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This is the first book to provide a systematic investigation of the relation between community and literature in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. It develops the original claim that this relation has to be understood as a rethinking of myth. Traversing the entirety of Nancy’s vast oeuvre, the author offers an incomparable account of the ways in which Nancy’s central questions of community and literature are linked together. Moreover, by putting this linkage in terms of ‘myth’, this book situates Nancy’s work within a larger tradition, leading from German Romanticism to contemporary theories of the social relevance of literature.
This is the first book to provide a systematic investigation of the relation between community and literature in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. It develops the original claim that this relation has to be understood as a rethinking of myth. Traversing the entirety of Nancy’s vast oeuvre, the author offers an incomparable account of the ways in which Nancy’s central questions of community and literature are linked together. Moreover, by putting this linkage in terms of ‘myth’, this book situates Nancy’s work within a larger tradition, leading from German Romanticism to contemporary theories of the social relevance of literature.
Abstract
This paper looks at the field of world literature through the lens of the narratives of paperless migrants. I propose a paradigm of world literary texts that criticize the barriers preventing or restricting Southern border crossers’ ability to circulate freely in this so-called global village. Hakim Abderrezak coined the neologism “illiterature” in order to refer to the literature of “illegal” migration. This paper situates illiterature within the ongoing debate over the redefinition of world literature. It sheds light on contemporary theorizations of world literature in order to show that illiterature represents a transnational genre that incarnates a cross-national interaction exemplary of a world literary model that criticizes the hierarchy of mobility and the unequal access to movement.
Abstract
As this essay aims to show, explicit self-reflection in early illustrated journals cannot be trusted: They underlie discursive constraints and may therefore (also) obscure the aims of such periodicals instead of exposing them. The illustration practice of texts (in which these statements are included), however, frequently offers, such is the working hypothesis, an implicit self-reflection which moves in a different direction: in the example presented in this article, one that refutes an explicit self-description by employing paratextual aspects such as the use of a layout plan (or lack thereof), paper quality, page numbering, placement of illustrations, and intertextual references. With the reconstruction of this implicit self-disclosure, the close reading of Magasin Pittoresque and Penny Magazine in the following case study intends to blaze a trail for an adequate analysis of illustrated journals of the 1830s – a trail that sheds particular light on the surprising complexity of verbal-visual forms of communication.
Abstract
In modern media history, newspapers, radio stations, and news platforms on the Internet are viewed as agents with their own agenda in an area of tension between politics, economy, culture, science, and the public. Thus, a new way of thinking has arisen in this discipline. The past media historiography had often tended to view historic events through a “mirror of the media.” This assigned the media the passive role of spectators of current events. In addition to this, internal operations of the media were rarely contextualized historically, and the editorial department was often viewed as a black box that functions independently from external influences. However, said discipline has abandoned this perspective over the past several years.
Currently, modern media history makes use of interdisciplinary approaches such as basic concepts of system theory according to Niklas Luhmann, the medializing theory, and the agenda-setting research, which enable the examination of the interrelation between media and their social environment. A further component of modern media history is a heuristic multiperspectivity which frees itself from press coverage as the only source and includes internal editorial documents as well as sources from archives of interaction partners. The third aspect are methodological tools, the use of which is enabled by the digital access to source material and leads to new questions and findings.
In this article, these approaches are outlined and illustrated using the history of the economics department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The goal is to present components for a stringent examination of media as productive societal agents which can be used for further research.