Critical Studies – serie

The contributors to this volume share the assumption that popular narrative, when viewed with an evolutionary lens, offers an incisive index into human nature. In theory, narrative art could take a near infinity of possible forms. In actual practice, however, particular motifs, plot patterns, stereotypical figures, and artistic devices persistently resurface, indicating specific predilections frequently at odds with our actual living conditions. Our studies explore various media and genres to gauge the impact of our evolutionary inheritance, in interdependence with the respective cultural environments, on our aesthetic appreciation. As they suggest, research into mass culture is not only indispensable for evolutionary criticism but may also contribute to our understanding of prehistoric selection pressures that still influence modern preferences in popular narrative.Contributions by David Andrews, James Carney, Mathias Clasen, Brett Cooke, Tamás Dávid-Barrett, Tom Dolack, Kathryn Duncan, Isabel Behncke Izquierdo, Joe Keener, Alex C. Parrish, Todd K. Platts, Anna Rotkirch, Judith P. Saunders, Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, Dirk Vanderbeke, and Sophia Wege.

The Culture of Boredom is a collection of essays by well-known specialists reflecting from philosophical, literary, and artistic perspectives, in which the reader will learn how different disciplines can throw light on such an appealing, challenging, yet still not fully understood, phenomenon. The goal is to clarify the background of boredom, and to explore its representation through forgotten cross-cutting narratives beyond the typical approaches, i.e. those of psychology or psychiatry. For the first time this experienced group of scholars gathers to promote a cross-border dialogue from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Refresh the Book contains reflections on the multimodal nature of the book, focusing on its changing perception, functions, forms, and potential in the digital age. Offering an overview of key concepts and approaches, such as liberature, technotexts, and bookishness, this volume of essays addresses the specificity of the printed book as a complex cultural phenomenon. It discusses diverse forms of representation and expression, both in literary and non-literary texts, as well as in artist’s books. Of special interest are these aspects of the book which resist remediation into the digital form. Finally, the volume contains an extensive section devoted to artistic practice as research, discussing the book as the synthesis of the arts, and site for performative aesthetic activity.Christin Barbarino, Katarzyna Bazarnik, Christoph Bläsi, Sarah Bodman, Zenon Fajfer, Annette Gilbert, Susanne Gramatzki, Mareike Herbstreit, Viola Hildebrand-Schat, Thomas Hvid Kromann, Monika Jäger, Eva Linhart, Bettina Lockemann, Patrizia Meinert, Bernhard Metz, Sebastian Schmideler, Monika Schmitz-Emans, Christoph Benjamin Schulz, usus (Uta Schneider & Ulrike Stoltz), Anne Thurmann-Jajes, Sakine Weikert, Gabriele Wix

The cultural change denominated as “the new normal” goes far beyond the adaptation to habits like physical distancing, limited person-to-person contact, teleworking, and self-isolation established with the COVID-19 pandemic. A series of significant transformations in human behavior spreads today in societies all around the world: physical intimacy decreases while virtual reality expands and alterity declines while artificial intelligence emerges, leading to structural reconfigurations of sex, relationships, gender awareness, and subjectivity. Sexuality and Eroticism in a Post-pandemic World explores this new cultural atmosphere through twelve interdisciplinary essays questioning global governmentality and challenging the biopolitics of the new normal—the administration of self-control societies so politically correct that repressed desire for otherness only finds a simulation of its satisfaction with the forced abnormality, outrageousness, and violence of mainstream porn—, going from ars erotica to alternative pornography, from online dating to gender fluidity, from LGBTQI+ artivism to sex life cultivation, and more.

The end of the first quarter of the 21st century invites us to revisit what gender means in society and how it has shaped our literal and cultural landscapes. This volume seeks to explore these spaces from interdisciplinary perspectives.The contributions span both “highbrow” art and popular culture, mapping interactions between gender and landscape as represented through numerous media. From urban to wild landscapes, distant planets, but also discursive practices, gendered domesticity, and the landscape of the body, the reader is invited to reflect on gender as a ubiquitous cultural marker.While contributing to the growing body of work on gender, media, and landscape, the volume lays out a new groundwork for developments in interdisciplinary studies on gender and its possible futures.

Replacement is always dramatic. How does one thing or person appearing in the place of another – the second baby, the new lover, the maternity cover or ‘surrogate’ mother – constitute a threat to the earlier occupant of that place? Or is the superseding figure haunted by the one for whom they substitute? What happens psychologically or socially to the pair-structure which is thus up-ended? Whom do we blame, whom do we hate, when we find ourselves in this drama? What do we want when we imagine ourselves to be irreplaceable? How might the idea of uniqueness lead to an unstoppable chain of repetitions?

Music, Popular Culture, Identities is a collection of sixteen essays that will appeal to a wide range of readers with interests in popular culture and music, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology. Organized around the central theme of music as an expression of local, ethnic, social and other identities, the essays touch upon popular traditions and contemporary forms from several different regions of the world: political engagement in Italian popular music; flamenco in Spain; the challenge of traditional music in Bulgaria; boerenrock and rap in Holland; Israeli extreme heavy metal; jazz and pop in South Africa, and musical hybridity and politics in Côte d’Ivoire. The collection includes essays about Latin America: on the Mexican corrido, the Caribbean, popular dance music in Cuba, and bossanova from Brazil. Communities of a cultural diaspora in North America are discussed in essays on Somali immigrant and refugee youth and Iranians in exile in the US. Grounded in cultural theory and a specialized knowledge of a particular popular musical practice, each author has written a critical study on the mix of music and identity in a particular social practice and context.

Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities takes a transnational and transcultural approach to exile and its capacities to alter the ways we think about place and identity in the contemporary world. The edited collection brings together researchers on exile in international perspective from three continents who explore questions of exilic identity along multiple geopolitical and cultural axes—Cuba, the USA and Australia; Colombia and the USA; Algeria and France; Italy, France and Mexico; non-Han minorities and Han majorities in China; China, Tibet and India; Japan and China; New Caledonia, Vietnam and France; Hungary, the USSR, and Australia; and Germany, before and after unification. The international and crosscultural span of this collection represents an important addition to the fields of exile criticism and cultural identity studies. Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities will be of interest to readers, scholars and students of exile, diasporic and transmigration studies, international studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, language studies, and comparative literary studies.

The twentieth century saw many revolutions. Various transformations in the political, economic, social, technological and artistic domains not only inaugurated new eras, or at least discourses about new eras; they also often entailed a radical reorientation in the very conceptions by which any revolution could be thought. This beautifully edited collection of essays addresses itself to the particular revolution by which we came to understand the unity of space and time as ontological categories.The twelve papers collected in this volume explore the consequences of conceptions of time and its relationship to space. Although originating from the revolution in mathematics and theoretical physics, these essays extend the thinking of space-time in a multi-disciplinary approach through the philosophy of space and time, social geography, post-Marxian social theory, new network theory, the philosophy of art and culture, musicology, evolutionary biology, historiography, psychoanalytic theory, and comparative literature. The result is a fascinating snapshot of a nearly universal transformation, but one that was only slowly realized, as the debates in one field reverberated across a vast terrain of discourse and discipline. In tracing the varied responses to the developments emanating from theoretical physics, the essays in this volume reveal how discontinuous but profound shifts in knowledge and aesthetics ultimately converge on a radically transformed horizon.Contributors are: Peter Galison, Richard T. W. Arthur, Nader El-Bizri, Chunglin Kwa, Leslie Kavanaugh, Mary Lynne Ellis, Patricia Locke, Sander van Maas, Raviv Ganchrow, Josef Früchtl, M. Christine Boyer, and Antoine Picon.

The human body as cultural object always has and is a performing subject, which binds the political with the theatrical, shows the construction of ethnicity and technology, unveils private and public spaces, transgresses race and gender, and finally becomes a medium that overcomes the borders of art and life. Since there cannot be a universal definition of the human body due to its culturally performative role as a producer of interactive social spaces, this volume discusses body images from diverse cultural, historical, and disciplinary perspectives, such as art history, human kinetics and performance studies. The fourteen case studies reach from Asian to European studies, from 19th century French culture to 20th century German literature, from Polish Holocaust memoirs to contemporary dance performances, from Japanese avant-garde theatre to Makeover Reality TV shows. This volume is of interest for performance studies artists as well. By focusing on the intersection of body and space, all contributions aim to bridge the gap between art practices and theories of performativity. The innovative impulse of this approach lies in the belief that there is no distinction between performing, discussing, and theorizing the human body, and thus fosters a unique transdisciplinary and international collaboration around the theme performative body spaces. (I. Biopolitical Choreographies, II. Transcultural Topographies, III. Corporal Mediations, IV. Controlled Interfaces.)