Bücher veröffentlicht von Verlag Peter Lang

This book takes as its terrain the changing perceptions of evil across centuries of English Literature. Starting with the models of conflict and malevolence in the Book of Genesis, its paths are the themes of ambition, desire, survival, belief and knowledge, from the Middle Ages to the present day. As if looking through both ends of a telescope, it moves forward in time, propelled by what has been left behind and by our knowledge of what will follow. Because the cinema is so vibrant an archive of shifting images of ourselves, selected films are viewed alongside the narrative fiction, drama and poetry of each chapter. Throughout the book, résumés and quotations bring as-yet-unread writings into the same line of vision as all the others. Exploring Evil confronts the diversity of evils reflected in literary depictions of human behaviour and finds two constant elements: the abuse of free will and a denial of the humanity of others. The author argues that, however much its forms and objectives may change, the supremacy of evil in the life of the imagination remains unassailable.

This is a study of the sociopolitical role of the belief in chen prophecy in early medieval China. The chen prophecies discussed in this work are not confined to the traditional prophetic-apocryphal texts. Many contemporary prophecies emerged and circulated in association with current events; personal names, reign titles, poems, folk and children¿s rhymes, even rumor-rhymes were recognized as heavenly revelations. Although prophetic utterances were used as psychological weapons in politics, it would be wrong to regard chen prophecy as simply political propaganda. Chen prophecies were believed to be genuine prophetic messages at the time. Chen prophecy was an indispensable part of a symbolic ritual of legitimation of mandate-transfer. It was recognized as a coded revelation that derived its prophetic power from the primitive belief in the magic power of words. The emphasis on winning public acceptance may have been another source of its prophetic power. Social integration, legitimation of dynastic change, and the hopes for a better future in an age of tumult thus depended on the belief in the interaction between Heaven¿s mandate and man¿s destiny.

The concept of kenosis plays a prominent part in the ¿return to religion¿ of the last decade. It comes up again and again in philosophical, ethical, and theological discussions. This book assembles a variety of contributions. Important points of reference are the notion of kenosis as it is traditionally discussed in theology and as it is applied in radical hermeneutics, particularly by Gianni Vattimo. Vattimös hermeneutic philosophy deals with theological (kenosis as God¿s incarnation), philosophical (the postmodern weakening of central philosophical notions) and the ethical (kenosis as an ethical ideal) aspects of kenosis. This collection of essays focuses on two topics: how to read ¿kenosis¿ and how to value Vattimös thoughts about kenosis.

The book adopts a crosslinguistic and crosscultural approach to narrative analysis. Concepts of narrative are explored through a contrastive study of its expressions in English and Chinese and through a comparison of the contexts of production. Narratives written by Grade 5/6 students were collected from primary schools in Sydney and in Hong Kong. Their structural, ideational and stylistic characteristics were contrasted within a synthesized framework of Western and Chinese narrative traditions, the Labovian model, Halliday¿s systemic functional grammar, critical discourse analysis and genre theory. The socio-cultural context was analyzed by examining curriculum documents and by investigating teachers¿ beliefs and teaching practices through surveys, interviews and observations. The book shows that the meaning of narrative has to be interpreted within a suprastructure which embodies the expectations, norms, and values of a specific culture. It is a powerful statement of how schools as social and cultural institutions mediate the production of narrative texts and transmit larger cultural values through specific practices. The study makes a substantial contribution to the field for its combination of empirical detail and theoretical breadth, and for its demonstration of how textual and linguistic structures arise from, and make sense within, divergent social and institutional contexts.

Polemical stupidity ¿ a critical concept drawn from Bakhtin ¿ denotes the strategic refusal to understand. It appears most familiarly in the character of the Fool (like Candide), who genuinely does not understand the world, thus unmasking its incoherence. But in literature it can cover too the stance of the narrator or author (who pretends to misunderstand). It also functions at the levels of genre and style, embracing parody and rewriting in general. It is a dialogic or open form of critical engagement. Though it can be found throughout Western literature, polemical stupidity is most richly characteristic of the writing of the French Enlightenment. This book suggests why, and traces its rise and fall as a discursive practice in the century from Pascal to Rousseau. Early chapters consider the concept itself, its emergence in Pascal¿s Lettres provinciales, worldliness and unworldliness, and the new writing of 1660-1700 (critical history to fairy tales). The main part of the book, on the age of Enlightenment itself, contains successive chapters on Regency theatre, Montesquieüs Lettres persanes, Marivaux, Voltaire, Diderot, and finally Rousseau who will not play.

One of the most remarkable features of Diderot¿s work is the refusal of closure in a large number of his texts which appears to leave philosophical, aesthetic or even narrative issues unresolved, and consequently invites a more active participation from the reader than more conventional works. Since it is in the nature of critical discourse to wish to answer questions, this aspect of the works has remained relatively unexplored, with some critics even choosing to ignore the questions asked by the endings in their efforts to give a specific and unambiguous meaning to texts that, in reality, seek to blur their meaning or even to avoid having one. This study addresses the problems posed by Diderot¿s endings directly, seeking through them to illuminate readings of the works as a whole. Hence it looks not just at the endings, but at what the endings can tell us about the complete texts, and how they are characteristic (or not) of the rest of the works.

Queneaüs novels are extremely popular for their wit and linguistic ingenuity but they also pose a serious challenge to the reader¿s reconstruction of the fictional world, which can often go unrecognised. This study takes us back to the fundamental elements of Queneaüs worlds, demonstrating how his idiosyncratic style can affect the reader¿s mental processing of the text (¿world-building¿). It also demonstrates the internal organisation of Queneaüs fictional worlds. Drawing on cognitive discourse models and the philosophical notion of ¿possible worlds¿, the book provides both comparative and general analysis of Queneaüs novels and case studies of Le Vol d¿Icare, Les Fleurs bleues, and Loin de Rueil, exposing the resistance that these worlds present to stable cognitive reconstruction, notably through the subversion of world boundaries (¿world-play¿), and the positing of impossible spaces (¿heterotopiae¿).

This volume presents a selection of essays in English and French initially delivered at the interdisciplinary conference of the Association of Modern and Contemporary France held in Leicester in September 2000. Frontiers are defined broadly in terms of material and symbolic inter- and transnational spaces where French and Francophone artists, communities and nations face their own selves and each other. Contributors reflect on the relationships between various cross-boundary contacts and perceptions of identity, power and marginality.

A series of intertextual short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, published in 1972, constitutes the subject-matter of the present work. Having entered into ¿literary marriages¿ with beloved masters, such as Kafka, Joyce, Thoreau, Flaubert, James and Chekhov, Oates has ¿re-imagined¿ their classic masterpieces. This study aims at finding out whether Oates remains ¿faithful¿ to the original versions. What elements besides the titles are retained, or added? Why does a young American woman writer undertake a dialogue with deceased authors and their texts? Why the short story genre? What is Oates¿s relationship to intertextuality, literary tradition, or the very aesthetics of her own art? Grounded in theories of intertextuality, comparative analyses show that Oates remains ¿faithful¿ in some of her spiritual unions, while committing ¿infidelities¿ in others. For a woman writer in the 1970s transgression was a necessity for survival; these stories thus belong to the revisionary movement. While assimilating and engendering a strongly Eurocentred male literary tradition, Oates manages to unlock energy from the original stories transforming them into expressions of her very own distinct literary voice.

Refugee research and debate have focused on international agreements, border controls and the legal status of asylum seekers. The lived, daily life of refugees in different phases of their flight has thus been unduly neglected. How have refugees experienced policies of reception and resettlement, and how have they individually and collectively built up their own cultures of exile? To answer these questions the author of this study has undertaken long-term fieldwork as a community worker in a Norwegian municipality. Refugees from Chile, Iran, Somalia, Bosnia and Vietnam were on occasions subjected to exclusionary and discriminatory practices. Nevertheless, restistance was seen in the form of a Somali women¿s sewing circle, the organisation of a multi-cultural youth club, running refugee associations and printing their own language newspapers. Moreover, in activities such as these, refugees addressed and came to terms with a limited number of shared existential concerns: morality, violence, sexuality, family reunion, belonging and not belonging to a second generation. Drawing upon these experiences a general theory of refugeeness is proposed. It states that the cultures refugees create in exile are the necessary prerequisite for self-recognition and survival.

Der vorliegende Band vereinigt ausgewählte Beiträge einer interdisziplinären Konferenz zum Thema «Berlin ¿ Wien ¿ Prag. Moderne, Minderheiten und Migration in der Zwischenkriegszeit», die im September 2000 an der Queen¿s University of Belfast stattfand. Die literaturwissenschaftlichen, publizistischen, judaistischen und architekturhistorischen Beiträge (in deutscher oder englischer Sprache) vermitteln neue Perspektiven in Bezug auf die spannungsreiche Kultur dieser Städte in den zwanziger und dreissiger Jahren. This volume comprises selected papers from the conference «Berlin ¿ Wien ¿ Prag. Modernity, Minorities and Migration in the Inter-War Period» which was held at the Queen¿s University of Belfast in September 2000. The contributions (in English or German) offer new perspectives on the exciting culture of these cities during the 1920s and 30s from a variety of disciplines: Literary History, Media Studies, Jewish Studies and History of Architecture.

Taking as its point of departure the remarkable increase in the production of fictional autobiographies in Britain and Ireland over the last thirty years, this book sets out to explore the historical, philosophical and literary context motivating and shaping such an increase. It seeks to show that as a result of the epistemological crisis of the 20 century and of the consequent assault on traditional modes of representation, writers began to look for alternative textual spaces and narrative forms which would allow them to highlight the constructed nature of identity and selfhood. The contention is that fictional autobiography is particularly suitable for postmodern needs, since it explores the relationship between text and reality and focuses on language as mediator between the two.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at an international conference held in Bergamo (5-6 May 2000), which focussed on the semantic and pragmatic values of modality in specialized texts ¿ legal, economic, academic and medical. The assembled contributions give an overview of the range of scholarly approaches to modality. They convey the theoretical background and provide in-depth analyses of specialized texts on a synchronic as well as on a diachronic level.

Celebrated for its ancient water wheels, the town of Hama is located on Syriäs longest river, the Orontes. Ottoman Hama was a stopover on the major north-south road of Syria as well as the center of a local economic zone of its own. Intertwined social networks linked townspeople to the peasants and pastoral nomads of Hamäs hinterland. By the early twentieth century a few elite and notable families had come to dominate the political and economic life of Hama and its outlying villages, setting the stage for the city¿s dramatic entry into Syrian national life during the French Mandate and post-colonial periods. Based principally on local judicial archives, this book is a social history of Hama during the last two centuries of Ottoman rule. It examines the social and economic structures that defined people¿s lives and that conditioned their participation in the historical changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dramatis personae include men and women, commoners and notables, merchants and artisans, and others who, taken together, represent a cross-section of a Middle Eastern society as they entered the world of global markets, European empires, and modern states.

How does contemporary Irish poetry migrate from traditional conceptions of identity drawn on by the cultural nationalism of the Irish Literary Revival? What effects does this have on our understanding of gendered and national identity formation? Chapters of this study focus on the work of Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Eavan Boland and Sara Berkeley. Looking at poets from North and South of the border, the book asks how does a younger generation of writers provide a response to nationality which is significantly different from their predecessors. Exploring feminist and post-colonial theorization of identity, this study interrogates the intellectual and political agenda of a new generation of Irish poets, while calling into question the implied divisions between poetry, theory and a practical politics.

This volume, containing selected papers from a conference held by the Department of French in the University of Cambridge in 1999, addresses the exciting and challenging figure of the shifting border in modern French literature and literary theory. Using a variety of critical approaches, the contributors map the fluctuating borders in specific literary texts and explore how these moving boundaries reflect on their practice of literary analysis. Inspired by the ideas of European and American thinkers, including Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan and Jean-François Lyotard, they consider three major areas of current concern: the construction of identity, the conceptualisation of literary genres and the demarcation of geographical and cultural domains. Applying their insights to a wide-ranging corpus of francophone texts, this volume analyses the work both of canonical figures such as Mallarmé, Proust and Zola and of lesser-known writers such as Aimé Césaire, Assia Djebar and St. John Perse.

This study of Edgar Reitz¿s 1984 film saga Heimat explores the cultural contexts of the Heimat tradition and examines the political debate surrounding the film¿s reception. Responses were largely supportive but some critics were disturbed by an apparent tendency to induce a sense of uncritical nostalgia in viewers. Reitz, by contrast, had wanted to make a film which would help people confront their memories of the Third Reich. The author tests hostile critiques not only against the film¿s elliptical narrative but also against Reitz¿s filmic techniques. She examines the interplay of realism and authenticity, and shows how Reitz dramatizes the confrontation between modernity and rural communities, while consciously alluding to the problematic and much-derided Heimat genre.

The contributions to this volume have been commissioned in honour of Michael Butler, Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Birmingham, on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Professor Butler has distinguished himself as an editor, interpreter and critic of post war German literature, most particularly in the area of German-Swiss writing. His three monographs on Max Frisch and the edited volumes Rejection and Emancipation. Writing in German-speaking Switzerland 1945-91, The Making of Modern Switzerland 1848-1995, and The Narrative Fiction of Heinrich Böll. Social Conscience and Narrative Achievement, all share the same concern with the moral dimension of imaginative literature, a focus which also unites the contributions to this celebratory volume. Michael Butler¿s signal contributions to German Studies have earned him a LittD from the University of Cambridge, the Bundesverdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Presidency from 1995 to 1998 of the Conference of University Teachers of German.

Mechthild of Magdeburg¿s singular book Das Fließende Licht der Gottheit (¿The Flowing Light of the Godhead¿) must be accounted one of the most significant texts in German that we have from the thirteenth century. As a piece of first-rate imaginative writing in the vernacular it is a highly rewarding text for those interested in medieval literature and women¿s writing. It is also of considerable interest to historians and theologians as a document of female spirituality. This introduction to Mechthild¿s extraordinary account of her revelations and of her relationship with God and with her contemporaries makes Mechthild¿s book more accessible to the English speaker. It takes as its central focus the multi-voiced nature of Mechthild¿s writings, suggesting ways of reading her work through an analysis of key voices in the text: (i) the social-historical voice of Mechthild as beguine and nun (ii) the authorial voice (iii) the voice of the mystic and prophet with particular reference to the influence of the Psalter and the Song of Songs (iv) the temporal voice of the visionary at the intersection of Mechthild¿s personal story with the master story of Christian salvation.

This study examines the reception of the controversial science of eugenics in Catalan and Valencian anarchist reviews in the early twentieth century, setting anarchist discourse on sexuality, theories of degeneration, inheritance and disease in the context of anarchism¿s own ideological framework, European sexology and eugenics itself. Drawing on a detailed analysis of the reviews Salud y Fuerza, Generación Consciente and Estudios, the author suggests that some anarchists¿ acceptance of eugenic science was predicated upon their enthusiasm for science as ¿objective knowledge¿ and ¿scientiä as a form of cultural ascendancy vital to their revolutionary project. Anarchist eugenics, however, as articulated in these reviews, was not stable and shifted focus and scientific rationale over time and as new ideas came to the fore. The author shows how far the social and ideological concerns of anarchists constructed their form of eugenics and how eugenic science in turn helped to construct a form of anarchism which sought to incorporate sexological science into what anarchists believed was a radical sexual project for the age.

Organisé par l¿Université de Sydney, l¿Université de New South Wales (Sydney) et l¿ambassade de France, le colloque «Repenser les processus créateurs / Rethinking Creative Processes» a réuni du 14 au 16 février 1999 autour de ce thème commun de nombreux chercheurs venus d¿horizons différents. Les contributions regroupées dans cet ouvrage interrogent les actes et les enjeux de la création artistique, qüelle soit littéraire, théâtrale ou visuelle. Avec une entrée en matière exclusive de l¿écrivain Philippe Djian, l¿ouvrage amènera le lecteur à réfléchir sur les frontières entre texte et image et remet en question les notions d¿origine de l¿¿uvre. Organized by the University of Sydney, the University of New South Wales (Sydney) and the French Embassy, the Conference «Repenser les processus créateurs / Rethinking Creative Processes», held from 14 February to 16 February 1999, gathered researchers from many different countries and backgrounds. Papers selected for this publication explore the acts and interplays involved in the creative process, in the areas of literature, theatre and visual arts. Opening with an article by writer Philippe Djian, this book will lead readers to question the frontiers of text and image and to challenge notions of artistic origin.

Contemporary cultural practices have blurred and eroded traditional disciplinary boundaries of art and its discourses, and the ways in which they are taught. They have called into question the ideological premises and cultural assumptions on which traditional academic subjects were founded and which have underwritten the segregation between practice, pragmatic and speculative thought. The Scottish Theoros ¿ Forum for Interdisciplinary Debate was jointly initiated by the Department of Philosophy and the School of Fine Art at the University of Dundee to create a space for dialogue between and across the various disciplines that are concerned with the study of visual arts: practice, aesthetics, theory, history and criticism. Theoros has initiated a series of international conferences bringing together professionals who are engaged in the research and teaching of art from different disciplinary perspectives. This volume contains selected contributions to the first Scottish Theoros conference on ¿Aesthetics, Historicity and Practice¿, held in Dundee in 1998. Historicity marks the temporal nature of our existence and experience. It forms a central aspect in the making of and reflection on art. Here historicity is explored as a common ground for the integration of practice, critical thought and historical enquiry in the spaces of higher education and professional engagement.

More than ever, comparative literature sees as its task the international study of literatures, which means that the entire spectrum of world literature is potentially its field of exploration. Today this means much more than studying relations between national literatures neatly contained within the borders of national states; transnationality is everywhere: in a multiplicity of diasporas, exiles, and multinational linguistic communities spanning the world; but also within multicultural countries and megacities. It means that in the global village the possibility exists and must exist not only to study the literatures closest to one¿s own, but those of the Other, in complete reciprocity; and not only from the vantage-point of one¿s own culture but with a mind open to patterns, methods, visions very distant from one¿s own. In ¿Dialogues of Cultures¿ twenty-two authors have come to grips with this necessity, studying self-critically, with open minds and a variety of comparative methods, first, aspects of ¿East-West relations¿ (but ¿East¿ and ¿West¿ must be understood in the broadest and most symbolical sense); and secondly aspects of intra-European relations.

Public education has received increasing criticism since the beginning of the nineties. Four major areas of concern can be discerned: the technical backwardness of the schools, the disappearance of political legitimization, financial limitations and the conservative school development. Worldwide, educational systems are being reorganized and developed beyond the traditional forms. These efforts are accompanied by increasingly complicated and complex research which assumes an international form. The international symposium Futures of Education, which took place in Zurich from 28 to 30 March 2000, was dedicated to these questions. The lectures held at the symposium were concerned with the relationship between research and development and above all, encouraged discussion and brought new ideas into play.

The One-Eyed Man asks what value literary sources may have for the social historian, who is accustomed to work with factual evidence. After a survey of the possible approaches and the work of previous scholars such as Kohn-Bramstedt and Auerbach, the author argues that the social novel, based on the novelist¿s observation and written to propagate his views, can aid historical knowledge particularly in the fields of mentality and the everyday. Studies of eighteen novels which deal with German life between 1848 and 1968 support and develop this thesis. Some novelists are concerned to propagate controversial philosophical or political views, some use peculiar theories of society to structure their work, yet there is still reason to assume that a writer of high literary quality will present details of everyday life fairly. Novels both are historical evidence in themselves, as showing an intelligent contemporary¿s opinions, and provide historical evidence in the mentalities and lifestyles depicted. Only writers who have a Utopian aim, or who are subject to interference from some kind of censorship, form an exception. The scholar¿s sensitivity is required to determine whether a particular novel gives good evidence or not.

The international airline industry is characterized by radical changes in regulation and firm behavior. Open-sky agreements abolish market entry restrictions, and global strategic alliances replace the government controlled national carriers. With deregulation and the restructuring of firms still in progress, the future design of market structures cannot easily be predicted. Will airlines behave competitively or is there danger of collusion? Do large networks lead to monopoly supply? And what are the effects of open skies on consumer welfare? Roland Fischer answers these questions by developing an economic model that combines traditional monopoly and oligopoly theory with specific features of air transport markets, like hub-and-spoke systems and passengers' valuation of time. The theoretical results are completed by case studies, which illustrate firm behavior and the development of market structures in an increasingly liberal environment.

Sound Evidence documents the range of phonological varieties in use in Aix-en-Provence and investigates the social pressures on convergence towards the standard, such as gender-related speech differences, education, geographical and social mobility, and perhaps most importantly, linguistic and regional identity including bilingualism, the emotional ties of language and relationships of members of a regionally-homogeneous community with the way they speak, exposing language as a rich tapestry through which we reveal, or conceal, ever-changing notions of our social identity.

This book gives a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the dialectical structure of God's history in Jürgen Moltmann's theology. It concentrates on the historical character of God's self-revelation and the relationship between God's inner divine life and his historical act, especially in the Christ event. Furthermore, it depicts a comprehensive picture of God's history from the very beginning to the eschaton. The study concludes with a discussion of the significance of God's history for the historical transformation of this world.

The book consists of 16 case-studies on issues relating to memory, the majority of which stem from a conference in April 2005 at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Public memory is tackled from a variety of angles and various disciplines, ranging across the humanities, the social sciences and the exact sciences. First and foremost the reader will obtain a comprehensive overview of the results of scholarship published in recent years about public memory. Second, the book provides a profound insight into how public memory works within societies of different nature and at different junctures of their histories. The volume begins by offering a glimpse into individual memory, and then goes on to discuss religious societies, ethnic groups, secular groups, institutions and larger segments of society, ultimately reaching the nation state. The authors, each in his or her own discipline, have addressed the complexities involved in the creation of public memory, the media that promote and preserve it within groups and societies, and finally the nature of memory and how it «behaves» during changing circumstances and changing regimes.

This book sets out to examine the internal workings of a colonial settler society drawing on aspects of post-colonial theory and whiteness studies. It focuses on the construction of a hierarchical social order in German Southwest Africa in the period 1884-1914. In doing so it explores the historical creation of categories of race and the construction of a concept of whiteness within white settler society in Germany¿s foremost settler colony. In the colonial environment the presence of some settlers was deemed to be more desirable than others. As a consequence policies of exclusion and racial rhetoric were employed to exclude undesirable settlers from white society. What emerged was a pioneer society in which undesirable settlers were socially, politically and economically excluded whilst desirable settlers sought to forge a racially and culturally exclusive utopia. Based on extensive archival material from the Bundesarchiv in Berlin as well as a wide range of printed sources, the book presents an insight into strategies of social control, power, the establishment of social privilege and constructions of whiteness in a settler society.