Ingo Berensmeyer

Twofold Vibration: Samuel Beckett's Laws of Form

The formal specifics of Samuel Becketts writing have so far been redescribed in terms of mysticism, ordinary language philosophy, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Expanding on but also departing from these descriptions, this article tests the capability of a different heuristic vocabulary, derived from systems theory and second-order cybernetics, to reconstruct the formal dynamics of Becketts writing and to reveal the structural principle that determines the generation of form in Becketts work. The argument assumes that George Spencer Browns dynamic (operative) concept of form can be used as a conceptual basis for describing the complex and baffling operation performed by Becketts writing, and it proposes that this literary technique is best understood as a double recursion that envisages the unpresentable generativity of the literary text. These hypotheses are developed by drawing on a wide range of Becketts work, including major plays, prose, Film, work for television, and critical writings.

Rhetoric, Religion, and Politics in Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici

Studies of Sir Thomas Brownes Religio Medici (1643) are often confronted with a discrepancy between the stylistic qualities of this book and the topicality of its subject matter. This problem is usually solved either by ignoring one of these aspects altogether or by seeking a tepid compromise. Instead, this article traces the interrelations and intersections among the discursive domains of rhetoric, religion, and politics in Religio Medici. It explores the performative dimensions of Brownes writing in order to demonstrate that, viewed in the appropriate historical context, the communicative and epistemological functions of Brownes peculiar style can be reconstructed.

Shakespeare and Media Ecology: Beyond Historicism and Presentism

This article proposes media ecology-a combination of media studies and performance studies with literary and cultural history-as a research perspective for Shakespeare studies. In contrast to a hermeneutics of renewal-as evinced in both New Historicism and what has been called presentism-media ecology combines a sense of historical alterity with an awareness of the continuing transformations of Shakespeare in changing media settings: from manuscripts and printed texts to theatrical performances, music, opera, cinema, and new media. As an example, the article focuses on the masque in The Tempest, which poses obvious difficulties for a hermeneutics of renewal and is often cut from performance. Productions and adaptations frequently extend the spectacular qualities of the masque to The Tempest as a whole and ignore the skepticism about theatrical illusion that is voiced by Prospero in the play. In the case of The Tempest, cultural productions ranging from theatrical performances to the closing ceremony of the London Olympics of 20 12 are difficult to conceptualize in the framework of adaptation studies (which relies on the precedence of an original over its derivations). The article argues that media ecology can help scholars map out such connections and differences between performances and cultural phenomena relating to Shakespeare as cannot be fully grasped either in a historicist or presentist perspective.

Cultural ecology and Chinese Hamlets

This essay examines the critical potential of cultural ecology and cultural mobility studies for modeling the relations between literature and culture. It investigates the mobility and portability of literary effects across different media, periods, and cultural and geographical spaces. It intends to offer a glimpse of what a continentally informed view of cultural ecology can contribute to the understanding of literary history as a cultural history of media effects. With a view to the twofold promise of cultural ecology, it hopes to accommodate both the historical singularity of literary objects (mostly, but not exclusively, texts) and their multifarious continuations in other media configurations. As a paradigmatic example, it explores the global cultural mobility of Shakespeare. Using the example of the adaptation of Hamlet in recent Chinese films, the essay demonstrates how literary effects circulate in different media contexts across temporal and spatial distances, beyond the range of traditional literary history. In the larger framework of cultural mobility studies, these suggestions also attempt to overstep the self-imposed generic limits of current world literature studies and to find an alternative to their methodological problems.

Staging Restoration England in the Post-Heritage Theatre Film: Gender and Power in Stage Beauty and The Libertine

Abstract This article analyses two British post-heritage films, Richard Eyre’s Stage Beauty (2004) and Laurence Dunmore’s The Libertine (2005). Both films are set in the seventeenth century and use the theatre as a central metaphor to describe and capture the cultural sensibilities of Restoration England. Both are based on stage plays in which theatre also functions as a site of resistance to cultural and social norms of gender and sexual politics. However, both films end by reinscribing and reaffirming the norms they set out to question, as transgressive desire is preempted and contained by an aesthetics of spectacle. Approaching the films in the light of gender performativity and queer theory, as well as examining their depiction of historical figures like Edward Kynaston and Elizabeth Barry, King Charles II and the earl of Rochester, this essay tries to find out why Restoration England appears to be so difficult to present cinematically

The Art of Oblivion: Politics of Remembering and Forgetting in Restoration England

This article enquires into the cultural uses of memory and forgetting in seventeenth-century England, focusing on strategic acts of recall and oblivion accompanying the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. In a reading of three representative texts from the 1660s – Samuel Tukes The Adventures of Five Hours, John Drydens ‘Astraea Redux’, and John Miltons Paradise Lost – it examines the relationship between officially sanctioned fictions of state and dissenting literary-political counter-fictions. The analysis of calculated acts of oblivion, memory, and countermemory is intended to contribute to a more complex picture of the social, political, and literary interconnections after 1660. In this light, the Restoration appears not as a monolithic reaction against the so-called Interregnum, but as a series of cultural reorientations characterised by the urgency of finding acceptable representations of history and memory amidst competing rhetorics of cultural and religious identity.

Sir Philip Sidney

Mitglied einer der einfl ussreichsten Familien Englands; Ausbildung an der Shrewsbury School und in Oxford; 1572–1575 Reise durch Europa, Begegnung mit bedeutenden Humanisten, danach Hofl ing Elizabeths I.; ab 1577 Geheimdiplomat in protestantischer Sache bei Rudolf II.; Erhebung in den Ritterstand; 1585 Statthalter von Vlissingen, einer britischen Besitzung in den Niederlanden; 1586 bei der Belagerung des spanisch besetzten Zutphen von einer Kugel getroff en; Tod durch Wundbrand; 1587 Uberfuhrung nach England; pomposes Begrabnis und Heldenverehrung.

Komik mit medialen und künstlerischen Mitteln

Mediale Reprasentationen entbehren – wie immer wieder behauptet wird – jener besonderen ›Magie‹ der Unmittelbarkeit, die fur das Theater, das Kabarett und den Zirkus charakteristisch sind (vgl. Berger 1998, 95).

Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture: An Introduction

Lying, cheating and deceiving can safely be assumed to be among the oldest forms of human behaviour. Yet while mendacity is a perennial social practice, its ethical implications have been viewed di...

Ben De Bruyn. Wolfgang Iser: A Companion

Fünf Jahre nach dem Tod Wolfgang Isers erscheint die erste Monographie, die die Lebensleistung eines der bedeutendsten deutschen Literaturwissenschaftler des 20. Jahrhunderts systematisch aufarbeitet. Nach den Nachrufen, Gedenkreden und einigen Aufsätzen, die meist von Isers Schülern verfasst wurden, markiert dieses Buch eine neue Phase des Umgangs mit Isers Literaturtheorie. Bemerkenswert daran ist zum einen die Tatsache, dass der Autor weder Deutscher noch Amerikaner oder Brite, sondern ein junger Flame ist, der vor drei Jahren in Leuven eine fast 600 Seiten umfassende Dissertation zu “Modernity, Meaning and Man in the Theory of Wolfgang Iser” vorgelegt hat. Verwunderlich ist zum anderen das Erscheinen dieses Buches als erster Band einer neuen Reihe zur deutschen Gegenwartskultur. Dies mag auf den ersten Blick wie ein Missverständnis erscheinen, erschließt sich aber durchaus, etwa wenn man die in diesem Buch zitierte Würdigung Isers durch Elinor Shaffer liest, derzufolge Isers Lebenswerk durch die Bemühung gekennzeichnet sei “to repair the breach that had opened between German and English cultures through the unhappy events of the twentieth century” (247).1 Dass auch Literaturtheorie ein Teil von Kultur ist und ein Movens der kulturellen Vermittlung und Übersetzung sein kann, dies hat Wolfgang Iser selbst immer wieder hervorgehoben. Wolfgang Iser: A Companion lässt noch einmal (und zum ersten Mal systematisch) deutlich werden, worin diese einzigartige Lebensleistung besteht und auch, weshalb man sich heute noch oder wieder mit Iser auseinandersetzen sollte. De Bruyns Buch ist weder DOI 10.1515/anglia-2013-0085  Anglia 2013, 131 (4): 704–708