800 Literatur und Rhetorik
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The aesthetic phenomenon of the uncanny in literature and art is a spatial and gendered aesthetic concept, which is expressed in the spatial characteristics of a literary or photographic narrative. The intention of this thesis is to evaluate the entanglement of the uncanny, space, domesticity and femininity in the context of Gothic literature and photography. These four objects can only be read in their interplay with each other and how they each function as structural principles in the framework of Gothic fiction and photography. The literary texts, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lovely House” (1950) and The Haunting of Hill House (1959) as well as Francesca Woodman’s self-portraits that will be discussed further share one particular quality; they use the haunted house motif to express the protagonist’s psychological state by transferring mental hauntings onto the narrative’s spatial layer. The establishment of a connection between the concepts at hand, the uncanny, domesticity, spatiality and femininity, is the basis for the first half of the thesis. What follows is an overview of how domestic politics and gendered perceptions of and behaviors in spaces are expressed in the Gothic mode in particular. In the literary analysis two ways in which the Freudian uncanny constitutes itself in the haunted house narrative, first the house as the site of repetition and second the house as a stand-in for the maternal body, are examined. Drawing from Gernot Böhme’s and Martina Löw’s theoretic work on space and atmosphere the thesis focuses on the different aesthetic strategies that produce the uncanny atmosphere associated with the Gothic haunted house. The female subjects at the narratives’ center are in the ambiguous process of disappearing or becoming, this (dis)appearing act is facilitated by their haunted surroundings. In the case of the unnamed narrator in “Wall-Paper” her suppressed rage at her husband is mirrored in the strangled woman trapped inside the yellow wallpaper. Once she recognizes her doppelganger the union of her two selves takes place in the short story’s dramatic climax. In Shirley Jackson’s literary works the haunted houses, protagonists in themselves, entrap, transform, and ultimately devour their female daughter-victims. The haunted houses are symbols, means and places of the continuous tradition of female entrapment within the domestic sphere, be it as wives, mothers or daughters. In Francesca Woodman’s self-portraits the themes of creation/destruction and becoming/disappearing within the ruinous (post)domestic sphere are acted out by the fragmented and blurry female figure who intriguingly oscillates between self-empowerment and submission to destruction.
Writing travel, writing life
(2022)
The book compares the texts of three Swiss authors: Ella Maillart, Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Nicolas Bouvier. The focus is on their trip from Genève to Kabul that Ella Maillart and Annemarie Schwarzenbach made together in 1939/1940 and Nicolas Bouvier 1953/1954 with the artist Thierry Vernet. The comparison shows the strong connection between the journey and life and between ars vivendi and travel literature.
This book also gives an overview of and organises the numerous terms, genres, and categories that already exist to describe various travel texts and proposes the new term travelling narration. The travelling narration looks at the text from a narratological perspective that distinguishes the author, narrator, and protagonist within the narration.
In the examination, ten motifs could be found to characterise the travelling narration: Culture, Crossing Borders, Freedom, Time and Space, the Aesthetics of Landscapes, Writing and Reading, the Self and/as the Other, Home, Religion and Spirituality as well as the Journey. The importance of each individual motif does not only apply in the 1930s or 1950s but also transmits important findings for living together today and in the future.
The political legacy of the Martinican poet, novelist and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) is the subject of an ongoing debate among postcolonial literary scholars. Responding to an influential view shaping this debate, that Glissant’s work can be categorised into an early political and late apolitical phase, this dissertation claims that this division is based on a narrow conception of 'engaged political writing' that prevents a more comprehensive view of the changing political strategies Glissant pursued throughout his life from emerging. Proceeding from this conceptual basis, the dissertation is concerned with re-reading the dimensions of Glissant's work that have hitherto been relegated as apolitical, literary or poetic, with the aim of conceptualising the politics of relation as an integral part of his overall poetic project. In methodological terms, the dissertation therefore proposes a relational reading of Glissant’s life-work across literary genres, epochs, as well as the conventional divisions between political thought, writing and activism. This perspective is informed by Glissant's philosophy of relation, and draws on a conception of political practice that includes both explicit engagements with established political systems and institutions, as well as literary and cultural interventions geared towards their transformation and the creation of alternatives to them. Theoretically the work thus combines a poststructuralist lens on the conceptual difference between 'politics' and 'the political' with arguments for an inherent political quality of literature, and perspectives from the Afro-Caribbean radical tradition, in which writers and intellectuals have historically sought to combine discursive interventions with organisational actions. Applying this theoretical angle to the analysis of Glissant's politics of relation results in an interdisciplinary research framework designed to explore the synergies between postcolonial political and literary studies.
In order to comprehensively describe Glissant's politics of relation without recourse to evolutionary or digressive models, the concept of an intellectual marronage is proposed as a framework to map the strategies making up Glissant's political archive. Drawing on a variety of historic, political theoretical and literary sources, intellectual marronage is understood as a mode of radical resistance to the neocolonial subjugation for which the plantation system stands historically and metaphorically, as an inherently innovative political practice invested in the creation of communities marked by relational ontologies, and as a commitment to fostering an imagination of the world and the human that differs fundamentally from the Enlightenment paradigm. This specific conception of intellectual marronage forms the basis on which three key strategies that consistently shape Glissant's political practice are identified and mapped. They revolve around Glissant's engagement with history (chapter 2), his commitment to fostering an imagination of the Tout-Monde (whole-world) as a political point of reference (chapter 3), and the continuous exploration of alternative forms of community on the levels of the island, the archipelago and the Tout-Monde (chapter 4). Together these strategies constitute Glissant's personal politics of relation. Its abstract characteristics can be put in a productive conversation with related theoretical traditions invested in exploring the political potentials of fugitivity (chapters 5), as well as with the work of other postcolonial actors whose holistic practice warrants to be described as a politics of relation (chapter 6).
This text is a contribution to the research on the worldwide success of evangelical Christianity and offers a new perspective on the relationship between late modern capitalism and evangelicalism. For this purpose, the utilization of affect and emotion in evangelicalism towards the mobilization of its members will be examined in order to find out what similarities to their employment in late modern capitalism can be found. Different examples from within the evangelical spectrum will be analyzed as affective economies in order to elaborate how affective mobilization is crucial for evangelicalism’s worldwide success. Pivotal point of this text is the exploration of how evangelicalism is able to activate the voluntary commitment of its members, financiers, and missionaries. Gathered here are examples where both spheres—evangelicalism and late modern capitalism—overlap and reciprocate, followed by a theoretical exploration of how the findings presented support a view of evangelicalism as an inner-worldly narcissism that contributes to an assumed re-enchantment of the world.
This essay reads Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners (1956) as a milestone in the decolonisation of British fiction. After an introduction to Selvon and the core composition of the novel, it discusses the ways in which the narrative takes on issues of race and racism, how it in the tradition of the Trinidadian carnival confronts audiences with sexual profanation and black masculine swagger, and not least how the novel, especially through its elaborate use of creole Englishes, reimagines London as a West Indian metropolis. The essay then turns more systematically to the ways in which Selvon translates Western literary models and their isolated subject positions into collective modes of narrative performance taken from Caribbean orature and the calypsonian tradition. The Lonely Londoners breathes entirely new life into the ossified conventions of the English novel, and imbues it with unforeseen aesthetic, ethical, political and epistemological possibilities.
Rezensiertes Werk
Theresa Biberauer u. George Walkden (Hgg.): Syntax over Time: Lexical, Morphological, and Information – Structural Interactions - Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, 418 S.
Recollecting Bones
(2016)
In the same “guarded, roundabout and reticent way” which Lindsay Barrett invokes for Australian conversations about imperial injustice, Germans, too, must begin to more systematically explore, in Paul Gilroy’s words, “the connections and the differences between anti-semitism and anti-black and other racisms and asses[s] the issues that arise when it can no longer be denied that they interacted over a long time in what might be seen as Fascism’s intellectual, ethical and scientific pre-history” (Gilroy 1996: 26). In the meantime, we need to care for the dead. We need to return them, first, from the status of scientific objects to the status of ancestral human beings, and then progressively, and proactively, as close as possible to the care of those communities from whom they were stolen.
Sound matters
(2016)
This essay proposes a reorientation in postcolonial studies that takes account of the transcultural realities of the viral twenty-first century. This reorientation entails close attention to actual performances, their specific medial embeddedness, and their entanglement in concrete formal or informal material conditions. It suggests that rather than a focus on print and writing favoured by theories in the wake of the linguistic turn, performed lyrics and sounds may be better suited to guide the conceptual work. Accordingly, the essay chooses a classic of early twentieth-century digital music – M.I.A.’s 2003/2005 single “Galang” – as its guiding example. It ultimately leads up to a reflection on what Ravi Sundaram coined as “pirate modernity,” which challenges us to rethink notions of artistic authorship and authority, hegemony and subversion, culture and theory in the postcolonial world of today.
Reflections of Lusáni Cissé
(2016)