TY - JOUR A1 - Eckstein, Lars T1 - Hawaiki according to Tupaia BT - glimpses of knowing home in precolonial remote oceania JF - Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik : ZAA ; a quarterly of language, literature and culture N2 - This essay looks into the concept of an ancestral homeland in Remote Oceania, commonly referred to as Hawaiki (‘Avaiki; Havai‘i; Hawai‘i). Hawaiki intriguingly challenges Eurocentric notions of ‘home.’ Following the rapid settlement of the so-called Polynesian triangle from Samoa/Tonga at around 1000 AD, Hawaiki has emerged as a concept that is both mythological and real; genealogical and geographic; singular and yet portable, existing in plural regional manifestations. I argue that predominantly Pakeha/Popa‘ā research trying to identify Hawaiki as a singular and geographically fixed homeland is misleading. I tap into the archive surrounding the Ra‘iātean tahu‘a and master navigator Tupaia who joined Captain Cook’s crew during his first voyage to the Pacific to offer glimpses of an alternative ontology of home and epistemology of Oceanic ‘homing.’ KW - Hawaiki KW - Tupaia’s Map KW - Oceania KW - Indigenous ontology and epistemology Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2006 SN - 0044-2305 SN - 2196-4726 VL - 71 IS - 1 SP - 55 EP - 69 PB - de Gruyter CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Waller, Nicole T1 - Marronage or underground? BT - the black geographies of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer JF - MELUS : multi-ethnic literature of the U.S. / Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States N2 - I combine a reading of contemporary scholarship on US maroon histories and the Underground Railroad—and the concomitant notions of marronage and the underground—with a reading of two recent works of African American literature: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer (2019). Foregrounding the idea of Black geographies as a form of placemaking and “thinking otherwise” about land and water, I suggest that despite the differing, and at times contrasting, trajectories of maroon histories and the histories of Black flight to the North, African American maroon experiences and the Underground Railroad are conceptually connected in contemporary African American literature. I read the two novels as recent literary expressions of this conceptual link, which is played out via representations of relating to the land. By reimagining and intertwining marronage and the underground, both novels articulate a critique of settler-colonial and plantation modes of spatial practice, modes they identify as formative for US-American nationhood. They also, tentatively but forcefully, gesture toward alternative ways of being “above” and “below” the land while affirming African American connectedness to place. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac021 SN - 0163-755X SN - 1946-3170 VL - 47 IS - 1 SP - 45 EP - 70 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Wilke, Heinrich T1 - Character and perspective in cosmic horror BT - Lovecraft and Kiernan JF - Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik : a quarterly of language, literature and cultur N2 - 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. KW - cosmic horror KW - H. P. Lovecraft KW - Caitlin R. Kiernan KW - race and whiteness KW - fiction Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2021-2038 SN - 0044-2305 SN - 2196-4726 VL - 69 IS - 2 SP - 173 EP - 190 PB - De Gruyter CY - Berlin ER - TY - THES A1 - Behrendt, Aileen Jorena T1 - Gender Politics and British Women Writers of the 1930s BT - Dynamic Stasis in the Novels of Nancy Mitford, Stevie Smith, Rosamond Lehmann and Jean Rhys T2 - Epistemata : Würzburger wissenschaftliche Schriften. Reihe Literaturwissenschaft N2 - Today’s focus on the 1930s as a time of radical politics paving the way for the apocalypse of the Second World War ignores the complexity of the decade’s cultural responses, especially those by British women writers who highlighted gender issues within their contemporary political climate. The decade’s literature is often understood to capture the political unrest, either narrating people’s chaotic movement or their paralysed shock. This book argues that 1930s novels collapse the distinction between movement and standstill and calls this phenomenon Dynamic Stasis. This Dynamic Stasis thematically and structurally informs the novels of Nancy Mitford, Stevie Smith, Rosamond Lehmann and Jean Rhys. By disrupting the oft-repeated cliché of the 1930s as the age of political extremes, gender politics and negotiations of femininity can emerge from the discursive periphery. This book therefore corrects a persistent gender blind spot, which opens up a (re)consideration of authors that have been overlooked in literary criticism of 1930s to this day. Y1 - 2020 SN - 978-3-8260-7177-5 SN - 2699-5859 N1 - Winner of the Gender Award of the Philosophical Faculty at the University of Potsdam in 2019. IS - 937 PB - Königshausen & Neumann CY - Würzburg ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Crane, Kylie Ann T1 - Anthropocene Presences and the Limits of Deferral BT - Alexis Wright's Carpentaria and The Swan Book JF - Open library of humanities N2 - Literary criticism, particularly ecocriticism, occupies an uneasy position with regard to activism: reading books (or plays, or poems) seems like a rather leisurely activity to be undertaking if our environment—our planet—is in crisis. And yet, critiquing the narratives that structure worlds and discourses is key to the activities of the (literary) critic in this time of crisis. If this crisis manifests as a ‘crisis of imagination’ (e.g. Ghosh), I argue that this not so much a crisis of the absence of texts that address the environmental disaster, but rather a failure to comprehend the presences of the Anthropocene in the present. To interpret (literary) texts in this framework must entail acknowledging and scrutinising the extent of the incapacity of the privileged reader to comprehend the crisis as presence and present rather than spatially or temporally remote. The readings of the novels Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) by Waanyi writer Alexis Wright (Australia) trace the uneven presences of Anthropocenes in the present by way of bringing future worlds (The Swan Book) to the contemporary (Carpentaria). In both novels, protagonists must forge survival amongst ruins of the present and future: the depicted worlds, in particular the representations of the disenfranchisement of indigenous inhabitants of the far north of the Australian continent, emerge as a critique of the intersections of capitalist and colonial projects that define modernity and its impact on the global climate. Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.348 SN - 2056-6700 VL - 5 IS - 1 PB - Open library of humanities CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hartung, Heike T1 - Longevity narratives BT - Darwinism and beyond JF - Journal of aging studie N2 - The essay looks at longevity narratives as an important configuration of old age, which is closely related to evolutionary theories of ageing. In order to analyse two case studies of longevity published in the early twentieth century, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall's book Senescence (1922) and the British dramatist Bernard Shaw's play cycle Back to Methuselah (1921), the essay draws on an outline of theories of longevity from the Enlightenment to the present. The analysis of the two case studies illustrates that evolutionary and cultural perspectives on ageing and longevity are ambivalent and problematic. In Hall's and Shaw's texts this is related to a crisis narrative of culture and civilization against which both writers place their specific solutions of individual and species longevity. Whereas Hall employs autobiographical accounts of artists as examples of longevity to strengthen his argument about wise old men as exclusive repositories of knowledge, Shaw in his vision of longevity as an extended form of midlife for both genders encounters the limits of age representation. KW - Age studies KW - Cultural studies KW - Longevity narratives KW - Evolutionary theories of ageing Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2018.03.002 SN - 0890-4065 SN - 1879-193X VL - 47 SP - 84 EP - 89 PB - Elsevier CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Reimer, Anna Maria T1 - Pink, Katharina, Identitas Oriens: Discursive Constructions of Identity and Alterity in British Orient Travelogues / [reviewed by] Anna Maria Reimer T1 - Pink, Katharina, Identitas Oriens: Diskursive Konstruktionen von Identität und Alterität in britischer Orient-Reiseliteratur / [rezensiert von] Anna Maria Reimer T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe N2 - Rezensiertes Werk Pink, Katharina, Identitas Oriens: Diskursive Konstruktionen von Identität und Alterität in britischer Orient-Reiseliteratur - Würzburg, Ergon Verlag, 2014 337 S. - (Literatur - Kultur - Theorie, 19) T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe - 126 Y1 - 2017 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-397856 SN - 1866-8380 IS - 126 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Adair, Gigi T1 - The “Feringhi Hakīm”: medical encounters and colonial ambivalence in Isabella Bird’s travels in Japan and Persia T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe N2 - This article considers Isabella Bird’s representation of medicine in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) and Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (1891), the two books in which she engages most extensively with both local (Chinese/Islamic) and Western medical science and practice. I explore how Bird uses medicine to assert her narrative authority and define her travelling persona in opposition to local medical practitioners. I argue that her ambivalence and the unease she frequently expresses concerning medical practice (expressed particularly in her later adoption of the Persian appellation “Feringhi Hakīm” [European physician] to describe her work) serves as a means for her to negotiate the colonial and gendered pressures on Victorian medicine. While in Japan this attitude works to destabilise her hierarchical understanding of science and results in some acknowledgement of traditional Japanese traditions, in Persia it functions more to disguise her increasing collusion with overt British colonial ambitions. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe - 120 KW - Isabella Bird KW - medicine KW - travel KW - gender KW - colonialism KW - missionaries KW - Japan KW - Persia Y1 - 2017 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-395316 SN - 1866-8380 IS - 120 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Röder, Katrin T1 - Engaging with T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets as a Multimedia Performance T2 - Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik N2 - This article explores a recent performance of excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1935/36–1942) entitled Engaging Eliot: Four Quartets in Word, Color, and Sound as an example of live poetry. In this context, Eliot’s poem can be analysed as an auditory artefact that interacts strongly with other oral performances (welcome addresses and artists’ conversations), as well as with the musical performance of Christopher Theofanidis’s quintet “At the Still Point” at the end of the opening of Engaging Eliot. The event served as an introduction to a 13-day art exhibition and engaged in a re-evaluation of Eliot’s poem after 9/11: while its first part emphasises the connection between Eliot’s poem and Christian doctrine, its second part – especially the combination of poetry reading and musical performance – highlights the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of Four Quartets. Y1 - 2017 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-397808 ER - TY - THES A1 - Reimer, Anna Maria T1 - The poetics of the real and aesthetics of the reel BT - medial visuality in the contemporary Indian English novel N2 - The dissertation proposes that the spread of photography and popular cinema in 19th- and 20th-century-India have shaped an aesthetic and affective code integral to the reading and interpretation of Indian English novels, particularly when they address photography and/or cinema film, as in the case of the four corpus texts. In analyzing the nexus between ‘real’ and ‘reel’, the dissertation shows how the texts address the reader as media consumer and virtual image projector. Furthermore, the study discusses the Indian English novel against the backdrop of the cultural and medial transformations of the 20th century to elaborate how these influenced the novel’s aesthetics. Drawing upon reception aesthetics, the author devises the concept of the ‘implied spectator’ to analyze the aesthetic impact of the novels’ images as visual textures. No God in Sight (2005) by Altaf Tyrewala comprises of a string of 41 interior monologues, loosely connected through their narrators’ random encounters in Mumbai in the year 2000. Although marked by continuous perspective shifts, the text creates a sensation of acute immediacy. Here, the reader is addressed as implied spectator and is sutured into the narrated world like a film spectator ― an effect created through the use of continuity editing as a narrative technique. Similarly, Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet Engine Laugh (2002) coll(oc)ates disparate narrative perspectives and explores photography as an artistic practice, historiographic recorder and epistemological tool. The narrative appears guided by the random viewing of old photographs by the protagonist and primary narrator, the photographer Paresh Bhatt. However, it is the photographic negative and the practice of superimposition that render this string of episodes and different perspectives narratively consequential and cosmologically meaningful. Photography thus marks the perfect symbiosis of autobiography and historiography. Tabish Khair’s Filming. A Love Story (2007) immerses readers in the cine-aesthetic of 1930s and 40s Bombay film, the era in which the embedded plot is set. Plotline, central scenes and characters evoke the key films of Indian cinema history such as Satyajit Ray’s “Pather Panchali” or Raj Kapoor’s “Awara”. Ultimately, the text written as film dissolves the boundary between fiction and (narrated) reality, reel and real, thereby showing that the images of individual memory are inextricably intertwined with and shaped by collective memory. Ultimately, the reconstruction of the past as and through film(s) conquers trauma and endows the Partition of India as a historic experience of brutal contingency with meaning. The Bioscope Man (Indrajit Hazra, 2008) is a picaresque narrative set in Calcutta - India’s cultural capital and birthplace of Indian cinema at the beginning of the 20th century. The autodiegetic narrator Abani Chatterjee relates his rise and fall as silent film star, alternating between the modes of tell and show. He is both autodiegetic narrator and spectator or perceiving consciousness, seeing himself in his manifold screen roles. Beyond his film roles however, the narrator remains a void. The marked psychoanalytical symbolism of the text is accentuated by repeated invocations of dark caves and the laterna magica. Here too, ‘reel life’ mirrors and foreshadows real life as Indian and Bengali history again interlace with private history. Abani Chatterjee thus emerges as a quintessentially modern man of no qualities who assumes definitive shape only in the lost reels of the films he starred in. The final chapter argues that the static images and visual frames forwarded in the texts observe an integral psychological function: Premised upon linear perspective they imply a singular, static subjectivity appealing to the postmodern subject. In the corpus texts, the rise of digital technology in the 1990s thus appears not so much to have displaced older image repertories, practices and media techniques, than it has lent them greater visibility and appeal. Moreover, bricolage and pastiche emerge as cultural techniques which marked modernity from its inception. What the novels thus perpetuate is a media archeology not entirely servant to the poetics of the real. The permeable subject and the notion of the gaze as an active exchange as encapsulated in the concept of darshan - ideas informing all four texts - bespeak the resilience of a mythical universe continually re-instantiated in new technologies and uses. Eventually, the novels convey a sense of subalternity to a substantially Hindu nationalist history and historiography, the centrifugal force of which developed in the twentieth century and continues into the present. N2 - Die Dissertation stellt die These auf, dass Photographie und Film im Indien des 19. und 20. Jhd. einen ästhetisch-affektiven Code geprägt haben, der für das Verständnis des Indisch-Englischen Romans von großer Bedeutung ist. Dies gilt umso mehr wenn diese Medien explizit thematisiert werden, so wie es hier der Fall ist. Indem die Verbindung zwischen Realem und (Foto-/Kino-) Film untersucht wird, zeigt die Forschungsarbeit, wie die Texte ihre Leser als Medienkonsumenten und virtuelle ‛Bildprojektoren’ ansprechen. Auf dem kritischen Ansatz der Rezeptionsästhetik aufbauend, entwickelt die Autorin das Konzept des 'impliziten Betrachters', um so die ästhetische Wirkung der Texte auf den Leser analysieren zu können. No God in Sight (2005) von Altaf Tyrewala ist eine Aneinanderreihung von 41 inneren Monologen, lose verbunden durch Zufallsbegegnungen im Mumbai des Jahres 2000. Obgleich von ständigen Perspektivwechseln geprägt, schafft der Text ein Gefühl unmittelbaren Erlebens. In seiner Funktion als impliziter Betrachter wird der Leser hier quasi als Filmzuschauer in die erzählte Welt hineinprojiziert bzw. ‚vernäht‘. Dieser Effekt entsteht durch die Anwendung einer dem Film entlehnten Technik, dem ‚continuity editing‘. Auch Ruchir Joshi‘ The Last Jet Engine Laugh (2002) vereint widersprüchliche Erzählperspektiven. Der Roman beleuchtet Fotographie als künstlerische Praxis, historiographisches Speichermedium und epistemologisches Werkzeug. Das Narrativ erscheint allein durch die Betrachtung alter Fotos durch den Protagonist und primären Erzähler Paresh Bhatt gelenkt. Jedoch sind es das fotographische Negativ und die fotographische Überblendung, welche die disparaten Episoden und Perspektiven erzählerisch schlüssig und kosmologisch bedeutungsvoll machen. Mithin repräsentiert Fotographie hier die Symbiose von Autobiographie und Historiographie. Tabish Khairs Filming. A Love Story (2007) versetzt den Leser in die Welt des Bombay-Films der 1930er und 40er Jahre, in dem die Haupthandlung spielt. Handlung, Szenenbilder und selbst die Namen der Protagonisten verweisen unmittelbar auf Schlüsselfilme der indischen Filmgeschichte wie Satyajit Rays "Pather Panchali" oder Raj Kapoors "Awara".Geschrieben als Film, löst der Text die Grenze zwischen Fiktion und (erzählter) Realität, Film(-rolle) und Realem auf um zu zeigen, dass die individuellen Erinnerungsbilder unauflöslich mit der kollektiven Erinnerung verbunden sind und letztlich von ihr geprägt werden. Die Rekonstruktion der Vergangenheit als und durch (den) Film(e) überwindet schließlich das historische Trauma der Teilung Indiens in ihrer brutalen Sinnlosigkeit. The Bioscope Man (2008) ist ein pikaresker Roman und spielt zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts in Kalkutta, damals noch Indiens kulturelle Hauptstadt und Geburtsstätte des indischen Kinos. Abani Chatterjee erzählt abwechselnd als konventioneller autodiegetischer Erzähler und als Zuschauer bzw. wahrnehmendes Bewusstsein von seinem Aufstieg und Fall als Stummfilmstar. Jenseits seiner Rollen bleibt der Erzähler jedoch eine Leerstelle. Der psychoanalytische Symbolismus des Textes wird durch wiederholte Aufrufung der Motive der Höhle und der Laterna Magica hervorgehoben. Auch hier spiegelt das Leben auf der Filmrolle das ‚echte‘ Leben, indem indische und bengalische Geschichte mit der individuellen (Lebens-)Geschichte verwoben werden. Chatterjee ist letztlich Inbegriff des modernen Menschen, des ‚Mannes ohne Eigenschaften‘ der nur in den verschwundenen Filmen in denen er einst spielte konkrete Form annimmt. Das Schlusskapitel argumentiert, dass die in den Texten entworfenen Bilder eine essentielle psychologische Funktion erfüllen: Auf der Linearperspektive basierend implizieren sie eine singuläre, statische Subjektivität die auf die Leserin als postmodernes Subjekt ansprechend wirkt. In den Texten scheint der Aufstieg der digitalen Technik und ihrer Bildwelt ältere Bilder, visuelle Praktiken und Medientechniken weniger ersetzt, als ihnen größere Sichtbarkeit und Appeal verliehen zu haben. Weiterhin werden Bricolage und Pastiche als originär moderne (Kultur-)Techniken dargestellt. Die den Romanen inhärente Medienarchäologie untersteht daher nicht vollständig der Poetik des Realen. Die hinduistisch geprägten Ideen vom ‚durchlässigen‘ Subjekt und vom Sehen als aktivem Austausch wie es der Begriff „darshan“ konzeptualisiert, verweisen auf die Widerstandskraft eines mythischen Universums das sich in den neuen Technologien kontinuierlich fortpflanzt. Letztlich versinnlichen und versinnbildlichen die Romane die Hindu-nationalistisch geprägte Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, deren Zentrifugalkraft in ihrer Exklusivität und Aggressivität bis heute nachwirkt. KW - postcolonial literatures in English KW - Indian English novel KW - visual culture KW - Hindi film KW - Indian cinema KW - phenomenology KW - reception aesthetics KW - media studies KW - No God in Sight KW - The Last Jet Engine Laugh KW - Filming. A Love Story KW - The Bioscope Man KW - visual textures KW - media anthropology KW - photography KW - implied spectator KW - rasadhvani KW - Pather Panchali KW - Awara KW - postkoloniale englische Literaturen KW - indisch-englischer Roman KW - Intermedialität KW - suture KW - indisches Kino KW - Medienwissenschaft Y1 - 2015 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-95660 ER -