Peter Schneck

Philipp Schweighauser

In his novel Mao II, Don DeLillo lets his protagonist say, 'Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness.' DeLillo suggests that while the collective imagination of the past was guided by the creative order of narrative fictions, our contemporary fantasies and anxieties are directed by the endless narratives of war and terror relayed by the mass media. To take DeLillo's literary reflections on media, terrorism, and literature seriously means to engage with the ethical implications of his media critique. This book departs from existing works on DeLillo not only through its focus on the function of literature as public discourse in culture, but also in its decidedly transatlantic perspective. Bringing together prominent DeLillo scholars in Europe and in the US, it is the first critical book on DeLillo to position his work in a transatlantic context.

Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo

Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction

Ridvan Askin

Paul John Ennis

Andreas Hägler (ed.)

"Ever since the turn of the century aesthetics has steadily gained momentum as a central field of study across the disciplines. No longer sidelined, aesthetics has grown in confidence. While this recent development brings with it a return to the work of the canonical authors (most notably Baumgarten and Kant), some contemporary scholars reject the traditional focus on epistemology and theorize aesthetics in its ontological connotations. It is according to this shift that speculative realists have proclaimed aesthetics as "first philosophy" and as speculative in nature. With speculative realism aesthetics no longer necessarily implies human agents. This is in alignment with the general speculative realist framework for thinking all kinds of processes, entities, and objects as free from our all-pervasive anthropocentrism, which states, always, that everything is "for us."This special volume of Speculations explores the ramifications of what could be termed the new speculative aesthetics. In doing so, it stages a three-fold encounter: between aesthetics and speculation, between speculative realism and its (possible) precursors, and between speculative realism and art and literature"

Aesthetics in the 21st Century

Speculations V

Therese Steffen

Gabriele Rippl

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

This timely volume explores a wealth of North American literary texts that engage with moral and ethical dilemmas. It ranges from William Dean Howells's and Henry James's realist novels to Edward Sapir's intermedial poems, and from John Muir's unpublished letters and journal of his 1893 tour of the Swiss Alps to Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers and the poetry of Robert Lowell. Many of the contributions also critically engage with and re?ect on some of the most prominent voices in contemporary theoretical debates about ethics such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jürgen Habermas, Em-manuel Levinas, Axel Honneth, Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, and Julia Kristeva. This volume thus aptly covers the panoply of contemporary ethical and moral interventions while at the same time providing distinctively American Studies perspectives.

Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives

Philipp Schweighauser

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