Gisela Brinker-Gabler – författare

Europe and the United States now confront many of the same unresolved issues of nationalist, religious, racial, and ethnic intolerance. The book addresses the question: How can the humanistic disciplines and social sciences play a role in a political transformation or address cultural difference? This "difference," the other, may be a racial, ethnic, gendered, religious, or colonial Other.Contributors to this book focus on the serious political questions posed by the problems of strangeness, "the other," in the present climate of accelerating social change and global shifts in political power.

Image in Outline introduces the reader to Lou Andreas-Salomé's significant engagement withmodern thought. Through detailed explorations of some of her major texts, Brinker-Gabler examinesAndreas-Salomé's contributions to contemporary discourses on meaning, perception, memory, andthe unconscious. Situating her analyses within Andreas-Salomé's historical, social, and intellectualcontexts, this new reading utilizes a theoretical frame informed by thinkers such as Benjamin, Bergson,and Freud, and current theoretical perspectives by Irigaray, Grosz, and Kristeva. Brinker-Gabler arguesthat Andreas-Salomé - committed as she was to the "double direction" of rigorous thought and individual nuancing - refocused dominant visions of gender, sexuality, culture, religion, and creativity through a female lens. In a "disenchanted world" (Weber), Andreas-Salomé offered an image epistemology or "aesthetics of b(u)ilding," as Brinker-Gabler calls it, that seeks to retrieve the multilayered past embedded in individuals and cultural forms, thus providing positive accounts of sexual and cultural difference, experience, narcissism, and creativity in modern life.

Image in Outline introduces the reader to Lou Andreas-Salomé's significant engagement with modern thought. Through detailed explorations o fsome of her major texts, Brinker-Gabler examines Andreas-Salomé's contributions to contemporar ydiscourses on meaning, perception, memory, and the unconscious. Situating her analyses within Andreas-Salomé's historical, social, and intellectual contexts, this new reading utilizes a theoretical frame informed by thinkers such as Benjamin, Bergson, and Freud, and current theoretical perspectives by Irigaray, Grosz, and Kristeva. Brinker-Gabler argues that Andreas-Salomé — committed as she was to the"double direction" of rigorous thought and individual nuancing — refocused dominant visions of gender, sexuality, culture, religion, and creativity through a female lens. In a "disenchanted world" (Weber), Andreas-Salomé offered an image epistemology or"aesthetics of b(u)ilding," as Brinker-Gabler calls it, that seeks to retrieve the multilayered past embedded in individuals and cultural forms, thus providing positive accounts of sexual and cultural difference,experience, narcissism, and creativity in modern life.

This volume explores the rich, evolving body of contemporary cultural practices that reflect on a European project of diversity, new dynamics between and across cultures in Europe, and its interactions with the world. There have been calls across Europe for both traditional national identities and new forms of identity and community, assertions of regionalized identity and declarations of multiculturalism and multilingualism. These essays respond to this critical moment by analyzing the literature of migration as a (re)writing of European subjects. They ask fundamental questions from a variety of theoretical and critical standpoints: How do migrants write new identities into and against old national (meta)narratives? How do they interrogate constructions of identity? What kinds of literary experiments are emerging in this unstable context, e.g. in the graphic novel and avant-garde film?This collection makes a unique contribution to contemporary European literary studies by taking an interdisciplinary, transnational and comparative perspective, thereby addressing readers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and stimulating new research on the ambitious writing and thinking taking place across the borders of Europe today.