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Deep into the second half of the twentieth century the traditionalist definition of India as a country of villages remained dominant in official political rhetoric as well as cultural production. In the past two decades or so, this ruralist paradigm has been effectively superseded by a metropolitan imaginary in which the modern, globalised megacity increasingly functions as representative of India as a whole. Has the village, then, entirely vanished from the cultural imaginary in contemporary India? Addressing economic practices from upper-class consumerism to working-class family support strategies, this paper attempts to trace how 'the village' resurfaces or survives as a cultural reference point in the midst of the urban.
When it comes to footnotes, Alexander von Humboldt was ahead of his times even though his references leave much to be desired by today’s academic standards. This article examines the footnotes of Humboldt’s Essai politique sur l‘île de Cuba (1826). While it is not always easy to decipher his sometimes cryptic references, the undertaking is worthwhile: Humboldt’s footnotes do not only reveal his vast networks of knowledge. They also provide glimpses of ongoing, contemporary disputes among different scholars that involve Humboldt’s writings. They also present Humboldt’s reactions to such disputes. Exploring Humboldt’s footnotes consequently allows the reader to access both Humboldt the scholar and Humboldt the human being.
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.
Tragédie et psychologie
(2017)
His dislike for psychological analysis accompanied Albert Camus throughout his life and had a profound impact on his idea of theatre. Especially in his early years, he sees psychology as the antagonist of the kind of theater that he envisages, the "modern tragedy". In the last decade of his life, Camus worked on the novel "Requiem for a Nun" by William Faulkner, whom he greatly respected, in order to stage it. The confrontation with this work and its highly psychologically driven plot makes Camus virtually give up on his anti-psychological attitude.
This article derives from two interdisciplinary research projects funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, involving the application of psychological experimental techniques to the study of poetic form and reader response. It discusses the semantic and expressive effects of space and pattern in innovative forms of contemporary British and American poetry. After referring to some historical and theoretical contexts for these issues, the article analyses the results of experiments using eye-tracking, manipulations of text, memory tests and readers' recorded responses and interpretations. The first group of poems studied were lineated, with extended spaces within lines and displacement of lines from the left margin. Referring to a poem from Geoffrey Hill'sCanaan(1996), the authors show that such use of space may serve to articulate syntactical structures, but may also promote richer interpretation by encouraging cross-linear semantic connections. The second technique studied was the break from linear into postlinear poetry, as an initially lineated sequence shifts to pages of dispersed text. In readings of Susan Howe'sPythagorean Silence(fromThe Europe of Trusts, 1990), the authors detected more radical effects of space, shape and pattern, with associated consequences for interpretative strategies and aesthetic responses. Finally, the article discusses the potential for both mutual support and heuristic challenge between an empirical study of reader response, and a historical-theoretical approach as exemplified by Jerome McGann's interpretation ofPythagorean Silence.
Introduction
(2018)
A frequently mentioned if somewhat peripheral figure in the historiography of late nineteenth-century linguistics is the German sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893). Today Gabelentz is chiefly remembered for several insights that proved to be productive in the development of subsequent schools and subdisciplines. In this paper, we examine two of these insights, his analytic and synthetic systems of grammar and his foundational work on typology. We show how they were intimately connected within his conception of linguistic research, and how this was in turn embedded in the tradition established by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), especially as it was further developed by H. Steinthal (1823–1899). This paper goes beyond several previous works with a similar focus by drawing on a wider range of Gabelentz’ writings, including manuscript sources that have only recently been published, and by examining specific textual connections between Gabelentz and his predecessors.
The multifaceted concept of ‘form’ plays a central tole in the linguistic work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), where it is deeply entwined with aesthetic questions. H. Steinthal's (1823–1899) interpretation of linguistic form, however, made it the servant of psychology. The Formungstrieb (drive to formation) of Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) challenged Steinthal's conception and placed a renewed emphasis on aesthetics. In this endeavour, Gabelentz drew on the work of such figures as August Friedrich Pott (1802–1887), Hans Conon von der Gabelentz (1807–1874) and William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894). In this paper, we examine Gabelentz' Formungstrieb and place it in its historical context.
A Prophet of Divine Wisdom?
(2020)
In the nineteenth century, the reception of Giambattista Vico’s writings came along with nationalist interpretations of his Scienza Nuova as an ‘Italian Science’. This tendency was based upon an increased examination of the role that the philosopher Pythagoras and his Italian school of Croton played in Vico’s hierarchical conception of the ancient Greek and Italian civilizations. Writers, archaeologists and historians used the New Science as a metonymic reference work for their own nationalist concepts by updating the Pythagorean myth in accordance with relevant narratives of exclusive genealogies concerning an ancient Italian wisdom. These narratives follow tendencies in Vico’s own writings that were quoted strategically and mixed with further interpretations of the Scienza Nuova as reliable testimonial for a glorious Italian history. A theological poet characterized by deeper insight into the secrets of nature and some parts of the divine providence, Pythagoras gains his special position in Vico’s general conception of knowledge.
This study is based on an editorial report, which was presented at the 2009 working conference »Alexander von Humboldt and the Hemisphere« at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN). It demonstrates the textual genesis of Humboldt’s writings on Cuba through examples, which were obtained from a detailed text comparison of the three existing »original« versions of Humboldt’s Essai politique sur l’île de Cuba. The collation was part of a larger strategy to regain philological ground for the »Humboldt in English« (HiE) project. Since 2007 and funded with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the US-German research team behind HiE has been working on new and unabridged translations and critical editions of three of Humboldt’s most significant texts from his American oeuvre.1 The following observations will outline the most important results of this collation effort as a complementary contribution to the recent release of the HiE project’s first volume, The Political Essay on the Island of Cuba (Chicago University Press 2011), edited by Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette.