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In this paper, we present data from an elicitation study and a corpus study that support the observation that the Yucatec Maya progressive aspect auxiliary táan is replaced by the habitual auxiliary k in sentences with contrastively focused fronted objects. Focus has been extensively studied in Yucatec, yet the incompatibility of object fronting and progressive aspect in Yucatec Maya remains understudied. Both our experimental results and our corpus study point in the direction that this incompatibility may very well be categorical. Theoretically, we take a progressive reading to be derived from an imperfectivity operator in combination with a singular operator, and we propose that this singular operator implicates the negation of event plurality, leading to an exhaustive interpretation which ranks below corrective focus on a contrastive focus scale. This means that, in a sentence with object focus fronting, the use of the marked auxiliary táan (as opposed to the more general k) would trigger two contrastive foci, which would be an unlikely and probably dispreferred speech act.
Humboldtian science aims at an empirically supported transdisciplinary and at the same time transareal development of a world consciousness. In the development of this world consciousness, not only Europe and the Americas, but also Central Asia and especially China play an important role. The Humboldt Center for Transdisciplinary Studies (HCTS) in Changsha, is attempting to address the fact that China has been largely left out of international Humboldt studies and that Alexander von Humboldt was intensively engaged with Central Asia and China for decades. Therefore, the Humboldt Center in Changsha sets itself the goal of expanding Humboldt Studies to include this important aspect, to stimulate and coordinate special research work, and to build scientific and cultural bridges between Germany and China, Europe and Asia.
This book provides a new perspective on prosodically marked declaratives, wh-exclamatives, and discourse particles in the Madrid variety of Spanish. It argues that some marked forms differ from unmarked forms in that they encode modal evaluations of the at-issue meaning. Two epistemic evaluations that can be shown to be encoded by intonation in Spanish are obviousness and mirativity, which present the at-issue meaning as expected and unexpected, respectively. An empirical investigation via a production experiment finds that they are associated with distinct intonational features under constant focus scope, with stances of (dis)agreement showing an impact on obvious declaratives. Wh-exclamatives are found not to differ significantly in intonational marking from neutral declaratives, showing that they need not be miratives. Moreover, we find that intonational marking on different discourse particles in natural dialogue correlates with their meaning contribution without being fully determined by it. In part, these findings quantitatively confirm previous qualitative findings on the meaning of intonational configurations in Madrid Spanish. But they also add new insights on the role intonation plays in the negotiation of commitments and expectations between interlocutors.
Linguistic hybridity
(2022)
This volume deals with different linguistic phenomena representing grammaticalization and lexicalization processes and combines different approaches of contact linguistics and variational linguistics. It contains papers on clitic placement in Angolan Portuguese, on the use of subject pronouns in French, Brazilian Portuguese and Caribbean Spanish, on evidential marking in Paraguayan Spanish, on Paraguayan Guaraní, on evidentiality in different varieties of Spanish, on discourse markers in Latin America, on modal particles in Italian and their translation into German, on bilingual communities in Southern Brazil, on Spanish-German-Russian language contact and on Romance aspectual periphrases in contact with English progressives.
Language contact and the linguistic coding of evidentiality in varieties of Spanish in Latin America
(2022)
Meaning and Function
(2022)
The use of the word functional in the most diverse theories and approaches has contributed in no small measure to the confusion in linguistics today. This article does not claim to give an overview of the different directions of functionalism in linguistics. Rather, the aim is to present what Coseriu‘s view characterised as functional in his time and to what extent his theory outlined a path that still makes sense in functional-cognitive linguistics today. This will involve an examination of Coseriu‘s difficult-to-identify concept of function. Furthermore, the article will also show that functional thinking is relevant for current grammatography.
The starting point of this article is the occurrence of determiner-less and bare que relative complementizers like (en) que, ‘(in) that’, instead of (en) el que, ‘(in) which’, in Yucatecan Spanish (southeast Mexico). While reference grammars treat complementizers with a determiner as the standard option, previous diachronic research has shown that determiner-less complementizers actually predate relative complementizers with a determiner. Additionally, Yucatecan Spanish has been in long-standing contact with Yucatec Maya. Relative complementation in Yucatec Maya differs from that in Spanish (at least) in that the non-complex complementizer tu’ux (‘where’) is generally the only option for locative complementation. The paper explores monolingual and bilingual data from Yucatecan Spanish to discuss the question whether the determiner-less and bare que relative complementizers in our data constitute a historic remnant or a dialectal recast, possibly (but not necessarily) due to language contact. Although our pilot study may not answer these far-reaching questions, it does reveal two separate, but intertwined developments: (i) a generally increased rate of bare que relative complementation, across both monolingual speakers of Spanish and Spanish Maya bilinguals, compared to other Spanish varieties, and (ii) a preference for donde at the cost of other locative complementizer constructions in the bilingual group. Our analysis thus reveals intriguing differences between the complementizer preferences of monolingual and bilingual speakers, suggesting that different variational patterns caused by different (socio-)linguistic factors can co-develop in parallel in one and the [same] region.
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 starting point of this article is the occurrence of determiner-less and bare que relative complementizers like (en) que, ‘(in) that’, instead of (en) el que, ‘(in) which’, in Yucatecan Spanish (southeast Mexico). While reference grammars treat complementizers with a determiner as the standard option, previous diachronic research has shown that determiner-less complementizers actually predate relative complementizers with a determiner. Additionally, Yucatecan Spanish has been in long-standing contact with Yucatec Maya. Relative complementation in Yucatec Maya differs from that in Spanish (at least) in that the non-complex complementizer tu’ux (‘where’) is generally the only option for locative complementation. The paper explores monolingual and bilingual data from Yucatecan Spanish to discuss the question whether the determiner-less and bare que relative complementizers in our data constitute a historic remnant or a dialectal recast, possibly (but not necessarily) due to language contact. Although our pilot study may not answer these far-reaching questions, it does reveal two separate, but intertwined developments: (i) a generally increased rate of bare que relative complementation, across both monolingual speakers of Spanish and Spanish Maya bilinguals, compared to other Spanish varieties, and (ii) a preference for donde at the cost of other locative complementizer constructions in the bilingual group. Our analysis thus reveals intriguing differences between the complementizer preferences of monolingual and bilingual speakers, suggesting that different variational patterns caused by different (socio-)linguistic factors can co-develop in parallel in one and the [same] region.
Language development in children with a heritage language background is often characterized by a shift towards the majority language once children enter formal educational contexts.
In Germany, educational programs that target heritage languages are scarce.
It is therefore of interest whether children with a heritage language background can benefit from a bilingual program targeting their heritage language.
In this paper, we report data on the lexical skills of Italian heritage children in two educational contexts, bilingual Italian-German kindergartens and a bilingual Italian-German elementary school.
We examine (1) developmental trajectories of children's lexical skills in German and Italian, (2) differences between noun and verb development, (3) differences between lexical production and comprehenand Italian, kindergarteners showed balanced receptive vocabulary skills.
By contrast, elementary school-children had a larger German than Italian vocabulary. Both groups demonstrated a clear dominance of nouns over verbs.
While school children already performed at ceiling in German at the end of first grade, across the school years, their Italian vocabulary increased, nouns in particular.
Meaning and Function
(2021)
The use of the word functional in the most diverse theories and approaches has contributed in no small measure to the confusion in linguistics today. This article does not claim to give an overview of the different directions of functionalism in linguistics. Rather, the aim is to present what Coseriu‘s view characterised as functional in his time and to what extent his theory outlined a path that still makes sense in functional-cognitive linguistics today. This will involve an examination of Coseriu‘s difficult-to-identify concept of function. Furthermore, the article will also show that functional thinking is relevant for current grammatography.
A grammar of authority?
(2021)
Directive Speech Acts (dsas) are a major feature of historical pragmatics, specifically in research on historical (im)politeness. However, for Classical French, there is a lack of research on related phenomena. In our contribution, we present two recently constructed corpora covering the period of Classical French, sermo and apwcf. We present these corpora in terms of their genre characteristics on a communicative-functional and socio-pragmatic level. Based on the observation that, both in sermo and apwcf, dsas frequently occur together with terms of address, we analyse and manually code a sample based on this co-occurrence, and we compare the results with regard to special features in the individual corpora. The emerging patterns show a clear correspondence between socio-pragmatic factors and the linguistic means used to realise dsas. We propose that these results can be interpreted as signs of an underlying "grammar of authority".
Présentation
(2020)
The present paper is concerned with the phenomenon of reporting on the speakers’ thinking when both the reporting and the reported clauses originate in one and the same speaker, i.e. the performative uses of the verbs sp. creer and pt. achar (‘think’). The data are retrieved from the CdE-NOW and CdP-NOW. Adopting both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, I concentrate on reporting on thinking with and without the overt expression of the subject pronouns sp. yo and pt. eu. In doing so, the constructions (yo) creo (que) and (eu) acho (que) as well as parenthetic and right-peripheral creo yo and acho eu are studied. According to the corpus data and compared to other possible constructions with creo and acho, creo que and acho que represent the most frequent constructions if searching for the ‘node’ creo or acho, that is, if the non-use of the subject pronoun exceeds its explicit expression.
This book is concerned with the diachronic development of selected topic and focus markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French. On the one hand, it focuses on the development of these structures from their relational meaning to their topic-/ focus-marking meaning, and on the other hand, it is concerned with their current form und use. Thus, Romance topic and focus markers – such as sp. en cuanto a, pt. a propósito de, fr. au niveau de or sentence-initial sp. Lo que as well as clefts and pseudo-clefts – are investigated from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The author argues that topic markers have procedural meaning and that their function is bound to their syntactic position. An important contribution of this study is the fact that real linguistic evidence (in the form of data from various corpora) is analyzed instead of operating with constructed examples.
Remembering German- Australian Colonial Entanglements emphatically promotes a critical and nuanced understanding of the complex entanglement of German colonial actors and activities within Australian colonial institutions and different imperial ideologies.
Case studies ranging from the German reception of James Cook's voyages through to the legacies of 19th- and 20th- century settler colonialism foreground the highly ambiguous roles played by explorers, missionaries, intellectuals and other individuals, as well as by objects and things that travelled between worlds - ancestral human remains, rare animal skins, songs and even military tanks. The chapters foreground the complex relationship between science, religion, art and exploitation, displacement and annihilation. Contributors trace how these entanglements have been commemorated or forgotten over time - by Germans, settler-Australians and Indigenous people.
Bringing to light a critical understanding of the German involvement in the Australian colonial project, Remembering German- Australian Colonial Entanglements will be of great interest to scholars of colonialism, postcolonialism, German Studies and Indigenous Studies. But for the editors' substantial new introductory chapter, these contributions originally appeared in a special issue of Postcolonial Studies.
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 article presents and discusses João Guimarães Rosa as an outstanding Brazilian author whose literary work, especially Sagarana, expresses aesthetically different ways of life-forms between human beings, animals, plants, and landscapes. Movement and transformations are the basic principles in which the melody of prose expresses itself as a language in and as motion. Although based in Brazilian culture, Rosa shows the conviviality of different logics which are not reduced to one myth of the Brazilian people, but produce multiple ways of co-existence between different life-forms and culture narratives. The translingual title “Sagarana” already alludes to the transitions between two languages, regions, and cultures: the Icelandic “saga-” and the Tupic-Word “rana” which means “similar” or “alike.” The interpretation figures out the correlation of different provenances (“Herkünfte”) which emerge from Rosa’s craft of storytelling. In its center, the Sertão arises as a region of nature whose forces are connected with the life of human beings. As fractal of the world, it symbolizes Brazilian relations as a world of its own and at the same time as a part of the world of others. From this point of view the essay turns world literature upside down: it emphasizes on the one hand that the epoch of world literature since Goethe has come to an end and that the meridian has shifted to Latin America. On the other hand it can be observed that the lusophonic world between Brazil and Angola, Portugal and Kap Verde develops new perspectives on literatures of the world beyond the fixed coordinations of periphery and center. Rosa’s ways of world making already shift the perspective from the local to the global as a miniatured model of a universe which reveals interpretations of a better understanding of the world as world fractals.
Alexander von Humboldt
(2020)
The name Ideologues refers to a group of philosophers, psychologists, grammarians, educational theorists and medical specialists who for a short period from 1795 to 1805 determined the intellectual climate in France and sought to develop a science of ideas (idéologie). The Ideologues had a rather reserved attitude to Condillac’s (1714–1780) ideas and his sensualist sign theory. They strove for the perfection of language for the needs of thought and of scientific knowledge. The connections with the Ideologues can also be discerned in Russia. In the educational theory, Jean-Baptiste Maudru (1740–1808) was close to the Ideologues and, despite his insufficient knowledge of the Russian language, made some interesting remarks on the connection between the language and the national character. According to Maudru and in agreement with the Ideologues, different typologies of word order are not just an indication of greater or lesser closeness to the natural order. Rather, they indicate differences in national character, which manifest themselves in the specific character of individual languages. Maudru taught at the military academy in Saint Petersburg and published the first Russian grammar in France (Maudru 1802). In his grammar, he sought to link mechanically the specific features of languages and of national characters with the climatic influences. His attempt to revive the theory of climatic influences was criticized by Karamzin. Karamzin also treated the discussion of the metaphoric extension of word meanings as an absurd undertaking, which had no place in grammar.
When it comes to autobiographical narratives, the most spontaneous and natural manner is preferable. But neither individually told narratives nor those grounded in the communicative repertoire of a social group are easily comparable. A clearly identifiable tertium comparationis is mandatory. We present the results of an experimental ‘Narrative Priming’ setting with French students. A potentially underlying model of narrating from personal experience was activated via a narrative prime, and in a second step, the participants were asked to tell a narrative of their own. The analysis focuses on similarities and differences between the primes and the students’ narratives. The results give evidence for the possibility to elicit a set of comparable narratives via a prime, and to activate an underlying narrative template. Meaningful differences are discussed as generational and age related styles. The transcriptions from the participants that authorized the publication are available online.
Pride is linked to conviviality, to the practice of life-with-an-other, and to an awareness of the limitations of the life forms and life norms which guide and regulate the life of culturally, socially, and historically defined communities. Assuming this link, pride in living-together and conviviality appear as concepts creating a framework for future perspectives. But these concepts need a space in which they can unfold critically and confidently with a view to the future. For millennia, the literatures of the world have created this space of simulation and experimentation in which knowledge of how-to-live-with-an-other has been put down on paper through the open-ended tradition of writing. It is the space of the life forms and life norms of conviviality: it offers us prospective knowledge for the future by translating the imaginable into the thinkable, and the readable into the livable.
“I mean, no soy psicóloga”
(2019)
This paper is concerned with the qualitative analysis of the use of the English discourse marker I mean in Spanish and Portuguese online discourses (in online fora, blogs or user comments on websites). The examples are retrieved from the Corpus del Español (Web/ Dialects) as well as the Corpus do Português (Web/ Dialects).
Postcoloniale Literatur bezeichnet die nationalen anglophonen Literaturen in den Amerikas, Asien, Afrika und Ozeanien (zeitweise auch New English Literatures genannt). Eine Darstellung nach Regionen ist wegen der migrantischen Bewegungen der Autor/innen allerdings nicht zu leisten. Daher behandelt der Band die zentralen Themen der postkolonialen Debatte, die jeweils Autor/innen aus verschiedenen Regionen betreffen.
This study adopts a cognitive approach to the analysis of the use of the Spanish imperfecto as a construal form for the conceptualization of state of affairs in certain journalistic texts. In doing so, the main focus of the study is to investigate cognitive processes like modalization and subjectivization, which are related to the speaker’s standpoint and to his subjective, not grammatically motivated, decision to use the imperfective instead of the perfective form. By the help of the corpus programmes GlossaNet and CREA (corpus of the Real Academia Española) we analyze the imperfective use of some Spanish verbs, which are semantically perfective in nature so that the normative use would require a perfective form. In other words, we investigate how the speaker/journalist construes a reality or situation to be expressed by means of the imperfecto and show that this use of the imperfect is typical for journalistic discourse.
Introduction
(2018)
Languages about Languages
(2018)
In the history of Humboldt research both brothers have been traditionally seen as representing the dichotomy between the humanities and the natural sciences. Today however, their similar approach to using and forming scientific language could be used as a starting point for conceiving a university, museum and even forum under one single Humboldtian science.
TransArea Tangier
(2018)
The present paper discusses the relationship between evidentiality and (inter-) subjectivity and argues that the two semantic-functional categories need not be mutually exclusive. In the use of certain means of expression and in certain contexts, both evidentiality and (inter-) subjectivity may be conveyed simultaneously. I thereby differentiate between two meanings of intersubjectivity, namely ‘intersubjectivity1’ and ‘intersubjectivity2’. Intersubjectivity1 refers to the notion of common or general knowledge: certain means of expression are seen as being intersubjectively used when the speaker shares or assumes sharing knowledge with the interlocutor. Intersubjectivity2 is related to particular discourse functions of certain means of expression in interactional settings, paying attention to the speaker-hearer constellation.
In order to substantiate the theoretical part of the paper, I then present a qualitative analysis of Portuguese, Spanish and English examples, which are taken from the Corpus do Português, Corpus del Español and the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
The assumption of linguistics relativity and the definition of languages as epiphenomena are certainly known as two contradictory positions from the last century. But I will start my discussion of them in the period of their appearance and then use this as a basis to evaluate the heuristic value of these positions in present day linguistics. I will start with the definition of language as an epiphenomenon and then I will go on with the linguistic relativity.
The notion of ʽepiphenomenon’ is usually used to exclude certain aspects of a scientific object because they are considered to be deduced from others. In linguistics, restrictions of the research object were made, invoking the notion of ʽepiphenomenonʼ, which was partially done with a polemical attitude, and was always responded to polemically.
In this paper evidential and modal adverbs will be studied, such as French apparemment, évidemment, visiblement, Italian apparentemente, evidentemente, ovviamente, and Spanish aparentemente, evidentemente and visiblemente. The development of their signification will be discussed, including German adverbs like offensichtlich. In these means of expression, the functional-semantic categories evidentiality and epistemic modality seem to overlap: on the one hand, they are used if the state of affairs talked about cannot be verified, that is, if there is still a moment of insecurity concerning the transmitted information. Then adverbials with a special structure (preposition + article + nominal form of a verb) will be analysed, and we will examine if they behave in the same way.
In 1916, three years after the death of Ferdinand de Saussure, the Cours de linguistique générale (CLG) was published in Geneva. This foundational work marked the beginning of a discipline that has profoundly influenced the development of the humanities ever since.
What sources influenced the CLG? Do the main concepts of this seminal work have the same validity today as they did in 1916? How has the recent development of language sciences influenced its reception? How does this text account for meaning and communication within the context of speech (parole)?
In order to explore these questions, one hundred years after the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's seminal work on General Linguistics, Polis--The Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities held an interdisciplinary conference that gathered 14 international specialists from various disciplines: general linguistics, pragmatics, philology, dialectology, translation studies, terminology, and philosophy.
The first section of this work reassesses the sources and further influence of the CLG on modern linguistics. The book's second part discusses some of the main concepts and dichotomies of the CLG (constitution of the linguistic method, arbitrariness of sign, main dichotomies), under the light of both the original manuscripts and recent linguistic developments (influence of dialectology or translation studies). The third and last part handles the pragmatic and semantic dimensions of language, suggesting new avenues of reflection that could not yet have been fully taken into account within the CLG itself.
Uniting 14 scholarly articles, together with an introduction, an index locorum and a collective bibliography, this volume hopes to encourage readers with its reappraisal and reinterpretation of Saussure's ground-breaking work and thus contribute to the future development of linguistics and humanities.
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.
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.
On the evidential use of English adverbials and their equivalents in Romance languages and Russian
(2017)
The present study investigates the use of equivalents of the English adverbials seemingly and apparently with a specific morphological structure in Romance languages and Russian, i.e. Spanish al parecer, Portuguese ao parecer and ao que parece, French avoir l’air de, Italian all’apparenza and in apparenza as well as Russian по-видимому. The underlying hypothesis is that the function and syntactic behaviour of these adverbial locutions are motivated by their morphological composition. It is to investigate whether the adverbials may be used sentence-initially, parenthetically, as an adverbial with broad or narrow scope or as a component of a modalised predication. The adverbial locutions are treated as means of expression where evidentiality and epistemic modality represent overlapping functional-semantic categories.
Welterleben/Weiterleben
(2017)
Welterleben and Weiterleben are what determine the second globalization (of four previously explored) whose constantly accelerating dynamic, vectorization, this essay explores. On the basis of selected writings of Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, and Adelbert von Chamisso, the author highlights the increasing speed with which knowledge, especially in the experiential sciences, is produced and disseminated following the routes of ever-widening trade speeded along by globalization. The notion of ‘vectopia’ stands for the connection of utopia and uchronia in space and time in such a way that the experience of the world, expanded worldwide, contains within it a Weiter-Leben, a ‘living-further’ that is to be understood first in a spatial, and not yet temporal, sense, of what Forster called Erfahrungswissen, or ‘experiential knowledge.’ Vectopia, as elaborated here, has a material dimension that relates to the physical person, the body, the experience of the world that cannot occur without the constant changing of place, without a journeying that is again and again recommenced. Vectopia develops the projection of a life not from space or from time alone, but by their combination. Vectopia is more than a concept, it is a thought-figure: it is vitally connected to life, and thus a life-figure. It opens itself to a type of knowledge that stands almost at the threshold of a further life, indeed, of a Weiterleben that, opening itself to a ‘living-onward,’ resides beyond space, time, and movement.
Innerhalb der USA gilt New Orleans seit jeher als die „unamerikanischste“ Stadt, als exotisch und anders, gar als „sozio-geographischer Unfall“. Hier überkreuzen sich nicht nur die Einflüsse verschiedener Kolonialkulturen, sondern auch die Routen des atlantischen Sklavenhandels und der asiatischen Arbeitsmigration und nicht zuletzt die ideellen wie materiellen Transferbewegungen zwischen den beiden Amerikas.
Der vorliegende Band macht es sich zur Aufgabe, diese vielfältigen transarealen Zirkulationsprozesse zu analysieren und das Potential New Orleans' zur paradigmatischen Metropole des Globalen Südens auszuloten. Im Fokus stehen verschiedene Formen der kulturellen Kreolisierung, wie sie sich in der Sprache, der Literatur, der Musik, aber auch in Alltagsphänomen wie dem Karneval oder Computerspielen manifestieren.
Within the USA, New Orleans has long been considered the ‘un-American’ city, seen as exotic and different, even as a ‘socio-geographical accident’. It is a crossroads not only for the influences of different colonial cultures but also for the routes of the Atlantic slave trade and immigration of Asian workers, and not least for material and non-material transfer between the two Americas. This volume seeks to analyse these manifold transareal circulation processes and to explore New Orleans’s potential as a paradigmatic metropolis of the Global South. The focus is on different forms of creolisation as manifested in language, literature and music, but also in everyday phenomena such as Carnival or computer games.
As the world cannot be adequately understood from the vantage point of a single language, the literatures of the world can no longer be trimmed to a single world literature in the Goethean sense. This recognition bodes well for the future of philology and of literary production. Through multiperspectival writing, knowledge of life may be attainable without being reduced to a single political, medial, cartographical, geocultural, or aesthetic logic. As a laboratory for polylogical thinking, literature does not represent reality, as Erich Auerbach put it. Rather, it represents multiple lived, experienced, or relivable realities. Whoever is open to a polylogical reception of the literatures of the world can perceive and experience how life knowledge transforms into lived knowledge and how knowledge for survival turns into knowledge for living together. However, literature can be more than it is only if it stays aware of the void, of lack, of privation, of the interminable: aware of the end that never is an end. Such a planetary concept of the literatures of the world offers valuable opportunities to all those who do not fall into the trap of contenting themselves with a supposed abundance of text.
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 Cápac. 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?
Writing-between-worlds
(2016)