Birgit Neumann

Travelling concepts for the study of culture

Bringing together innovative and internationally renowned experts, this volume provides concise presentations of the main concepts and cutting-edge research fields in the study of culture. The volume outlines different models, explores avenues for interdisciplinary exchange, assesses key concepts and traces their travels across various disciplinary, historical and national contexts. In doing so, the volume serves to initiate a dialogue that exceeds disciplinary and national boundaries and introduces a self-reflexive dimension to the field.

Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft : theoretische Grundlegung und Anwendungsperspektiven

In this volume, concepts of memory from literary studies are systematically recorded for the first time and presented from an historical, theoretical and methodological aspect. The aim is to locate the discussion in the subject discipline within the transdisciplinary discussion of memory and recollection.

Towards a Cultural and Historical Imagology

The paper explores forms and functions of the rhetoric of national character in 18th-century British literature. British writers mobilised the rhetoric of national character not only to define themselves collectively against others, but also to influence political controversies at home; in particular the class- and gender-based struggle for political rights in the emerging British nation. To analyse the forms and functions of images of national character, this paper develops a framework for a cultural and historical imagology. This framework integrates a social constructivist view of national character and national identity with discursive, rhetorical, and cultural approaches to literature. Emphasis is placed on the role that narrative devices and intermedial strategies play for constructions of national character. It is concluded that ‘national character’ not only consists of the attributes typically predicated to a specific nation; rather it is also a formal and even aesthetic construct, which relies on processes of intermedial translation.

Postcolonial Ekphrasis and Counter-Visions in Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound – Contacts, Contests and Translations

Abstract The article sets out to investigate configurations of literary visuality in Derek Walcott’s long poem Tiepolo’s Hound, illustrating how an engagement with verbal-visual relations might add to our understanding of Walcott’s postcolonial aesthetics. It is argued that the evocation of Eurocentric visual practices constitutes an act of intermedial and transcultural translation, which both acknowledges the influence of imposed models and subjects them to creative processes of exchange.

Travelling Concepts in English Studies

Concepts are first and foremost intellectual tools of academic discourse: They fulfil heuristic, cognitive and descriptive functions and thus enable discussion and exchange on the basis of a common language. Operating as interpretative instruments, they determine how members of the scientific community conceive of themes, approach objects and define the relevant research questions. Although the growing importance of concepts is sometimes viewed critically, their use as tools for organizing and systematizing knowledge is widely acknowledged. However, more often than not, the meaning and operational value of these concepts differ between diverse disciplines, national cultures and historical periods. Concepts such as ‘performance’, ‘image’, or ‘space’, which are at the core of the study of culture and literature, are not univocal or firmly established terms. Rather, they are dynamic and changeable as they travel back and forth between different academic contexts. Hence, they constitute what Bal, in her eponymous book, has called ‘travelling concepts’. With the move towards greater interdisciplinarity, the exchange of such concepts between disciplines has intensified considerably. English Studies is certainly among those disciplines which have been strongly affected by the dynamic exchange of concepts, most of which have been imported from other disciplines, such as sociology, philosophy or psychology, and so forth. In fact, it is striking how enthusiastically English Studies has welcomed concepts from other disciplines for at least the last 40 years or so. In a volume that seeks to explore the journeys of some key concepts and their effects on the study of culture it is certainly worth recalling that the concept of ‘travelling concepts’ is itself a travelling concept par excellence. It was Edward Said (1983), who in his essay ‘Traveling Theory’ introduced the metaphor of travel to refer to the constant transfer, adaptation and translation of theories that take place within the humanities and the social sciences. Stressing that theories are always ‘a response to a specific social and historical situation of which an intellectual occasion is part’ (Said, 1983: 237), Said challenged the conventional notion of theory as being stable and located in a fixed place or original context. Jürgen Habermas (1987: 322), for instance, insists that theory is typically driven by an assertive universality, striving to erase all particularities. It is precisely this claim that Said calls into question. He maintains that theories always travel both in space and in time, continually altering their shape as they traverse distances from one academic context to another and being inflected by the field in which they are used. The journeys of theories are characterized by selective appropriations and translations according to historical and local circumstances. Perpetually being moved in and out of discrepant contexts, theories acquire new meanings, and this process ultimately yields transformed ideas which occupy ‘a new position in a new time and place’ (Said, 1983: 227). Each theory, we may conclude, thus involuntarily reveals the historicity of the sociocultural contexts in which it has

Wissenschaftliche ›Zusatzqualifikationen‹: Aufsatzpublikation, Vortrag, Tagungsorganisation

Der im vorangegangenen Kapitel vorgestellte Projektmanagement-Ansatz hilft nicht nur bei der Bewaltigung des Grosprojekts Promotion, sondern kann auch die Umsetzung kleinerer Projekte erleichtern, wie etwa das Halten eines Vortrags, die Publikation eines Aufsatzes oder die Organisation einer eigenen Tagung. Es ist sinnvoll, sich durch solche Projekte schon wahrend der Promotionszeit ein eigenstandiges Profil zu verschaffen, das nach der Promotion das berufliche Weiterkommen innerhalb sowie auserhalb des Wissenschaftsbetriebs erleichtert und die Aussichten auf eine Stelle oder ein Stipendium deutlich erhoht. Vortrage, Aufsatze und Tagungsorganisationen haben zudem ein hohes Motivationspotenzial: Im Gegensatz zur langwierigen Arbeit an der Dissertation verschaffen sie kurzfristige Erfolgserlebnisse, die uber mogliche Durststrecken hinweg helfen. Man bekommt zudem unmittelbar Feedback, das bei der Arbeit an der Dissertation oftmals lange auf sich warten lasst.

Celebrating Afropolitan Identities? Contemporary African World Literatures in English

Abstract Against the background of today’s debate on Afropolitanism, this article discusses three contemporary African novels as instances of world literatures, focusing on their creative modelling of open, non-Eurocentric worlds in motion. Taking existing research in the field of world literature into account, we argue that the affective and effective uniqueness of world literatures only comes to the fore when considering their distinct power to creatively make worlds. We suggest understanding world literatures in terms of their capacity to create open, polycentric worlds, which enmesh diverse places, multiple temporalities, situated practices and locally grounded experiences into open networks of reciprocal change. In theorizing world literatures as pluralized and multiple, we also try to overcome the privileging of western literature. The final section negotiates how these imaginative worlds interact, intersect and possibly collide with that world which is configured by labelling, marketing and canonizing a specific text as ‘world literature’.

Introduction: The Aesthetics and Politics of British TV Comedy

TV comedies make up some of the most watched, most profitable and most controversial productions on British screens. Not least due to the role of public broadcasting, TV comedy in the UK enjoys a tradition and success probably unrivalled anywhere. Firmly embedded in the British media culture and shaped by the specific dynamics of the British television industry, British TV comedies are immensely powerful cultural media, which have developed distinctive filmic formats and nationally inflected narrative traditions (Dannenberg 169). The great popularity of the British TV comedy has certainly much to do with its formal and cultural flexibility. Even if its primary aim is to be funny and to entertain, comedy typically touches upon a whole range of cultural topics and explores a variety of ideological conflicts (Feuer 69). Typically oscillating between appreciation and denigration, affirmation and subversion, British TV comedy plays a significant role in the formation, dissemination and reflection of cultural values, structures of identification and notions of difference: concepts of class, gender, ethnicity, disability, sex, family, work and domesticity find a most intriguing and provocative expression in TV comedies. Consider, for instance, Men Behaving Badly (ITV/BBC1 1992–1999), probably the signature sitcom of the 1990s, whose depiction of the ‘new lad’ propelled debates about new concepts of masculinity and the historical dynamics of gender relations. Since British TV comedies, with very few exceptions, pick out central themes that concern British society in general or particular social groups at the time of production, they offer a rich source for gauging the intersections of British (popular) culture, history and media.

Confessions of a Thug: The Voice of the Criminal in Colonial Crime Fiction

Abstract The paper explores the centrality of crime fiction to the formation of colonial authority, focussing on an aspect which up to now has received little attention: the confessional narrative. Using Philip Meadows Taylor’s imperial bestseller Confessions of a Thug (1839) as an example, the paper scrutinizes how the confessional narrative is used for legitimising British rule in India. By examining the formal peculiarities of the confessional mode it becomes evident that the confession is furnished with an ambivalent dimension that may not only disrupt the law and order inherent in the genre of crime fiction but that also poses a challenge to the reader and invites considerations on a larger cultural scale. Stories of order and disorder interrogate imperial authority even as they play a key role in its entrenchment

Methoden postkolonialer Literaturkritik und anderer ideologiekritischer Ansätze

Spatestens seit den 1950er Jahren ist die europaische Gegenwartsliteratur von einem tiefgreifenden Wandel gekennzeichnet, der auch fur die literaturwissenschaftliche Theoriebildung weitreichende Konsequenzen haben sollte: multi- und transkulturelle Erzahltexte, die aus den ehemaligen Kolonialreichen Grosbritanniens, sowie auch Spaniens und Frankreichs hervorgegangen sind, schrieben mit wachsender Eigenstandigkeit gegen die etablierten Literaturzentren Europas an. Ahnlich wie zuvor die Literaturen der USA und Irlands machten sich Autor/innen der ehemaligen Kolonien spatestens seit der Entkolonialisierungsphase die traditionell imperiale Deutungshoheit zu Eigen und wurden ihrerseits zu Interpreten und Konstrukteuren (post-)kolonialer Geschichten, Geographien und Identitaten. Autor/innen mit Migrationshintergrund setzen sich in kritischer, oftmals revisionistischer Absicht mit dem kolonialen Erbe und damit verbundenen Formen der Stereotypisierung auseinander und erproben anhand der Erfahrungen ihrer fi ktionalen Protagonisten neue Deutungsmuster, die sich eurozentristischer Vereinnahmung entziehen.