändert. Dies zeigen exemplarisch auch Beiträge zu verschiedenen Genres, darunter zu Krimi, Fantasy und Comics. Ein Praxiskapitel vermittelt Wege der Analyse von Wertungen und Kanonbildungen.

Gabriele Rippl

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