[Rezension von: Darwin’s bards
: British and American poetry in the age of evolution]
Some thoughts on the spatial forms and practices of storytelling
Abstract: Our notions of space and place are deeply invested with narrative – to the degree that one can think of storytelling as a spatial form and practice. Critical engagements with space and place have bypassed these investments so far since...
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Abstract: Our notions of space and place are deeply invested with narrative – to the degree that one can think of storytelling as a spatial form and practice. Critical engagements with space and place have bypassed these investments so far since narrative is firmly associated with matters of time whereas space, commonly perceived as the stable backdrop to history’s transformative operations, is yet to be emancipated from the dominance of time. Parallel to reconstructing space in ways that bring out its own productivity, narratologists have been reassessing narrative’s vastly neglected relation to space. This essay zooms in on two venues of this work: on general recalibrations of the relation of space and narrative, and on the spatial metaphors evoked and employed by it. Linking these reassessments of narrative spatiality to on-going revisions of representational narrativity, I hope to show how these parallel strands of critical rethinking can deepen our understanding of both space and narrative – if they are brought to converge
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Verluste verzeichnen
: zum poetischen Prinzip der Liste in der Gegenwartsliteratur = Inventoring losses : on the poetic principle of lists in contemporary literature
Abstract: Taking my cue from Judith Schalanskys 2018 work Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, I discuss the striking presence of lists and list-like, enumerative structures in contemporary literature. As a poetic principle, the use of lists and...
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Abstract: Taking my cue from Judith Schalanskys 2018 work Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, I discuss the striking presence of lists and list-like, enumerative structures in contemporary literature. As a poetic principle, the use of lists and enumerations becomes a means of defamiliarizing the mundane and familiar, and at the same time also shows a preoccupation with existential issues
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Permeable boundaries: Daniel Defoe’s "A journal of the plague year" (1722) and Jurij M. Lotman’s semiosphere
Abstract: This article argues that the cultural semiotic model of the “semiosphere” by Lotman (Lotman, Grishakova and Clark 2009) can be productively employed to interpret the complex layers of social order and liminal sociality in Daniel Defoe’s A...
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Abstract: This article argues that the cultural semiotic model of the “semiosphere” by Lotman (Lotman, Grishakova and Clark 2009) can be productively employed to interpret the complex layers of social order and liminal sociality in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Defoe’s text, analysed with a cultural semiotic approach, appears as more than a shocking re-narration of a historical event, as it becomes possible to read this proto-novel as a text that showcases and makes experiential the entanglement of social breakdown and social needs. London during the plague is shown as a space that labours to enforce both discursive as well as physical borders, but fails in both instances: The lively media public which Defoe depicts for the mid-17th century is shown as failing to establish boundaries of ‘facts’ and ‘fake news’, while single human beings constantly defy the shutting orders of the authorities, or flee the city illegally. In the semiosphere of a London constituted by a state of exception, Defoe strategically inserts permeable boundaries to show a survival of conviviality in the face of the breakdown of society. The main topoi of Lotman’s cultural semiotic model – explosion and periphery – illustrate both the discursive disorientation during the plague as well as the spatial peripheries of the city as sites of liminal social survival in the face of catastrophe
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[Rezension von: Christoph Reinfandt (ed.): Handbook of the English novel of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries]
= Christoph Reinfandt (ed.). 2017. "Handbook of the English novel of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries". Handbooks of English and American studies 5. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, ix + 604 pp., € 199.95/£ 182.00/$ 229.99
Critical notes on Servius’ commentary on Virgil (Serv. on Aen. 11.741; ECL. 2.58; ECL. 4.4)
Abstract: This article discusses three textual problems in Servius’ commentary on Virgil (Serv. on Aen. 11.741; Ecl. 2.58; Ecl. 4.4). In two notes a new conjecture is proposed; in one passage a transmitted reading, so far neglected by earlier...
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Abstract: This article discusses three textual problems in Servius’ commentary on Virgil (Serv. on Aen. 11.741; Ecl. 2.58; Ecl. 4.4). In two notes a new conjecture is proposed; in one passage a transmitted reading, so far neglected by earlier editors, is supported
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