Russell West-Pavlov – författare

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English.This volume offers an overview of contemporary Eastern African writing in English since the mid-twentieth century. It takes a fresh look at what has been an under-represented regional literary tradition within what continues to be an under-represented continental literary tradition. In particular, it broadens the scope of such an overview, complementing the extant monographs on well-known Eastern African writers such as Ngũgĩ to include a host of more recent, less-publicizednovelists, dramatists, and poets. It extends the geographical range of existing studies from the familiar triad of Kenyan, Ugandan, and Tanzanian traditions of writing in English, to include the lesser-known Somali, Ethiopian, or Sudanese, or Mauritian or Madagascan traditions.Rather than simply addressing national traditions or broad thematic bundles, the volume treats works as literatures of a region: that is, as literatures of place and space. Eastern African Literatures stresses the formative role of space, place and geography in fashioning the fabric of social interaction, whether individual or collective, in generating history, in moulding identities, and as a consequence in defining the shape of the future. The ''spatial'' perspectives allow the ''proximate''rather than the ''distant'' influence of literary art to come into view. Proximate modes of literary communication, arising out of residual but vibrant traditions of oral communication, blend with contemporary media to produce hybrid genres of proximity specific to Eastern African literary production. Inthis way, the book also makes a contribution to the ongoing theorization of literary and cultural innovation in the cultures of the Global South.

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English.This volume offers an overview of contemporary Eastern African writing in English since the mid-twentieth century. It takes a fresh look at what has been an under-represented regional literary tradition within what continues to be an under-represented continental literary tradition. In particular, it broadens the scope of such an overview, complementing the extant monographs on well-known Eastern African writers such as Ngũgĩ to include a host of more recent, less-publicized novelists, dramatists, and poets. It extends the geographical range of existing studies from the familiar triad of Kenyan, Ugandan, and Tanzanian traditions of writing in English, to include the lesser-known Somali, Ethiopian, or Sudanese, or Mauritian or Madagascan traditions. Rather than simply addressing national traditions or broad thematic bundles, the volume treats works as literatures of a region: that is, as literatures of place and space. Eastern African Literatures stresses the formative role of space, place and geography in fashioning the fabric of social interaction, whether individual or collective, in generating history, in moulding identities, and as a consequence in defining the shape of the future. The 'spatial' perspectives allow the 'proximate' rather than the 'distant' influence of literary art to come into view. Proximate modes of literary communication, arising out of residual but vibrant traditions of oral communication, blend with contemporary media to produce hybrid genres of proximity specific to Eastern African literary production. In this way, the book also makes a contribution to the ongoing theorization of literary and cultural innovation in the cultures of the Global South.

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English.This volume offers an overview of contemporary Eastern African writing in English since the mid-twentieth century. It takes a fresh look at what has been an under-represented regional literary tradition within what continues to be an under-represented continental literary tradition. In particular, it broadens the scope of such an overview, complementing the extant monographs on well-known Eastern African writers such as Ngũgĩ to include a host of more recent, less-publicized novelists, dramatists, and poets. It extends the geographical range of existing studies from the familiar triad of Kenyan, Ugandan, and Tanzanian traditions of writing in English, to include the lesser-known Somali, Ethiopian, or Sudanese, or Mauritian or Madagascan traditions. Rather than simply addressing national traditions or broad thematic bundles, the volume treats works as literatures of a region: that is, as literatures of place and space. Eastern African Literatures stresses the formative role of space, place and geography in fashioning the fabric of social interaction, whether individual or collective, in generating history, in moulding identities, and as a consequence in defining the shape of the future. The 'spatial' perspectives allow the 'proximate' rather than the 'distant' influence of literary art to come into view. Proximate modes of literary communication, arising out of residual but vibrant traditions of oral communication, blend with contemporary media to produce hybrid genres of proximity specific to Eastern African literary production. In this way, the book also makes a contribution to the ongoing theorization of literary and cultural innovation in the cultures of the Global South.

Temporalities presents a concise critical introduction to the treatment of time throughout literature. Time and its passage represent one of the oldest and most complex philosophical subjects in art of all forms, and Russell West-Pavlov explains and interrogates the most important theories of temporality across a range of disciplines. The author explores temporality's relationship with a diverse range of related concepts, including:historiographypsychologygendereconomicspostmodernismpostcolonialismRussell West-Pavlov examines time as a crucial part of the critical theories of Newton, Freud, Ricoeur, Benjamin, and explores the treatment of time in a broad range of texts, ranging from the writings of St. Augustine and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.This comprehensive and accessible guide establishes temporality as an essential theme within literary and cultural studies today.

Temporalities presents a concise critical introduction to the treatment of time throughout literature. Time and its passage represent one of the oldest and most complex philosophical subjects in art of all forms, and Russell West-Pavlov explains and interrogates the most important theories of temporality across a range of disciplines. The author explores temporality's relationship with a diverse range of related concepts, including:historiographypsychologygendereconomicspostmodernismpostcolonialismRussell West-Pavlov examines time as a crucial part of the critical theories of Newton, Freud, Ricoeur, Benjamin, and explores the treatment of time in a broad range of texts, ranging from the writings of St. Augustine and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.This comprehensive and accessible guide establishes temporality as an essential theme within literary and cultural studies today.

This collection of essays explores medieval and early modern Troilus-texts from Chaucer to Shakespeare. The contributions show how medieval and early modern fictions of Troy use love and other emotions as a means of approaching the problem of tradition. As these texts reflect on their own traditionality, they highlight both the affective nature of temporality and the role of affect in scrutinising tradition itself. Focusing on a specific textual lineage that bridges the conventional period boundaries, the collection participates in an exchange between medievalists and early modernists that seeks to generate a dialogic encounter between the periods with the aim of further dismantling the rigid notions of chronology and periodisation that have kept medieval and early modern scholarship apart.

This book explores how African fiction offers revolutionary models for understanding temporality and reimagining history in our catastrophe-ridden twenty-first century. Examining eight works from diverse African writers - ranging from Achebe's classic Things Fall Apart, via works by Coetzee and Dangarembga, to contemporary novels by Makumbi, Mengiste, Mujila, Owuor and Serpell - the book demonstrates how these authors eschew linear Eurocentric historicism in favour of bold, immediate confrontations with history in the making and its temporal fabric. Drawing from fiction across Africa, the book proposes a composite theory of 'proximate historiographies' encompassing the entangled, plaited, expansive, interpellative, somatic and kinetic temporalities that emerge from these pathbreaking works. Taken together, they reveal Africa as a laboratory of futurity rather than a place outside history. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of African literature, postcolonial studies and contemporary fiction. It will also appeal to those working in environmental humanities, decolonial theory and innovative approaches to historiography.

This book explores how African fiction offers revolutionary models for understanding temporality and reimagining history in our catastrophe-ridden twenty-first century. Examining eight works from diverse African writers - ranging from Achebe's classic Things Fall Apart, via works by Coetzee and Dangarembga, to contemporary novels by Makumbi, Mengiste, Mujila, Owuor and Serpell - the book demonstrates how these authors eschew linear Eurocentric historicism in favour of bold, immediate confrontations with history in the making and its temporal fabric. Drawing from fiction across Africa, the book proposes a composite theory of 'proximate historiographies' encompassing the entangled, plaited, expansive, interpellative, somatic and kinetic temporalities that emerge from these pathbreaking works. Taken together, they reveal Africa as a laboratory of futurity rather than a place outside history. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of African literature, postcolonial studies and contemporary fiction. It will also appeal to those working in environmental humanities, decolonial theory and innovative approaches to historiography.

This book explores how African fiction offers revolutionary models for understanding temporality and reimagining history in our catastrophe-ridden twenty-first century. Examining eight works from diverse African writers – ranging from Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart, via works by Coetzee and Dangarembga, to contemporary novels by Makumbi, Mengiste, Mujila, Owuor and Serpell – the book demonstrates how these authors eschew linear Eurocentric historicism in favour of bold, immediate confrontations with history in the making and its temporal fabric. Drawing from fiction across Africa, the book proposes a composite theory of ‘proximate historiographies’ encompassing the entangled, plaited, expansive, interpellative, somatic and kinetic temporalities that emerge from these pathbreaking works. Taken together, they reveal Africa as a laboratory of futurity rather than a place outside history. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of African literature, postcolonial studies and contemporary fiction. It will also appeal to those working in environmental humanities, decolonial theory and innovative approaches to historiography.

This book explores how African fiction offers revolutionary models for understanding temporality and reimagining history in our catastrophe-ridden twenty-first century. Examining eight works from diverse African writers – ranging from Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart, via works by Coetzee and Dangarembga, to contemporary novels by Makumbi, Mengiste, Mujila, Owuor and Serpell – the book demonstrates how these authors eschew linear Eurocentric historicism in favour of bold, immediate confrontations with history in the making and its temporal fabric. Drawing from fiction across Africa, the book proposes a composite theory of ‘proximate historiographies’ encompassing the entangled, plaited, expansive, interpellative, somatic and kinetic temporalities that emerge from these pathbreaking works. Taken together, they reveal Africa as a laboratory of futurity rather than a place outside history. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of African literature, postcolonial studies and contemporary fiction. It will also appeal to those working in environmental humanities, decolonial theory and innovative approaches to historiography.

The ''Global South'' has largely supplanted the ''Third World'' in discussions of development studies, postcolonial studies, world literature and comparative literature respectively. The concept registers a new set of relationships between nations of the once colonized world as their connections to nations of the North diminish in significance. Such relationships register particularly clearly in contemporary cultural theory and literary production. The Global South and Literature explores the historical, cultural and literary applications of the term for twenty-first-century flows of transnational cultural influence, tracing their manifestations across the Global Southern traditions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This collection of interdisciplinary contributions examines the origins, development and applications of this emergent term, employed at the nexus of the critical social sciences and developments in literary humanities and cultural studies. This book will be a key resource for students, graduates and researchers working in the field of postcolonial studies and world literature.

The ''Global South'' has largely supplanted the ''Third World'' in discussions of development studies, postcolonial studies, world literature and comparative literature respectively. The concept registers a new set of relationships between nations of the once colonized world as their connections to nations of the North diminish in significance. Such relationships register particularly clearly in contemporary cultural theory and literary production. The Global South and Literature explores the historical, cultural and literary applications of the term for twenty-first-century flows of transnational cultural influence, tracing their manifestations across the Global Southern traditions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This collection of interdisciplinary contributions examines the origins, development and applications of this emergent term, employed at the nexus of the critical social sciences and developments in literary humanities and cultural studies. This book will be a key resource for students, graduates and researchers working in the field of postcolonial studies and world literature.

The 'Global South' has largely supplanted the 'Third World' in discussions of development studies, postcolonial studies, world literature and comparative literature respectively. The concept registers a new set of relationships between nations of the once colonized world as their connections to nations of the North diminish in significance. Such relationships register particularly clearly in contemporary cultural theory and literary production. The Global South and Literature explores the historical, cultural and literary applications of the term for twenty-first-century flows of transnational cultural influence, tracing their manifestations across the Global Southern traditions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This collection of interdisciplinary contributions examines the origins, development and applications of this emergent term, employed at the nexus of the critical social sciences and developments in literary humanities and cultural studies. This book will be a key resource for students, graduates and researchers working in the field of postcolonial studies and world literature.

The 'Global South' has largely supplanted the 'Third World' in discussions of development studies, postcolonial studies, world literature and comparative literature respectively. The concept registers a new set of relationships between nations of the once colonized world as their connections to nations of the North diminish in significance. Such relationships register particularly clearly in contemporary cultural theory and literary production. The Global South and Literature explores the historical, cultural and literary applications of the term for twenty-first-century flows of transnational cultural influence, tracing their manifestations across the Global Southern traditions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This collection of interdisciplinary contributions examines the origins, development and applications of this emergent term, employed at the nexus of the critical social sciences and developments in literary humanities and cultural studies. This book will be a key resource for students, graduates and researchers working in the field of postcolonial studies and world literature.

Temporalities presents a concise critical introduction to the treatment of time throughout literature. Time and its passage represent one of the oldest and most complex philosophical subjects in art of all forms, and Russell West-Pavlov explains and interrogates the most important theories of temporality across a range of disciplines.

The author explores temporality''s relationship with a diverse range of related concepts, including:

historiography psychology gender economics postmodernism postcolonialism

Russell West-Pavlov examines time as a crucial part of the critical theories of Newton, Freud, Ricoeur, Benjamin, and explores the treatment of time in a broad range of texts, ranging from the writings of St. Augustine and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

This comprehensive and accessible guide establishes temporality as an essential theme within literary and cultural studies today.

Temporalities presents a concise critical introduction to the treatment of time throughout literature. Time and its passage represent one of the oldest and most complex philosophical subjects in art of all forms, and Russell West-Pavlov explains and interrogates the most important theories of temporality across a range of disciplines.

The author explores temporality''s relationship with a diverse range of related concepts, including:

historiography psychology gender economics postmodernism postcolonialism

Russell West-Pavlov examines time as a crucial part of the critical theories of Newton, Freud, Ricoeur, Benjamin, and explores the treatment of time in a broad range of texts, ranging from the writings of St. Augustine and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

This comprehensive and accessible guide establishes temporality as an essential theme within literary and cultural studies today.

Contestatory and Creative Poetics for a Time of Climate Catastrophe: Volume 1: Per Se is an extended narrative meditation upon the meaning of per se, which generally denotes the thing-in-itself, for its own sake – but that, upon closer examination, transpires to be a high tensile composite of the ‘thing’ (se) and a relationship (per) that always links it to something else – and indeed, in relations of internal complexity, to itself. Per se, in the book’s multiple parsings of the term, is a moniker for the infinite relationality of the world and the relationality of each thing in itself. Per se also denotes the endless fractal embedding of bundles of relationality at the successive levels of thing-ness from the infinitesimally minute nano-scale to the unimaginably distant outer reaches of the sideral. Per se becomes an exploration of the way commodities, cut loose from their context of production and floating on sea of oscillating (exchange) values, never cease to morph back into artefacts defined by the socially intensive use-values their fellow actants discover in them.The book thus focalises a politicised effort to revision the rampant multiscalar individualism, solipsism and apartheid-like segregation of our age. Instead, it searches for possibilities or community in every aspect of the world we have learnt to see through a relentlessly atomising and hypostatising filter. The volume claims that every act of perception is political, reestablishing obfuscated connections, thereby seeking to repair the shredded fabric of the ecosphere below the threshold of myopic common-sense. Yet it also celebrates the myriad acts of citizen defiance, visible and invisible, that constitute activist agendas around the world, sending signals – both practical and exemplary, symbolic and literary – that shore up communities of resistance everywhere. The book does not hesitate to interrogate the fractal responsiveness to its own nature, meditating repeatedly on the political character of writing, and more significantly, of the teaching of writing.Central to its concerns are various avatars of trees, from the pirogue that hangs above a bar in Lille, and one that is crafted as part of an Italian artist’s global collaboration on the periphery of this volume’s emergence, via the jacarandas of post-apartheid South Africa, to a wood-chipped pine forest that has become a memorial library in Oslo – to name only a few of the topics taken up by the book’s many silvan micro-fictions. Looming over all these concerns are two contemporary silvan catastrophes: the megablazes that destroyed forests in Amazonia, Australia, California, Siberia and the Mediterranean during the period when the book was being written and the deforestation that has allowed zoogenic diseases to jump from once secluded animal species to the humans that would never have been their neighbours if naturally occurring forest-barriers had been left intact.

This book seeks to elaborate a theory of ''troping'' that expands thepurview of linguistic work and agency, parsing its transformative work beyond the limits usually set by theories of language. It registers a sea-change in the theorization of theatrical art from representation to intervention. The book thereby seeks to lay bare the activity of language as a heterotropology. It focuses on early modern theatre from Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida) and other theatrical forms of the same era (the Court Masque, dramas by Ford or Johnson) through to the Restoration; it also reads a number of contemporary avatars of Shakespearean texts from Stoppard to Jones, and of early modern and postmodern performance spaces such as the New Globe Theatre. In a dozen readings of early modern theatre it asks how the remarkable energy and social purchase ascribed to theatrical language by contemporary commentators can be reconceptualized, mobilized anew and thus harnessed for our own turbulent times.

This book seeks to elaborate a theory of ''troping'' that expands thepurview of linguistic work and agency, parsing its transformative work beyond the limits usually set by theories of language. It registers a sea-change in the theorization of theatrical art from representation to intervention. The book thereby seeks to lay bare the activity of language as a heterotropology. It focuses on early modern theatre from Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida) and other theatrical forms of the same era (the Court Masque, dramas by Ford or Johnson) through to the Restoration; it also reads a number of contemporary avatars of Shakespearean texts from Stoppard to Jones, and of early modern and postmodern performance spaces such as the New Globe Theatre. In a dozen readings of early modern theatre it asks how the remarkable energy and social purchase ascribed to theatrical language by contemporary commentators can be reconceptualized, mobilized anew and thus harnessed for our own turbulent times.

In einem Zeitalter zahlreicher globaler Umbrüche destabilisieren klimatische, politische und finanzielle Krisen und die daraus resultierenden Kriege und Konflikte gesellschaftliche Strukturen und kulturelle Wertemuster weltweit. Unter diesen Umständen müssen sich die Literaturwissenschaften kritischen Fragen stellen: Welche Relevanz haben philologische, historische und kontextuelle Forschungsprojekte im Licht einer krisengeschüttelten Gegenwart und einer unsicheren Zukunft? Welche Rolle kann Literatur, kann die Vermittlung literaturwissenschaftlicher Techniken im Rahmen bildungspolitischer Systeme spielen, die ökonomisch nutzbare Ergebnisse als Hauptlegitimationskriterium von Bildung betrachten? Welche ethischen und politischen Imperative müssen zwingend neu formuliert werden und welche Rolle spielen die Literaturwissenschaften dabei? In ihren Beiträgen setzen sich Literatur-, Medien- und Kulturwissenschaftler mit ihrer eigenen literaturwissenschaftlichen Praxis und der Bedeutung ihres Faches in den und für die aktuellen Krisensituationen auseinander und versuchen eine Neueinordnung der gesellschaftlichen Rolle und Relevanz der Literaturwissenschaften über Fach- und Landesgrenzen hinaus.

Temporariness is a scandal in our culture of monumentalism and its persistent search for permanence. Temporariness, the time of the ephemeral and the performative, the time of speech, the time of nature and its constant changesthese times have little cultural purchase. In this volume two practitioners and theoreticians of time, space and the word embrace the notion of temporarinessseeing in it a site for a renewal of ways of thinking about ourselves, our language, our society and our environment. This collage of fragmentary genres approaches the notion of mitigated presence to build an atlas of intersections attentive to our own temporariness as the site of aesthetic and ethical responsibility.This book is a scintillating meditation on the temporality of human lives and the contemporary possibilities of humanistic writing. John Kinsella and Russell West-Pavlov explore the conjunctions of memoir, theory, poetry, anecdotes, journal entries and other fragmentary forms in their conversations about the political realities of the world and the imperatives of human survival. They write across hemispheres, they interanimate the specific experience of place and history in Germany, Ireland, Western Australia, the Adriatic coast, Africa, New England. ''t?mp(?)r?r?n?s is the chance collaboration of two writers and intellectuals that could never have come into existence before it did and that can never be repeated. Philip Mead, University of Melbourne

This book suggests that linguistic translation is one minute province of an immense process of creative activity that constitutes the world as an ongoing dynamism of unceasing transformation. Building upon the speculative quantum gravity theory, which provides a narrative of the push-pull dynamics of transformative translation from the very smallest scales of reality to the very greatest, this book argues that the so-called translative turn of the 1990s was correct in positing translation as a paradigmatic concept of transformation. More radically, the book stages a provocative provincialization of linguistic translation, so that literary translation in particular is shown to display a remarkable awareness of its own participation in a larger creative contact zone. As a result, the German language, literary translations in and out of German, and the German-language classroom, can be understood respectively as quantum contact zones.Russell West-Pavlov is Professor of Anglophone Literatures at the University of Tübingen and Research Associate at the University of Pretoria.

Die aktuelle Flüchtlingsdebatte fordert die Wissenschaft zu einem intensiven gesellschaftlichen Dialog auf. Wie können wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse in die Praxis öffentlicher Räume überführt werden? Wie ist mit der veränderten Lage an Schulen umzugehen? Welche Bildungskonzepte erfordert die kulturelle Vielfalt? Und was für eine Schlüsselrolle kann hierbei der Literatur zukommen? Der vorliegende Band nimmt sich dieser und weiterer Fragen interdisziplinär an, indem er sowohl Forscher als auch Flüchtlingshelfer unterschiedlicher Kontexte zu Wort kommen lässt.

2004 jährte sich zum hundertsten Mal der Ausbruch des Deutsch-Namibischen Krieges (1904–1908) im damaligen Deutsch-Südwestafrika, der im Genozid an den Herero- bzw. Nama-Völkern gipfelte. Der Versöhnungsprozess findet langsam und vor allem durch symbolische Gesten statt, während formelle Verhandlungen nur schleppend vorankommen. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Aufarbeitung des Völkermords an Herero und Nama in der jüngsten deutschsprachigen Belletristik. Sie betrachtet eine Reihe deutschsprachiger Romane von Timms ''Morenga'' (1978) bis Jaumanns ''Der lange Schatten'' (2015) nicht nur im Rahmen diskursgeschichtlicher bzw. ideologiekritischer Debatten, sondern analysiert sie außerdem mithilfe der Affekttheorie. Dieser Ansatz erlaubt es zu beschreiben, wie literarische Texte mannigfaltige Rituale und Symboliken mit affektiver Reichweite über zeitliche und kulturelle Grenzen hinweg in die Gegenwart tragen und so zum dringend notwendigen interkulturellen Dialog und zur längst überfälligen Versöhnung beitragen können.

This book suggests that linguistic translation is one minute province of an immense process of creative activity that constitutes the world as an ongoing dynamism of unceasing transformation. Building upon the speculative quantum gravity theory, which provides a narrative of the push-pull dynamics of transformative translation from the very smallest scales of reality to the very greatest, this book argues that the so-called translative turn of the 1990s was correct in positing translation as a paradigmatic concept of transformation. More radically, the book stages a provocative provincialization of linguistic translation, so that literary translation in particular is shown to display a remarkable awareness of its own participation in a larger creative contact zone. As a result, the German language, literary translations in and out of German, and the German-language classroom, can be understood respectively as quantum contact zones.Russell West-Pavlov is Professor of Anglophone Literatures at the University of Tübingen and Research Associate at the University of Pretoria.

Die aktuelle Flüchtlingsdebatte fordert die Wissenschaft zu einem intensiven gesellschaftlichen Dialog auf. Wie können wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse in die Praxis öffentlicher Räume überführt werden? Wie ist mit der veränderten Lage an Schulen umzugehen? Welche Bildungskonzepte erfordert die kulturelle Vielfalt? Und was für eine Schlüsselrolle kann hierbei der Literatur zukommen? Der vorliegende Band nimmt sich dieser und weiterer Fragen interdisziplinär an, indem er sowohl Forscher als auch Flüchtlingshelfer unterschiedlicher Kontexte zu Wort kommen lässt.

In einem Zeitalter zahlreicher globaler Umbrüche destabilisieren klimatische, politische und finanzielle Krisen und die daraus resultierenden Kriege und Konflikte gesellschaftliche Strukturen und kulturelle Wertemuster weltweit. Unter diesen Umständen müssen sich die Literaturwissenschaften kritischen Fragen stellen: Welche Relevanz haben philologische, historische und kontextuelle Forschungsprojekte im Licht einer krisengeschüttelten Gegenwart und einer unsicheren Zukunft? Welche Rolle kann Literatur, kann die Vermittlung literaturwissenschaftlicher Techniken im Rahmen bildungspolitischer Systeme spielen, die ökonomisch nutzbare Ergebnisse als Hauptlegitimationskriterium von Bildung betrachten? Welche ethischen und politischen Imperative müssen zwingend neu formuliert werden und welche Rolle spielen die Literaturwissenschaften dabei? In ihren Beiträgen setzen sich Literatur-, Medien- und Kulturwissenschaftler mit ihrer eigenen literaturwissenschaftlichen Praxis und der Bedeutung ihres Faches in den und für die aktuellen Krisensituationen auseinander und versuchen eine Neueinordnung der gesellschaftlichen Rolle und Relevanz der Literaturwissenschaften über Fach- und Landesgrenzen hinaus.

Temporariness is a scandal in our culture of monumentalism and its persistent search for permanence. Temporariness, the time of the ephemeral and the performative, the time of speech, the time of nature and its constant changesthese times have little cultural purchase. In this volume two practitioners and theoreticians of time, space and the word embrace the notion of temporarinessseeing in it a site for a renewal of ways of thinking about ourselves, our language, our society and our environment. This collage of fragmentary genres approaches the notion of mitigated presence to build an atlas of intersections attentive to our own temporariness as the site of aesthetic and ethical responsibility.This book is a scintillating meditation on the temporality of human lives and the contemporary possibilities of humanistic writing. John Kinsella and Russell West-Pavlov explore the conjunctions of memoir, theory, poetry, anecdotes, journal entries and other fragmentary forms in their conversations about the political realities of the world and the imperatives of human survival. They write across hemispheres, they interanimate the specific experience of place and history in Germany, Ireland, Western Australia, the Adriatic coast, Africa, New England. ''t?mp(?)r?r?n?s is the chance collaboration of two writers and intellectuals that could never have come into existence before it did and that can never be repeated. Philip Mead, University of Melbourne

2004 jährte sich zum hundertsten Mal der Ausbruch des Deutsch-Namibischen Krieges (1904–1908) im damaligen Deutsch-Südwestafrika, der im Genozid an den Herero- bzw. Nama-Völkern gipfelte. Der Versöhnungsprozess findet langsam und vor allem durch symbolische Gesten statt, während formelle Verhandlungen nur schleppend vorankommen. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Aufarbeitung des Völkermords an Herero und Nama in der jüngsten deutschsprachigen Belletristik. Sie betrachtet eine Reihe deutschsprachiger Romane von Timms ''Morenga'' (1978) bis Jaumanns ''Der lange Schatten'' (2015) nicht nur im Rahmen diskursgeschichtlicher bzw. ideologiekritischer Debatten, sondern analysiert sie außerdem mithilfe der Affekttheorie. Dieser Ansatz erlaubt es zu beschreiben, wie literarische Texte mannigfaltige Rituale und Symboliken mit affektiver Reichweite über zeitliche und kulturelle Grenzen hinweg in die Gegenwart tragen und so zum dringend notwendigen interkulturellen Dialog und zur längst überfälligen Versöhnung beitragen können.