This introductory text is a critical theory toolkit on how to how to make use of Karl Marx's ideas in media, communication and cultural studies. Karl Marx's ideas remain of crucial relevance, and in this short, student-friendly book, leading expert Christian Fuchs introduces Marx to the reader by discussing fifteen of his key concepts and showing how they matter for understanding the digital and communicative capitalism that shapes human life in 21st century society. Key concepts covered include: the (...) dialectic, materialism, commodities, capital, capitalism, labour, surplus-value, the working class, alienation, means of communication, the general intellect, ideology, socialism, communism, and class struggles. Students taking courses in Media, Culture and Society; Communication Theory; Media Economics; Political Communication and Cultural Studies will find Fuchs' concise introduction an essential guide to Marx. (shrink)

The fixation on canonical works that characterizes the disciplines of literary study in Germany is an inheritance of Geistesgeschichte; only literary historical curiosity, however, can secure the epistemological basis of literary study and protect it from disciplinary tedium.

Taking as its point of departure certain necessary distinctions to be drawn regarding the concept of Geistesgeschichte – a concept by no means reducible to the early 20th-century school of literary-historical research –, this contribution calls to mind some enduring tasks of our discipline. The role played by the epistemic tools of conceptual history in the fulfillment of those tasks is exemplified and discussed with regard to a normatively rich concept of understanding as the final goal of literary studies.

The history of political thought of the so-called »Cambridge School« is certainly only one of many methodological successors of the old German »Geistesgeschichte«. Yet it may be regarded as the latter’s most influential replacement. The essay discusses the relation between Quentin Skinner’s history of political thought and literary studies which leads to the differences between the approach promoted by the »Cambridge School« and the »Geistesgeschichte« of the inter-war years. The essay concludes by discussing the »Cambridge School’s« potential for literary studies (...) as well as the significance of literary texts for studying political thought and political ideas in history. (shrink)

The concept of the periodical (DVjs) when it was founded in 1923 is submitted here to a rereading, with a selective plea for three possibilities of productive development: Geist is reconceived as an activity of »burrowing«, Geistesgeschichte as a history of problems informed by the sociology of culture and of knowledge, and the research library as a problem library.

In the research on the Early Modern Period distributed among various disciplines – history, religion, philosophy, law, literature –, there is no doubt that Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) was one of the outstanding representatives of modern, secular natural law, whose work had an impact over a century that can hardly be overestimated. When did the research development associated with Pufendorf’s name begin? The article examines this question from the perspective of history of science using the example of the jurisprudence dissertation of (...) Hans Welzel (1904–1977), which appeared in a partial print in the DVjs in 1931. (shrink)

Die Abhandlung betrachtet “Verantwortlichkeit für menschliches Handeln” als die quintessentielle Forderung der Aufklärung, welche Herder, nicht weniger als Thomasius und Kant, befürwortete. Was Herder, und diese Abhandlung, in Frage stellen, ist die enge Identifizierung des Aufklärungsbegriffes “Mündigkeit” mit Rationalität, Sittlichkeit, und Politik schlechthin.

This article examines the history of Erich Auerbach’s relationship with the DVjs, in which science and politics intersect. In the early phase of his career, Auerbach attributed great importance to the DVjs and developed a special relationship with Rothacker in particular. This is evident from his letters to the journal’s editors, which are the focus of this study. When Rothacker began to take sides with National Socialism, Auerbach turned his back on the DVjs. After the Second World War, he was (...) one of the emigrated academics whose cooperation the journal sought. The effects of the political upheavals of 1933/45 on the DVjs can be exemplified by the relationship Auerbach had with it. (shrink)

The emergence of public opinion is often (and especially since Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit [1962]) dated to the 18th century and thus interpreted as a phenomenon of the Enlightenment. Following more recent historical research, however, this article shows that there was already an awareness and aesthetic reflection of opinion and the public sphere in the 16th and 17th centuries. In a first step, the article reconstructs the historical semantics and sociological conditionality of opinion in the early modern period, while in (...) a second step it analyses the dramatic shaping of opinion in the works of Gryphius, Haugwitz and Gottsched. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin’s treatise »The Life of Students« (1914/15) is not only an insightful document of the youth culture movement, but also an important philosophical contribution to the discussion on the idea and task of the university. In his critique of the contemporary university, the 22-year-old student develops the counter-concept of a future university that, rejecting all heteronomous functionalizations, finds its purpose in radical and risky intellectual work. This vision is rooted in the strict dichotomy of study and career, the origins (...) of which lie in German educational idealism around 1800, and in the concept of creative Eros that refers back to Plato. The promise is to restore the productive synthesis of spirit, Eros and youth under the sign of the youth movement.After a commentary on this little-noticed work (I.), the article outlines the contemporary context and the basic lines of the history of ideas between Kant, Fichte and Nietzsche, to which Benjamin refers with his concept (II.). The focus, however, is, following the concept of constellation research, on the critical comparison with the university concepts that have been developed between 1917 and 1923 by Max Weber, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers (III.–V.). Although it was not a debate in the true sense, the reconstruction of this constellation in the history of ideas nevertheless allows to analyze the contradictions and deficits, but also the cognitive potential and the possible topicality of Benjamin’s treatise in a broader context. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Beitrag nimmt die unter anderem von Walter Benjamin zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts im Rahmen einer Auseinandersetzung um die konzeptionelle Ausrichtung der Germanistik geäußerte Forderung in Augenschein, dass der spekulative Drang zum Philosophischen mit der verweilenden Aufmerksamkeit fürs Einzelne zu kombinieren sei, um die gleichzeitige Geltung geistesgeschichtlicher Zusammenhänge und historischer Details, von konkretem Gegenstand und allgemeinem Wesen, in den Blick zu bekommen. Am Beispiel von Athanasius Kirchers Traktat Scrutinium physico-medicum von 1658 wird gezeigt, dass es an Benjamins Forderung (...) eine frühneuzeitliche Annäherung gibt, in der die Wahrnehmungsform der spekulativen Aufmerksamkeit zu einer Möglichkeit wird, die Geistesgeschichte als Ergebnis eines Wechselverhältnisses zwischen Fokus und Entgrenzung zu verstehen. (shrink)

Vor dem Hintergrund eines kurzen historischen Rückblicks argumentiert der Beitrag für die Bedeutung einer an Texten (statt nur Begriffen oder Sätzen) ausgerichteten ideenhistorischen Forschung und plädiert spezifisch für das Forschungsfeld einer ›Literaturgeschichte der Philosophie‹ (doppelter Genitiv) als ein zentrales Arbeitsgebiet der vorliegenden Zeitschrift.

Taking as its point of departure the first systematic definition of the concept of literary studies (Literaturwissenschaft) as formulated by Ernst Elster, the essay explores the question to what degree literary studies can be conceived as a discipline that inquires after the principles of literature.

This essay reads Der Verschollene in the context of Prague cultural Zionism and its conflict between Western Jewish assimilation and Eastern Jewish “authenticity.” The novel’s symbolic network articulates Kafka’s problematic relationship to cultural Zion-ist thought, his valorization of Yiddish culture, and his ambivalent understanding of his literary identity as an assimilated Western Jew. As Karl travels West, he paradoxically travels East: through the embodiment of Yiddish by his doubles (Delamarche, Robinson) and the return of Kafka’s “black” Eastern Jewish (...) actor friend Löwy from beneath “Negro,” Karl moves toward a “Teater von Oklahama” that is a symbolic “Yiddish Theater.” The West of Oklahama figures the “primitive,” “authentic” Eastern European East; however, the ambiguous metaphors that permit this progression toward “Zion” likewise ensure its ultimate instability. (shrink)

Geistesgeschichte was a serious response to a modal-quantitative problem in Classical German Philosophy. In an attempt at solving the problem, it glorified the historically given as spirit, and for this reason became ideology. Nonetheless, Geistesgeschichte is heir to the promise that history, as the history of the spirit, may yet rise to transcend what is given.

According to their founders, the DVjs, established in 1923, was supposed to develop a specific focus also for medieval literature and culture. This article analyzes how this program was realized and how the relationship between literary studies and intellectual history (›Geistesgeschichte‹) was shaped in different periods from the early articles of Günther Müller, Wolfgang Stammler or Walther Rehm to the reestablishment by Hugo Kuhn around 1950. The authors reconstruct a particular branch of German medieval studies still relevant today.

It is with great pleasure that I remember my visit to the University of Alberta in Fall 1995, and I would like especially to thank Eric Higgs, Andrew Light, and Ray Morrow for making my visit an especially memorable one. During my visit, we participated in a series of seminars on postmodern theory, critical theory, media culture, cultural studies, and the philosophy of technology and not surprisingly these themes were the focus of the symposium of my book (...) class='Hi'>Media Culture, which we are now committing to print. Accordingly, I shall respond to each of the three commentators, focusing on the themes which they highlighted. This will enable me to clarify my positions on media culture, the philosophy of technology, and the Internet (Higgs); social theory, media culture, and cultural studies (Morrow); and media culture, identity, and identity politics (Light). The interconnection of these issues in Media Culture and my work in general points, I would argue, for the need to develop transdisciplinary theories to confront the issues, problems, and challenges of the contemporary moment as we negotiate the troubled terrain between the modern and the postmodern. (shrink)

Introduction. The development of legal culture and a culture of human rights in the modern world through media technologies, is acquiring special significance in connection with the processes of globalization and the spread of media in recent decades. The purpose of the article is to study the prospects for the use of media education in the formation of the legal social culture and a culture of human rights. Materials and methods. Based on a study of domestic and (...) foreign sources, issues of media education, media literacy, spiritual and moral education, the legal culture of society, the phenomenon of post-truth and ways of forming critical, creative thinking are considered. The use of general scientific, philosophical, and socio-pedagogical methods has made it possible to study media education as a dialogue of learning, stimulating the development of rational, critical thinking, focused on the search for the value foundations of intellectual and social activity. Results. The development of the field of information and communication technologies determines the principles for the formation of the content and orientation of modern education. Media education is interlinked with the development of democracy and human rights. It influences the formation of a culture of citizen participation, their active social position, civic and political culture. Media education plays a significant role in shaping the legal culture of society since critical media research and information research focuses on the analysis of power structures and structures of dominance in the media. A study of the interpretations of the concepts of "media education" and "media literacy" made it possible to show that media education focuses a person on a critical approach to media content. One of the main issues of media education is teaching a person the skills to critically study media and media technologies, which involves addressing the technological, cultural and historical specifics of specific media used at a specific time and place. Information and communication technologies have changed the way of life, work, communication, and ways of selfpresentation, the formation of values, participation in socially significant events. Therefore, a critical approach to mass media should be based on knowledge of socio-philosophical theories, ethics and research in the field of mass media. Discussion. Mass media are constructing a history of human rights, which updates the topic of the media policy of human rights, combining socio-legal, cultural and media theories. Education in the field of acquiring information perception skills, the ability to correctly understand the importance of audiovisual images, to competently handle and navigate information flows are necessary for the life of a modern person in society. (shrink)

Each of the three volumes of Erasmus Francisci’s Acerra Exoticorum (1672-74), a collection of stories and reports from all corners of the known world, begins with a Vorrede to the reader. These texts address the rationale for his work, apologize for errors in spelling and/or meaning, and outline his thinking about stories and histories, or more precisely, the difference between reports of current events and histories proven true by the test of time. Each of the three tomes offers stories from (...) all over the known world, gathered and arranged without any easily perceptible organizing principle. Still, some of the narratives do suggest a teaching or moralizing function, while others seem to serve mostly to inform and entertain introducing the reader to »meldungswürdige Sitten/ Gewonheiten / so wol als andrer anmercklicher Sachen außheimischer Sachen,« as truthfully and historically accurate as possible. Francisci presents his Acerra Exoticorum as a receptacle of events outside of Germany. He will inform the reader about old and new »Ordnungen und Gewohnheiten,« corroborated by the writings of trusted authors. While paying special attention to the programmatic Vorreden of the three Acerra-volumes, I will examine how Francisci handles both textual and narrative varieties, news reports and historical texts, and what this tells us about his historical, cultural, and geographic reach. (shrink)

Studying publications from Sezession magazine and Antaios publishing house as examples, we argue that the so-called New Right uses esoteric forms of communication and interaction to recruit a new generation of far-right intellectuals. Central to this is the activation of readers to think and write according to New Right patterns. Double-coded forms of communication therefore have a group-structuring function which serves to promote an elite and to internally enforce right-wing intellectual leadership claims.

British cultural studies, represented perhaps chiefly by the so-called Birmingham School, is much marked by its strong orientation towards the application of grounded theory in the analysis of concrete cases, rather than the development of abstract Theory with a Capital T (in Stuart Hall’s words). As a leading figure of the Birmingham School and a key representative of the active audience model in television studies, or broadly, media studies, David Morley stands at a point where this trend was (...) set, as is evidenced in this interview. Questioned by Huimin Jin, Morley puts his audience studies into the contexts of British cultural studies, postmodernism, Marxism, social movements, and so on; and in doing so, he shows the ambiguity, and subtlety of his concepts of how to best theorize the active audience. Only by this method, Jin believes, could Morley launch his version of audience studies, which aims not to invent a general theory of media effects, but to use an interdisciplinary range of theories to explore how people actually respond to a TV programme; and only by this approach to audience studies, furthermore, could Morley develop a theory of the audience’s activity, which is embedded in the course of their everyday life and that cannot be thoroughly colonized by discourses. Cultural studies, wherever it is conducted, therefore, Morley suggests, has to construct modes of analysis that are relevant to its own conditions of production in a particular place, at a particular time. This is the tradition, as we know it, but also the future, as Morley envisages, of cultural studies. (shrink)

Mass media play an important role in changing body image. This study aimed to determine the role of media (magazines and television) in body weight concern among university females in five Arab countries. A total sample of 1134 female university students was selected at convenience from universities in five Arab countries: Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Oman and Syria. The females' ages ranged from 17 to 32. A pre-tested questionnaire was used to assess the exposure to mass media regarding (...) weight concerns. For the variables on exposure to mass media, girls were divided into two groups: infrequently exposed and frequently exposed. In general, the females who were exposed to mass media had a greater risk of having dieted to lose weight and changing their ideas of a perfect body shape than those who were not exposed or infrequently exposed. The association of exposure to magazines with having dieted to lose weight was only significant among females in Bahrain (p<0.044), Egypt (p<0.001) and Jordan (p<0.001). Exposure to television had a weaker association than exposure to magazines with body weight concerns of females. The association of exposure to television with females' idea of a perfect body shape was only statistically significant in females in Egypt (p<0.019) and Oman (p<0.019). The pressure from mass media on the body weight concern of female university students may lead these women to practise unhealthy weight control diets. (shrink)

The study documents that the founding of the journal was the initiative of the publisher Hermann Niemeyer. It was the result of negotiations Niemeyer conducted mainly with Paul Kluckhohn and Erich Rothacker; the former sought for a literary-historical, the latter for a more scientific-philosophical orientation for the journal. The article concludes with an overview on the epistemic situation of literary studies between 1890 and 1920 which shows that the geistesgeschichtliche Bewegung emerged from an ideological reaction to the Kulturkrise and found (...) its way into the discipline of literary studies in various conceptions. (shrink)

Since antiquity, prologues are an opportunity to specify adaptations and translations, as well as to be polemical. In the 18th century, both these traditions merge into a new form: translation polemics in prologues. Such polemics, I want to argue in this paper, serve as a cultural and political medium of nation-building. This process becomes apparent in the reception of Voltaire in German-speaking theatre, particularly when it is mediated through English drama. The national antagonisms that are found in English Voltaire (...) translations (Hill, Miller) recur in prominent text such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy and Friedrich Schiller’s prologue To Goethe, On His Producing Voltaire’s »Mahomet« On The Stage in an effort to break new ground for German national theatre. (shrink)

The topical focus of the following inquiry is the critical engagement of French scholars and writers ca. 1800 – for example, Madame de Staël or Charles de Villers – with German philosophical aesthetics. With regard to this case study, the changing relationship of literary criticism and aesthetics within different national contexts can be brought into view. In France, the concept »esthétique«, which was imported as a translation of the German neologism »Ästhetik« current since the publication of Baumgarten’s work, met with (...) firm resistance from the middle of the 18th century on. The task of the following contribution is to analyze the reasons for this rejection in French intellectual circles at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. In the background of these often quite intensely conducted discussions lies the question whether philosophy can legitimately claim to produce a specific discourse regarding literature. (shrink)

This text reflects cultural techniques in relation to other concepts in cultural and media studies by addressing their relation to selected Anglo-American and French discussions. It also investigates the relation of cultural techniques to more recent material and speculative turns. Suggesting that the cultural techniques approaches introduce their own important material dimension to media-specific analysis of culture, the article argues that cultural techniques should be read in relation to recent post-Fordist political theory and (...) explorations of the post-human in order to develop conceptual hybrids that are able to inject politics into media theoretical accounts, as well as excavate histories of cultural techniques of cognitive capitalism. (shrink)

The essay discusses the contribution of Periodical Studies to histories of knowledge, the arts, and theory. Special attention is given to the fact that magazines and journals have often been conceptualized and imagined as embodiments of »Geist« in time and space.

This paper reexamines the thesis of a split between politics and morality in the political theory of the eighteenth century. At its center is the notion of a “civil society” and the safeguards necessary for its proper functioning. While arguments are drawn from several discourses (economic, juridical, political, ethical), the focus is on the political and ethical reasoning of the age derivative of natural law and dependent upon the free and open exchange of ideas.

Ideology and politics were among the dynamics that shaped the scholarly reception of Friedrich Hölderlin and his work from the 1920s to 1940s. By taking the examples of research reports by Adolf von Grolman, Johannes Hoffmeister, and Heinz Otto Burger as well as of the controversy between Wilhelm Böhm and Ludwig Strauß, we outline the reciprocal function of Hölderlin and the DVjs. In doing so, we specifically focus on Paul Kluckhohn’s role in Hölderlin research, not only as an editor but (...) also as a public speaker and academic promoter in politically turbulent times. (shrink)

The paper discusses in six parts the role of knowledge and omniscience in narration. The first part identifies kinds of knowledge which usually inform narratives, using modern and medieval narratives as examples. The second part focuses on the carrier of knowledge: it is the author, but also the narrator to whom omniscience is attributed. The third part describes the phenomenology of this knowledge which cannot be derived in a natural manner and traces it back in the history of narration. The (...) concept of omniscience is defined in the fourth part and distinguished from divine omniscientia. Omniscience was ›discovered‹ as a characteristic of third-person narration only at the beginning of the 19th century – evidence of this is given in part V. Finally, part VI discusses if the concept of omniscience can apply to modern forms of representing the mental states of characters. (shrink)

Central representational problems of Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften are concentrated in the thematic complexes of archiving, preservation, and restoration, which have received little attention to date. Goethe’s engagement with archival discourses and techniques of the late 18th century, as will be shown here, not only illuminates an important historical background of the novel, but also makes clear that his interest in the theory and practice of archives as well as his »archival poetics« described for his late work is already crucial for the (...) time of the Wahlverwandtschaften. (shrink)

From the perspective of praxeological scientific research as well as quantitative methods and on the basis of archival materials, it becomes apparent that it is not in the ›geistesgeschichtliche‹ method, but in the implicit recognition of disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical plurality that the unity of literary studies lies that the DVjs expects from its articles.

In the historical, literary, and philosophical history of concepts, large-scale concepts or, more precisely, »Kollektivsingulare« [collective singular concepts] – as Koselleck described them with considerable effect on the practice of social history – are regarded as metaphysical, ideological, or at least as simplifications. The essay does not deny that this is justified, but with a certain melancholy it pleads for a careful archiving and also for the ongoing use of the terms in question including their multifaceted historical semantology. This even (...) applies to the term »Geist.« To reject this concept cannot really mean replacing it or – more drastically – erasing it altogether. (shrink)

This paper argues that Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People constitutes one his most ambitious literary and political achievements. In literary terms, the play seeks to reinvent the genre of history drama in a manner deliberately opposed to Hegelian aesthetics. Ibsen does so by systematically deepening the play’s central conflict. What at first appears to be a problem grounded in personal rivalries, reveals itself to be a social and political struggle, which in turn yields a moral crisis, to, finally, a (...) problem of history. In this manner, Ibsen combines two positions that at first sight seem incompatible: the most relativistic impulses of the historicism of his day and a metaphysical form of tragedy that he identifies with Shakespeare. Politically, Ibsen stages what might be characterized as a profoundly pessimistic form of messianism. On that view, it is necessary to categorically reject any existing political project and instead champion the possibilities articulated by those in society who have no investment in the present. This is not because those individuals have greater access to utopian ideals that should be actualized, since any political success automatically invalidates the ideals in question. Instead, the defense of the socially marginalized is grounded in the view that their saving power lies with their ability to articulate ideals that have no stake in the persistence of our world. Against this background it becomes possible to fully understand the structure and continuing significance of this play. (shrink)

This article examines the widespread diagnosis of a »crisis of rhetoric« around 1800 from the hitherto largely neglected perspective of the sermon. Four exemplary cases are used to show how rhetoric continues and transforms itself. Franz Theremin reaffirms the function of rhetoric and represents the largely unbroken continuity of rhetorical knowledge in 19th century homiletics and preaching practice. Johann G. Fichte develops the format of a philosophical sermon supposed to serve precisely as a propaedeutic of critical philosophy, which is in (...) itself anti-rhetorical. Friedrich D.E. Schleiermacher develops a new conception of the sermon and also a highly influential conception of religion from the problem of the communicability of religious knowledge. Karl P. Moritz proclaims a religion of art in the form of a sermon and narrates the comical failure of this proclamation, thus exposing the very limits of a sacralization of art. Through these four case studies we can gain a more precise understanding of the »crisis of rhetoric« and envision an interdisciplinary research on the sermon in which literary studies and theology would cooperate closely. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe issue of soli or content-influencing gifts and its relations to the professional practice of journalist and other media workers has become a subject of discussion among academic researchers and general audiences. It is against this background that this article examines media practitioners’ understanding of the culture and moral implications of soli and its effects on professional journalism in the northern region of Ghana. Using qualitative approaches, the study revealed that in Ghana, soli is both a moral (...) and cultural problem, and when accepted, it undermines objective, balanced, and independent news reportage. This project concludes that any discourse on soli must take into consideration the cultural and philosophical foundations of journalism within a developmental context, as well as the various global socio-cultural insti... (shrink)

The article examines strategies of new-right publishing policy. In response to boycotts of the online book trade since 2014, small-scale collaborations have been formed. The heterogeneous milieu builds networks via curated programs. At the same time, publishers are appropriating non-right-wing contemporary and pop literature, which is advertised and distributed alongside their own publications.

One of the most controversial episodes in early medieval hagiography was the legend of the Roman Emperor Trajan, who escaped hell by the intercession and the prayers of Pope Gregory. Was there a way out of hell? How could this legend be interpreted without disrupting core ideas of Western scholastic theology like the eternity of damnation? This paper takes this example and provides a diachronic overview of the gradual emergence of this new capacity for understanding hagiography from the early Middle (...) Ages to the Early Modern Period. It draws special attention to a group of lesser-known Early Modern theologians like Alonso Salmeron, Alonson Chacón, Caesar Baronius or Alexandre Noël, whose contributions to the debate over the fate of Trajan’s soul are illustrative of a process of negotiation wherein innovative scholarly methods were interwoven with an overarching drive to purify theology. The result was a situation in which a problematic authority that could not be demolished by way of rational arguments based on its own internal logic could at least be brought down by undermining the value and legitimacy of its genre. (shrink)

Taking my cue from Judith Schalanskys 2018 work Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, I discuss the striking presence of lists and list-like, enumerative structures in contemporary literature. As a poetic principle, the use of lists and enumerations becomes a means of defamiliarizing the mundane and familiar, and at the same time also shows a preoccupation with existential issues.

In contemporary poetry, devices serving the purpose of creative destruction are increasingly coming into use. Usually not considered as proper to art making, these tools create by dismantling what is already there rather than generating something entirely new from nothing. Such methods of text deletion are at stake in so-called »erasure poetry«. Erasure poetry designates a mode of poetic production, in which an existing text is edited with a black felt marker or painted over with other suitable office supplies according (...) to a set of given parameters. This essay explores what happens when texts are no longer written but crossed out. Examples from a variety of contexts of use illustrate both the wide spectrum of the phenomenon and different functions of erasure. As a collective practice the technique may be therapeutic or simply helpful in coping with life. However, as an artistic strategy, erasure is currently deployed in many poetry collections and artists’ books that question common ways of engaging with literature as well as certain practices of power. Here, erasure emerges as an aesthetic strategy that can in fact reveal contents that have been concealed, negated, or threatened with oblivion. Both in terms of production and of reception, the decisive aesthetic feature in such cases is a break with conventional modes of representation. This break manifests itself in the ways the remaining words or letters are arranged on the page and put into relation to the empty space that surrounds them: Word placement and white space management are the two central operations of post-avant-garde literature and its page design. (shrink)

In den religiösen Gemeinschaften des Mittelalters begegnete man biblischen Texten in einem rituellen und musikalischen Aufführungskontext, der dem heutigen stillen Lesen wenig ähnelt. Doch die Rezeption der Bibel wurde nicht nur durch liturgische Performativität geprägt, sondern auch durch ein kombinatorisches Wiederholungsmuster, das sich über mehrere Tage entfaltete. In diesem Beitrag möchte ich zeigen, wie das formale Prinzip der mehrfachen Rekombination von Bibeltexten in der Liturgie es zu einer Selbstverständlichkeit machte, dass dieselbe Bibelstelle mehrere Bedeutungen hatte. Am Beispiel der zisterziensischen und (...) dominikanischen Liturgie erörtere ich die vielfältigen Interpretationen der menschlichen Gottebenbildlichkeit, die durch ein wechselndes Nebeneinander von biblischen Texten am Anfang der jährlichen Bußzeit entstanden. Ich plädiere somit dafür, liturgische Texte nicht nur als Kontext von geistlicher Literatur oder exegetischen Schriften zu betrachten, sondern das performative Rekombinationsmuster der liturgischen Praxis als eine historisch spezifische Sinnstiftungsform zu verstehen. (shrink)

Ziel des Versuchs ist, Analogien und Differenzen zwischen zwei der Herkunft nach verschiedenen Mystologien aufzudecken. Eckhart vertritt die christlich-westliche, zenbuddhistische Texte vertreten die östliche Variante. Der Vergleich betrifft neben formalen Aspekten der literarischen Gattung die folgenden Punkte: den “Sitz im Leben”, aus dem die Texte entstanden (I), die Autorität des sprechenden Ich (II), das apophatische und das kataphatische Sprechverfahren in ihren Ähnlichkeiten (III/IV) und schließlich die darin hervortretenden Unterschiede (V/VI).

This article is dedicated to the intersection between the literary politics and the educational ideas of the German New Right. Focusing on two authors from the context of Antaios publishing, the first part deals with New Right educational concepts and the second part with a New Right pedagogy of literature, mimetic reading practices, and the figure of the reading mother.

Interviews are a prime example of the expansion of the literary in contemporary literature. Long understood (and devalued) as paratextual secondary communication, a de-paratextualization of the interview has been observable for about twenty years. The article compares the current situation with the position of the interview around 1970 and asks for reasons for this tectonic shift.

Paul Kluckhohns Arbeiten zur Romantik orientieren sich an Wilhelm Diltheys Bestimmung des Verhältnisses von ›Erlebnis‹ und dessen Ausdruck in Dichtung. Mit diesem Konzept ist der Wunsch nach der Wiederkehr der Einheit des ›Lebens‹ in der Moderne verbunden. Kluckhohn deutet die Romantik im Rahmen dieser kulturkritischen Vorstellung, indem er für den Bereich intimer Beziehungen die romantische Auffassung von ›Liebe‹, für Staat und Gesellschaft das romantische Ideal von ›Gemeinschaft‹ als Orientierungsmodell für die Gegenwart anbietet. Die Romantik wird dabei als Gegensatz zur französischen (...) und englischen Aufklärung und damit als deren deutsche ›Überwindung‹ interpretiert. Der Beitrag analysiert Kontinuität und Wandel dieser Romantik-Deutung von 1910–1947 und geht dabei auch auf das ambivalente Verhältnis dieses Konzepts zur Ideologie des Nationalsozialismus ein. (shrink)

The revival of realism for francophone literature has been widely addressed. The essay argues that this comeback stems not only from a social crisis, but from an urgent need to justify the social world. If this new realism can be said to emerge at the end of the 1980s, then its driving force is a melting away of universalism – a loss of claims to global legitimacy, or to speak with a validity encompassing all of human experience, that manifests itself (...) as a fundamental problem in representing the world. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn der Literatur ist lange über Sinn und Funktion des wirkungsvoll inszenierten Spiels der Ringe in Lessings 1767 erschienenem Lustspiel Minna von Barnhelm sowie der Ringe, die im Zentrum der von Nathan erzählten Parabel im 1779 verfassten Drama stehen, debattiert worden. Allerdings fehlt bisher eine eingehende Erörterung der Frage, inwiefern die jeweiligen Ringe eine vergleichbare Rolle in den beiden Werken haben. Dieser Aufsatz untersucht das Lustspiel und das dramatische Gedicht, um zu zeigen, dass die jeweils verhandelten Ringe als Erinnerungs-Zeichen verstanden (...) werden sollen und dass die Vielschichtigkeit der Ring-Thematik eine grundsätzliche Ambivalenz in Lessings Verständnis von Erinnerung an den Tag legt. Jeder Ring stellt dementsprechend sowohl eine Wiederkehr zu vergangenen Wirklichkeiten und Versprechen dar als auch jene historischen Brüche und Veränderungen, die eine solche Wiederkehr verhindern. Darüber hinaus repräsentieren die Ringe der beiden Dramen den von Aleida Assmann geschilderten und sowohl emanzipatorischen als auch schwierigen Übergang von einem von der Memoria-Tradition geerbten und auf dem Prinzip einer Rückholung archivierter Inhalte basierenden Gedächtnismodell hin zu einem modernen Erinnerungsmodell gegenwartsbasierter Umformung und Erneuerung (Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses [1999]). (shrink)

The article offers a discursive account of what generality in machine learning research means and how it is constructed in the development of general artificial intelligence from the perspectives of cultural and media studies. I discuss several technical papers that outline novel architectures in machine learning and how they conceive of the “world”. The agency to learn and the learning curriculum are modulated through worlding (in the sense of setting up and unfolding of the world for artificial (...) agents) in machine learning engineering. In recent computer science articles, large models trained on Internet-scale datasets are framed as general world simulators—despite their partiality, historicity, finite nature, and cultural specificity. I introduce the notion of “model worlds” to refer to composable interactive environments designed for the purpose of machine learning that partake in legitimising that claim. I discuss how large models are grounded through interaction in model worlds, arguing that model worlds mediate between the sheer scale of language models and their hypothetical capacity to generalise to new tasks and domains, rehashing the empiricist logic of “big data”. Further, I show that the emerging capacity of artificial agents to generalise redraws the epistemic boundary between artificial agents and their learning environments. Consequently, superficial statistics of language models and abstract action are made meaningful in distilled model worlds, giving rise to synthetic agency. (shrink)

The paper focuses on ›Sammelrezensionen‹ (reviews) in the DVjs in their founding period and enquires into their function on establishing the concept of ›Geistesgeschichte‹ as a research paradigm. First, I will have a closer look on the text-type itself in the context of the journal and will analyze its strategic potential to (re-)organize research fields. Second, I will investigate the polemic function of such reviews and the relevance for the founding years of the DVjs. Finally, the results of this analysis (...) are discussed in relation to the research on Baroque literature. (shrink)

Die digitale Transformation erfasst die Medien der Literatur und Literaturkritik in unterschiedlicher Geschwindigkeit. Die Substituierung der gedruckten Zeitung, der Stammheimat der Literaturkritik, durch digitale Formate ist weit vorangeschritten. Auf dem Buchmarkt ist das gedruckte Hardcover nach wie vor ein relativ stabiles Element. Der Beitrag kommentiert diese Differenz in medienhistorischer Perspektive.