@article{Wilke2021, author = {Wilke, Heinrich}, title = {Character and perspective in cosmic horror}, series = {Zeitschrift f{\"u}r Anglistik und Amerikanistik : a quarterly of language, literature and cultur}, volume = {69}, journal = {Zeitschrift f{\"u}r Anglistik und Amerikanistik : a quarterly of language, literature and cultur}, number = {2}, publisher = {De Gruyter}, address = {Berlin}, issn = {0044-2305}, doi = {10.1515/zaa-2021-2038}, pages = {173 -- 190}, year = {2021}, abstract = {Despite their overt focus on inexplicable alien forces, cosmic horror stories are also determined by their human cast. Far from being merely fodder for horror, the characters significantly contribute to the generation of meaning, including that of the supernatural entity or phenomenon itself. The same holds for the narrators' (implicitly) political perspectives on the world of which they are part. Much of the perspective propounded in Lovecraft's cosmic horror stories partakes of myth, adopting in particular the latter's universal view and pronounced sidelining of humanity as a whole, which it intensifies to the point of horror. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this universal perspective is consistent with the racism permeating and structuring Lovecraft's writing. Though eschewing racism and universalism, the cosmic horror of Kiernan's "Tidal Forces" negotiates literary reflections of colonialism from an unreflective white perspective.}, language = {en} } @article{WiemannRajaShaswati2021, author = {Wiemann, Dirk and Raja, Ira and Shaswati, Mazumdar}, title = {Postcolonial world literature}, series = {Thesis eleven : critical theory and historical sociology}, volume = {162}, journal = {Thesis eleven : critical theory and historical sociology}, number = {1}, publisher = {Sage}, address = {London [u.a.]}, issn = {0725-5136}, doi = {10.1177/0725513621994707}, pages = {3 -- 17}, year = {2021}, abstract = {Postcolonial criticism has repeatedly debunked the ostensible neutrality of the 'world' of world literature by pointing out that and how the contemporary world - whether conceived in terms of cosmopolitan conviviality or neoliberal globalization - cannot be understood without recourse to the worldly event of Europe's colonial expansion. While we deem this critical perspective indispensable, we simultaneously maintain that to reduce 'the world' to the world-making impact of capital, colonialism, and patriarchy paints an overly deterministic picture that runs the risk of unwittingly reproducing precisely that dominant 'oneworldness' that it aims to critique. Moreover, the mere potentiality of alternative modes of world-making tends to disappear in such a perspective so that the only remaining option to think beyond oneworldness resides in the singularity claim. This insistence on singularity, however, leaves the relatedness of the single units massively underdetermined or denies it altogether. By contrast, we locate world literature in the conflicted space between the imperial imposition of a hierarchically stratified world (to which, as hegemonic forces tell us, 'there is no alternative') and the unrealized 'undivided world' that multiple minor cosmopolitan projects yet have to win. It is precisely the tension between these 'two worlds' that brings into view the crucial centrality not of the nodes in their alleged singularity but their specific relatedness to each other, that both impedes and energizes world literature today and renders it ineluctably postcolonial.}, language = {en} } @article{Wiemann2021, author = {Wiemann, Dirk}, title = {Being Taught Something World-Sized}, series = {The Work of World Literature}, journal = {The Work of World Literature}, editor = {Robinson, Benjamin Lewis}, publisher = {ICI Press}, address = {Berlin}, issn = {2627-728X}, doi = {10.37050/ci-19_07}, pages = {149 -- 172}, year = {2021}, abstract = {This paper reads 'The Detainee's Tale as told to Ali Smith' (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith's story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient's openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith's account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.}, language = {en} } @article{Wiemann2021, author = {Wiemann, Dirk}, title = {Layer after Layer}, series = {Thesis Eleven}, volume = {162}, journal = {Thesis Eleven}, number = {1}, publisher = {Sage}, address = {Melbourne}, issn = {0725-5136}, doi = {10.1177/0725513621990772}, pages = {33 -- 45}, year = {2021}, abstract = {When the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in South London were opened to the general public in the 1840s, they were presented as a 'world text': a collection of flora from all over the world, with the spectacular tropical (read: colonial) specimens taking centre stage as indexes of Britain's imperial supremacy. However, the one exotic plant species that preoccupied the British cultural imagination more than any other remained conspicuously absent from the collection: the banyan tree, whose non-transferability left a significant gap in the 'text' of the garden, thereby effectively puncturing the illusion of comprehensive global command that underpins the biopolitical designs of what Richard Grove has aptly dubbed 'green imperialism'. This article demonstrates how, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the banyan tree became an object of fascination and admiration for British scientists, painters, writers and photographers precisely because of its obstinate non-availability to colonial control and visual or even conceptual representability.}, language = {en} } @incollection{Wiemann2021, author = {Wiemann, Dirk}, title = {Being Taught Something World-Sized}, series = {The Work of World Literature}, volume = {2021}, booktitle = {The Work of World Literature}, publisher = {ICI Berlin Press}, address = {Berlin}, isbn = {978-3-96558-011-4}, issn = {2627-728X}, doi = {10.37050/ci-19_07}, pages = {149 -- 172}, year = {2021}, abstract = {This paper reads 'The Detainee's Tale as told to Ali Smith' (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith's story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient's openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith's account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.}, language = {en} } @article{StenzelWilliams2021, author = {Stenzel, Kristine and Williams, Nicholas}, title = {Toward an interactional approach to multilingualism}, series = {Language \& communication : an interdisciplinary journal}, volume = {80}, journal = {Language \& communication : an interdisciplinary journal}, publisher = {Elsevier}, address = {Oxford}, issn = {0271-5309}, doi = {10.1016/j.langcom.2021.05.010}, pages = {136 -- 164}, year = {2021}, abstract = {This study examines language ideologies and communicative practices in the multilingual Vaupes region of northwestern Amazonia. Following a comparative overview of the Vaupes as a 'small-scale' language ecology, it discusses claims from existing ethnographic work on the region in light of data from a corpus of video-recordings of sociolinguistic interviews and spontaneous everyday conversations. It shows how a practice-based and interdisciplinary approach combining language documentation methodology and ethnographic, structural linguistic, and interactional perspectives can contribute to understanding of macro and micro aspects of multilingualism, thus contributing to future work on the Vaupes, typologies of small-scale multilingual ecologies, and language contact research.}, language = {en} } @article{Pittel2021, author = {Pittel, Harald}, title = {Ali Smith's 'Coming-of-Age' in the age of Brexit}, series = {Brexit and Beyond: Nation and Identity}, journal = {Brexit and Beyond: Nation and Identity}, publisher = {Narr}, address = {T{\"u}bingen}, isbn = {978-3-8233-8414-4}, pages = {121 -- 144}, year = {2021}, language = {en} } @article{Pittel2021, author = {Pittel, Harald}, title = {Fin du globe}, series = {Thesis eleven : critical theory and historical sociology}, volume = {162}, journal = {Thesis eleven : critical theory and historical sociology}, number = {1}, publisher = {Sage}, address = {London}, issn = {0725-5136}, doi = {10.1177/0725513621994702}, pages = {121 -- 136}, year = {2021}, abstract = {This essay argues that Oscar Wilde noticeably contributed to the emerging discourse about world literature, even though his views in this regard have to be unearthed from the margins of his works, from his early and unpublished American lectures and 'between the lines' of his major critical essays. Wilde's implicit ideas around world literature can be understood as being closely related to his broader endeavour of redirecting and revaluing the pejorative discourse around 'decadence' in art and literature. More specifically, the arch-aesthete preferred to use the word 'romance' rather than 'decadence' (a term he hardly used at all in his writings), signalling a sensitivity attuned to what he called the 'love of things impossible'. This reconceptualization of the decadent outlook was to inspire a critical ideal of literature which relied on creatively activating the other as Other, culminating in a vision of intersubjective, transcultural and unlimited literary communication. Wilde's thought can be more specifically understood as anticipating central tenets of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's evocations of the planetary, thus preparing the way for an alterity-oriented understanding of literary cosmopolitanism.}, language = {en} } @article{Mischke2021, author = {Mischke, Dennis}, title = {Deleuze and the digital}, series = {Deleuze and Guattari studies}, volume = {15}, journal = {Deleuze and Guattari studies}, number = {4}, publisher = {Edinburgh University Press}, address = {Edinburgh}, issn = {2398-9777}, doi = {10.3366/dlgs.2021.0459}, pages = {593 -- 609}, year = {2021}, abstract = {In his short and often quoted essay 'Postscript on the Societies of Control', Gilles Deleuze famously describes the structures of power in the dawning twenty-first century as driven by 'machines of a third type, computers', as novel and predominantly digital infrastructures. In fact, from a Deleuzian perspective the entire ecosystem of the digital transformation can be described as a larger shift in modes of production and the political economy. This essay proposes to read this 'technological evolution' as the power of algorithms and their material substance - digital infrastructures that entail a different mode of interaction between humans and technology. In looking at these infrastructures from a materialist position, my essay reconceptualises the digital as the unfolding logic of assemblages that have been shaping a 'long now' of technological modernity. In bringing a Deleuzian reading of infrastructures to the study of technology and society, this essay seeks to shed a new light on the political function-and the increasing abstraction-of infrastructures in the realm of the digital.}, language = {en} } @misc{McLaughlin2021, author = {McLaughlin, Carly}, title = {Rezension zu: Children's voices from the past: new historical and interdisciplinary perspectives. - Hrsg.: Kristine Moruzi, Nell Musgrove; Carla Pascoe Leahy. - Cham : Springer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. - 342 S. - ISBN: 978-3-030-11895-2}, series = {Australian historical studies : a journal of Australian history / Department of History, the University of Melbourne}, volume = {52}, journal = {Australian historical studies : a journal of Australian history / Department of History, the University of Melbourne}, number = {2}, publisher = {Routledge, Taylor \& Francis Group}, address = {Abingdon}, isbn = {978-3-030-11895-2}, issn = {1031-461X}, doi = {10.1080/1031461X.2021.1905223}, pages = {310 -- 311}, year = {2021}, language = {en} }