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- Philosophische Fakultät (31) (remove)
Das Drama des 17. Jahrhunderts steht nicht in einem ästhetischen, sondern als Argument in einem sozialen, politischen oder, in der Sprache der Zeit, moralphilosophischen Kontext. Ein erster Teil des Aufsatzes zeigt, dass die Poetik in der aristotelischen Schulphilosophie als Teil der Logik, das heißt der Argumentationstheorie im weitesten Sinne galt, und die Dichtung selbst somit als Anwendung einer argumentativen Form. Ein zweiter Teil zeigt an drei Beispielen, dass diese logische, argumentationstheoretische Auffassung des Dramas auch den Poetiken der Zeit zugrunde liegt. Ein dritter Teil führt an einigen Dramen (u.a. Gryphius’ „Catharina von Georgien“, Masens „Androphilus“ und Birkens „Silvia“) kurz vor, in welcher Form sie als Argument zu verstehen sind. Der vierte Teil zeigt, dass die Auffassung des Dramas als Argument ihren sozialhistorischen Kontext im Schultheater hat. Ein letzter Teil widmet sich der Frage, was nach Überzeugung der Frühen Neuzeit die Eigentümlichkeit des Dramas ausmacht, wenn es sich als Argument nicht von anderen Argumentationsformen unterscheidet.
Der Beitrag zeigt in einem ersten Schritt, dass die "Absurda comica" ein theologisches Gleichnis darstellt, in dem der König die Rolle Gottes, Pickelhäring die Rolle des Teufels und die Handwerker die Rolle des Menschen übernehmen. Schlüssel für dieses Gleichnis ist Lk 9.60 und Mt 8.22, wo Christus von seinen Jüngern fordert, "die Toten ihre Toten begraben zu lassen", d.h. sich vom Reich der Welt abzuwenden. Auf die "Absurda comica" übertragen, besagt dies, dass die Handwerker die Rollenhaftigkeit und die Narrheit ihrer Existenz erkennen müssen, wenn sie vor Gott gerechtfertigt werden wollen. In einem zweiten Schritt wird gezeigt, dass die "Absurda comica" als ein solches Gleichnis in der Tradition der Fastnachtspiele steht, deren Funktion eben dieser Aufweis der menschlichen Narrheit war. Das protestantische Schuldrama trat dabei bewusst in die Tradition dieser Fastnachtspiele, wie sich gerade an der "Absurda comica" zeigen lässt. In einem dritten Schritt wird diese These in einem Vergleich mit Jacob Masens "Rusticus imperans" und Christian Weises "Tobias und die Schwalbe" bestätigt.
Urbanity and literature
(2011)
Transarea studies focus upon spaces as created by the movements that criss-cross them. From this point of view, from its very beginnings, literature is closely interrelated with a vectorial (and much less with a purely spatial) conception of history - and with urbanity, which plays a decisive role in Gilgamesh's travels through a (narrative) cosmos centered upon the city of Uruk. This article explores the city as a transareal space of movement in three examples of literature, with no fixed abode, around the turn of the millennium, i.e. Assia Djebar's Les Nuits de Strasbourg, Emine Sevgi Oezdamar's Istanbul-Berlin Trilogy, and Cecile Wajsbrot's L'ile aux musees. These three writers project, in a very specific way, cities in motion as anagrammatic and fractal structures.
The selection of ‘good’ pictures has increasingly become a crucial factor when transmitting news to the recipients. Every day thousands of events are happening and millions of pictures are taken. By choosing photographs for newspapers and magazines, photographic editorial departments want to attract the recipients’ attention, evoke emotions and get them to read their stories. But what exactly is a good picture that meets these expectations? Which criteria are decisive for selecting pictures and what effects of this selection can be measured on the recipients’ side? This article presents the results of a research project carried out at the University of Erfurt in 2008 and conducted in collaboration with the German weekly magazine stern. It deals with the selection and impact of press photography by introducing the concept ‘photo news factors’. Applying the traditional news value theory to pictures, photo news factors are defined as selection criteria that, on the part of the communicator, decide whether the press photos are worth publishing. Furthermore, they are assumed to exert an influence on the intensity of attention that a picture arouses.
The nature of the links between speech production and perception has been the subject of longstanding debate. The present study investigated the articulatory parameter of tongue height and the acoustic F1–F0 difference for the phonological distinction of vowel height in American English front vowels. Multiple repetitions of /i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ/ in [(h)Vd] sequences were recorded in seven adult speakers. Articulatory (ultrasound) and acoustic data were collected simultaneously to provide a direct comparison of variability in vowel production in both domains. Results showed idiosyncratic patterns of articulation for contrasting the three front vowel pairs /i-ɪ/, /e-ɛ/, and /ɛ-æ/ across subjects, with the degree of variability in vowel articulation comparable to that observed in the acoustics for all seven participants. However, contrary to what was expected, some speakers showed reversals for tongue height for /ɪ/-/e/ that were also reflected in acoustics, with F1 higher for /ɪ/ than for /e/. The data suggest the phonological distinction of height is conveyed via speaker-specific articulatory-acoustic patterns that do not strictly match features descriptions. However, the acoustic signal is faithful to the articulatory configuration that generated it, carrying the crucial information for perceptual contrast.
Previous studies suggest that there are special timing relations in syllable onsets. The consonants are assumed to be timed, on the one hand, with the vocalic nucleus and, on the other hand, with each other. These competing timing relations result in the C-center effect. However, the C-center effect has not consistently been found in languages with complex onsets. Moreover, it has occasionally been found in languages disallowing complex onsets. The present study investigates onset timing in German while discussing alternative explanations (not related to bonding) for the timing patterns observed. Six German speakers were recorded via Electromagnetic Articulography. The corpus contained items with four clusters (/sk/, /kv/, /gl/, and /pl/). The clusters occur in word-initial position, word-medial position, and across a word boundary preceding different vowels. The results suggest that segmental properties (i.e., oral-laryngeal coordination, coarticulatory resistance) determine the observed timing patterns, and specifically the absence or presence of the C-center effect.
In recent years, the category of evidentiality has also come into use for the description of Romance languages and of German. This has been contingent on a change in its interpretation from a typological category to a semantic-pragmatic category, which allows an application to languages lacking specialised morphemes for the expression of evidentiality. We consider evidentiality to be a structural dimension of grammar, the values of which are expressed by types of constructions that code the source of information which a speaker imparts. If we look at the situation in Romance languages and in German, drawing a boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality presents problems that are difficult to solve. Adding markers of the source of the speaker's knowledge often limits the degree of responsibility of the speaker for the content of the utterance. Evidential adverbs are a frequently used means of marking the source of the speaker's knowledge. The evidential meaning is generalised to marking any source of knowledge, what can be regarded as a result of a process of pragmaticalisation. The use of certain means which also carry out evidential markings can even contribute to the blurring of the different kinds of evidentiality. German also has modal verbs which in conjunction with the perfect tense of the verb have a predominantly evidential use (sollen and wollen). But even here the evidential marking is not without influence on the modality of the utterance. The Romance languages, however, do not have such specialised verbs for expressing evidentiality in certain contexts. To do this, they mark evidentiality - often context bound - by verb forms such as the conditional and the imperfect tense. This article shall contrast the different architectures used in expressing evidentiality in German and in the Romance languages.
Madness and Sense
(2015)
This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whether Kiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking in multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language High German', a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of German' speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane.
Magic screens
(2016)
Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca, for several centuries doubtlessly the most discussed and most eminent writer of Andean America in the 16th and 17th centuries, throughout his life set the utmost value on the fact that he descended matrilineally from Atahualpa Yupanqui and from the last Inca emperor, Huayna Capac. Thus, both in his person and in his creative work he combined different cultural worlds in a polylogical way. (1) Two painters boasted that very same Inca descent - they were the last two great masters of the Cuzco school of painting, which over several generations of artists had been an institution of excellent renown and prestige, and whose economic downfall and artistic marginalization was vividly described by the French traveller Paul Mancoy in 1837.(2) While, during the 18th century, Cuzco school paintings were still much cherished and sought after, by the beginning of the following century the elite of Lima regarded them as behind the times and provincial, committed to an 'indigenous' painting style. The artists from up-country - such was the reproach - could not keep up with the modern forms of seeing and creating, as exemplified by European paragons. Yet, just how 'provincial', truly, was this art?
West German anticommunism and the SED’s Westarbeit were to some extentinterrelated. From the beginning, each German state had attemted to stabilise itsown social system while trying to discredit its political opponent. The claim tosole representation and the refusal to acknowledge each other delineated governmentalaction on both sides. Anticommunism inWest Germany re-developed under theconditions of the Cold War, which allowed it to become virtually the reason ofstate and to serve as a tool for the exclusion of KPD supporters. In its turn, theSED branded the West German State as‘revanchist’and instrumentalised itsanticommunism to persecute and eliminate opponents within the GDR. Bothphenomena had an integrative and exclusionary element.
In October 2016, following a campaign led by Labour Peer Lord
Alfred Dubs, the first child asylum-seekers allowed entry to the UK
under new legislation (the ‘Dubs amendment’) arrived in England.
Their arrival was captured by a heavy media presence, and very
quickly doubts were raised by right-wing tabloids and politicians
about their age. In this article, I explore the arguments
underpinning the Dubs campaign and the media coverage of
the children’s arrival as a starting point for interrogating
representational practices around children who seek asylum. I
illustrate how the campaign was premised on a universal politics
of childhood that inadvertently laid down the terms on which
these children would be given protection, namely their innocence.
The universality of childhood fuels public sympathy for child
asylum-seekers, underlies the ‘child first, migrant second’
approach advocated by humanitarian organisations, and it was a
key argument in the ‘Dubs amendment’. Yet the campaign
highlights how representations of child asylum-seekers rely on
codes that operate to identify ‘unchildlike’ children. As I show, in
the context of the criminalisation of undocumented migrants‘,
childhood is no longer a stable category which guarantees
protection, but is subject to scrutiny and suspicion and can,
ultimately, be disproved.
Across currents
(2017)
Khal Torabully
(2017)
Khal Torabully creates poetry and a poetics for those forgotten by history, a theorem and theory which construct a tangible and sensual landscape, allowing for an empathetically shared experience and expressing the dramatic climax of the third phase of accelerated globalization: a project that would be unthinkable without the cultural theory we now have at our disposal in the present surge of globalization. In his poetic and theoretical texts, he has paid a literary tribute to the Coolies, usually from India, but also China and many other countries. Given Torabully’s Mauritian roots, but also the worldwide migration of the Coolies themselves, the world of Coolitude is culturally and linguistically extremely diverse, making the act of translation very relevant and giving it multiple meanings. Literature brings these forgotten lives back to life and allows us to share this experience thanks to its aesthetic force. It traces the movements, which sketch trajectories functioning to this day as palimpsest-like vectors of our own paths and trajectories. The author of Chair Corail, Fragments Coolies breaks the chain of mutual exclusions, replacing it with a type of writing belonging to a wider array of expressive modes which in diasporic situations unleash polylogical and archipelagic imaginaries.
‘Hasty observations’?
(2018)
This article examines geographical field research in Albania and Montenegro under Austro-Hungarian occupation, which lasted from 1916 to 1918. It focusses on one of the most important German-speaking geographers of the early 20 th century, Eugen Oberhummer (1859–1944), a pupil of Friedrich Ratzel, the founder of German geo-politics. In 1917 and 1918, Oberhummer went on two expeditions to Montenegro and Albania during the First World War. He already had travelled in four continents and vaguely knew the Western Balkans from an expedition in 1907. It will be argued that the actual situation in Albania and Montenegro did not alter, but did rather reinforce Oberhummer’s attitudes and opinions on the ‘other’ he encountered. Thus, the two war expeditions – Oberhummer primarily met high-ranking Austro-Hungarian officials and only few locals – confirmed his expectations basing on his ‘Ratzelian’ theoretical conceptions. It will further be argued that – in contrast to the much younger and less experienced ‘scholars-at-arms’ of the expedition of 1916 – war and violence were of secondary relevance for the well-travelled and renowned professor of geography in his late 50s. Neither in Oberhummer’s articles nor in his diaries the war and the occupation of Albania and Montenegro made up an important part. In Oberhummer’s ‘Ratzelian’ view, humans could not change or over-come the basic features of geography, as humans were clearly subordinated to the elemental forces of geography. People, over generations, adapted to geography, not the other way round. The on-going First World War was an opportunity for Oberhummer to travel to Albania and Montenegro, but the guerrilla warfare in large parts of Montenegro, the violence against the civilian population, and the fighting at the Albanian front were of secondary relevance and interest for him. Nevertheless, what Oberhummer observed offers great insights into the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Montenegro and Albania from the perspective of a renowned and – given the general circumstances – pleasantly relaxed Ratzelian geographer at the height of his academic career.
Recollecting bones
(2018)
This article critically engages with the different politics of memory involved in debates over the restitution of Indigenous Australian ancestral remains stolen by colonial actors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and brought to Berlin in the name of science. The debates crystallise how deeply divided German scientific discourses still are over the question of whether the historical and moral obligations of colonial injustice should be accepted or whether researchers should continue to profess scientific disinterest'. The debates also reveal an almost unanimous disavowal of Indigenous Australian knowledges and mnemonic conceptions across all camps. The bitter ironies of this disavowal become evident when Indigenous Australian quests for the remains of their ancestral dead lost in the limbo of German scientific collections are juxtaposed with white Australian (fictional) quests for the remains of Ludwig Leichhardt, lost in the Australian interior.
The focus in this article, through a reading of the German-Australian
newspaper Der Kosmopolit, is on the legacies of entangled imperial
identities in the period of the nineteenth-century German
Enlightenment. Attention is drawn to members of the liberal
nationalist generation of 1848 who emigrated to the Australian
colonies and became involved in intellectual activities there. The
idea of entanglement is applied to the philosophical orientation
of the German-language newspaper that this group formed, Der
Kosmopolit, which was published between 1856 and 1957. Against
simplistic notions that would view cosmopolitanism as the
opposite of nationalism, it is argued that individuals like Gustav
Droege and Carl Muecke deployed an entangled ‘cosmo-
nationalism’ in ways that both advanced German nationalism and
facilitated their own engagement with and investment in
Australian colonial society.
Schomburgk’s Chook
(2018)
Focusing on the politics of museums, collections and the untold
stories of the scientific ‘specimens’ that travelled between
Germany and Australia, this article reconstructs the historical,
interpersonal and geopolitical contexts that made it possible for
the stuffed skin of an Australian malleefowl to become part of the
collections of Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. The author enquires into the kinds of contexts that are habitually considered
irrelevant when a specimen of natural history is treated as an
object of taxonomic information only. In case of this particular
specimen human and non-human history become entangled in ways that link the fate of this one small Australian bird to the German revolutionary generation of 1848, to Germany’s
nineteenth-century colonial aspirations, to settler–Indigenous
relations, to the cruel realities that underpinned the production of
scientific knowledge in colonial Australia, and to a present-day
interest in reconstructing Indigenous knowledges.
Affect Disposition(ing)
(2018)
The “affective turn” has been primarily concerned not with what affect is, but what it does. This article focuses on yet another shift towards how affect gets organized, i.e., how it is produced, classified, and controlled. It proposes a genealogical as well as a critical approach to the organization of affect and distinguishes between several “affect disposition(ing) regimes”—meaning paradigms of how to interpret and manage affects, for e.g., encoding them as byproducts of demonic possession, judging them in reference to a moralistic framework, or subsuming them under an industrial regime. Bernard Stiegler’s concept of psychopower will be engaged at one point and expanded to include social media and affective technologies, especially Affective Computing. Finally, the industrialization and cybernetization of affect will be contrasted with poststructuralist interpretations of affects as events.