Europe in the Global History of Culture, or: Journeying to a Japanese Cape with Friedrich Kittler1

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-134
Author(s):  
Yūji Nawata
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Media History ◽  
Computer Hardware ◽  
Global History ◽  
German Studies ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
Humboldt University ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture

Abstract Allow me to begin with two explanatory notes. The first concerns the title of this lecture: Europe in the Global History of Culture, or: Journeying to a Japanese Cape with Friedrich Kittler. The subsidiary title Journeying to a Japanese Cape with Friedrich Kittler sounds as if I travelled from abroad across a vast sea to a cape in Japan, enjoying a voyage with the thinker and cultural historian, Friedrich Kittler. Unfortunately, this is not true. It was a much less romantic journey in a taxi we took from Tokyo. At all events, we both undertook an excursion to the coast. I will be talking about this journey. Please also allow me, therefore, to share private experiences with you. I do this in order to place this thinker in an intercultural context and explore his relevance to comparative studies. So, who was Friedrich Kittler? He was born in 1943 in Saxony, emigrated from East to West when Germany was divided, and studied in Freiburg – mainly German Studies. In his books from the 1980s, such as Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Discourse Networks 1800/1900) and Grammophon Film Typewriter (Gramophone, Film, Typewriter), he developed the method of analysing literary history as part of media studies, defining “media” as things like books, phonograph or computer hardware. In 1993, after the reunification of Germany, he took up a professorship in “Aesthetics and the History of Media” at the Humboldt University, where he remained until his death in 2011 in Berlin. He always identified as a historian. His research focus was cultural history from antiquity onwards. For him, the core of cultural history was media history, and the history of literature was part of media history. For approximately the last ten years of his life his focus was on a large project, a cultural history of Europe from antiquity to the present. In 2007 Friedrich Kittler, the expert on Europe, came to Japan, and this is what I will be talking about here. My focus is therefore on Europe, Japan, and the sea that connects Europe and Japan and the European Friedrich Kittler in an intercultural context. So, that was my first explanatory note.

Auszeit

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
German Studies ◽  
Time Out ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Association

This volume uses literary texts, films and computer games to examine how the specifically modern narrative of time-out is represented. The contributions examine time-out narratives from early Romanticism to contemporary pop and game culture: a polyphonic contribution to the cultural history of time-out, that has yet to be written. The volume is based on a panel organised by Stephanie Catani (University of Würzburg) and Friedhelm Marx (University of Bamberg) as part of the 26th Conference of the German Association of German Studies 2019 at Saarland University. With contributions by Prof. Dr. Sabina Becker, PD Dr. Juliane Blank, Prof. Dr. Stephanie Catani, apl. Prof. Dr. Michael Eggers, Prof. Dr. Jörn Glasenapp, Roya Hauck, PD Dr. Nikolas Immer, Prof. Dr. Friedhelm Marx, Beatrice May, Dr. Jasmin Pfeiffer, PD Dr. Jörg Schuster and Julian Weinert.

Gustav Klemm, Cultural History, and Kulturwissenschaft

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
German Culture ◽  
High Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
Cultural Science ◽  
History Of Culture

This chapter examines a new material-based history of German culture and looks at how a study of material culture had since evolved into “cultural history.” It traces the history of culture in nineteenth-century Germany, at the same time puzzling out the ambiguity of such a category as it was applied during the period. Encompassing both high culture and low, the popular and the elite, cultural history has often seemed borderless and indefinite—leading even its admirers to “search” for it or to see it as a “problem.” The chapter then turns to a study of Gustav Friedrich Klemm (1802–1867), the most important of the cultural historians of the 1840s and 1850s. His General Cultural History (1843–1852) and General Cultural-Science (1855) are both significant works in the field.

Introduction

Picture World ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Rachel Teukolsky
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Media History ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Visual Culture Studies ◽  
Cross Media ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
Words And Images

The introduction explores both Victorian and contemporary theories of visual culture, while developing the book’s own interdisciplinary methodology. Visual culture studies, media history, art history, literary history, and cultural history number among the book’s disciplines. The chapters move across media to study novels and poems alongside photographs and illustrations. Weaving together both visual and textual strands, the book presents a revisionist, multidisciplinary approach to “culture” as it was lived and experienced in the nineteenth century. Academic divides between the disciplines today have obscured the cross-media connections studied in the book. The book’s approach captures the historical reality of the nineteenth century’s turbulent media moment, when the bounds of high art and mass culture were not yet fixed, and words and images mingled indiscriminately in the cultural field.

Avant-gardes in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: New Perspectives

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-402
Author(s):  
NORBERT BANDIER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture

The time has come for researchers into innovative movements in art and literature in the first half of the twentieth century to break free from traditional investigative frameworks. The works reviewed here belong to different disciplines – art history, literary history, literary criticism, history – but all show a shift of perspectives in the history of culture. They point to a reassessment of the theoretical models we use to understand modern art and literature. Those models are – in this case as they relate to the avant-garde – nuanced, refined, developed and sometimes even invalidated. Though some of these works are not wholly devoted to the European avant-gardes, they do deal with the international circulation of modern art in, to or from Europe, studied here in its lesser-known aspects. Moreover, they all to some extent examine the artist’s responsibility to the community, or the state’s responsibility to art. This theme of responsibility runs through all these works, either in its ethical dimension or as an aspect of the social function of art, especially when art has to confront an entertainment culture or is roped in as part of cultural policy.

scholarly journals Procesos da historiografía literaria galega Para un debate crítico

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arturo Casas
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Methodological Innovation ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Galician Literature ◽  
The 19Th Century

Galician literary historiography shows links and ruptures that refer to the cultural history of Galicia itself and to the sequence of historical events that have delineated the social, economic and political development of the country since the 19th century. These coordinates comprise a series of processes, including the elaboration and propagation of ideologies aimed at achieving a way out of political subalternity and oriented towards the horizon of national emancipation. Those events and these processes also marked the connection of Galicia with modernity and the dynamics of historical change. As a result of the above, this book analyses critically the institutionalization processes of the history of Galician literature – with special emphasis on historiographic models such as that of Said Armesto, Carvalho Calero, Méndez Ferrín and others – and indicates the need to undertake a productive methodological innovation of the discipline in heuristic, organic and discursive terms. It further argues that this update should pay attention to substantive theoretical debates, not exclusively of specific cultural coordinates, such as Galician ones or any others that could be considered. Among these, the cooperation between history and sociology, the intellection of literary facts as historical facts, the review of the link between literary history and nation, the public uses of literary history, and the inquiry of discursive choices that promote a less self-indulgent and predictable historiography. This essentially involved a challenge, that of permanent dialogue with some of the most powerful critical reinterpretations of the Galician historiographic tradition and with alternative models constituted from feminist thought, postcolonial theories, the sociology of the literary field or the systemic theories of culture, as well as with the contributions made from a post-national understanding of the literary phenomenon.

Zwischen Literaturgeschichte und Zeitgenossenschaft

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Henrike Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
German Research Foundation ◽  
German Research ◽  
Humboldt University ◽  
History Of

Summary The article serves as an introduction to the thematic cluster of papers devoted to the work of Bulgarian poet and literary theoretician Pencho Slaveykov (1866–1912), which present the outcomes of a workshop dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the poet at the Department of Slavic and Hungarian Studies, Humboldt University (Berlin 2016; supported by the German Research Foundation DFG). As Slaveykov, while a leading representative of Bulgarian modern literature, is not an established figure in comparative literary studies, the paper sketches briefly the biography of the author, or rather the “biographemes” out of which he constructs his self-representation. In summarizing the main findings of the cluster contributions, it outlines the ways in which Slaveykov and his work—as a phenomenon ‘untimely’ to his era—have been embedded into the narratives of Bulgarian literary history of the 20th and early 21st century, which reach from postmodernism and postcolonialism to new engagement, or to entangled histories.

Social History in Serbia: The Association for Social History

2008 ◽  
Vol 34-35 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 369-381
Author(s):  
Radina Vučetić ◽  
Olga Manojlović Pintar
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
South Eastern Europe ◽  
History Of Culture ◽  
The University

This review essay provides a brief overview of the research and publication activity of the Udruženje za društvenu istoriju/Association for Social History, an innovative scholarly organization established in 1998 in Belgrade, Serbia. The association promotes research on social history in modern South-Eastern Europe, with a focus on former Yugoslavia, and publishes scientific works and historical documents. The driving force behind the activity of the association is a group of young social historians gathered around Professor Andrej Mitrović, at the University of Belgrade. Prof. Mitrović’s work on the “social history of culture” has provided a scholarly framework for a variety of new works dealing with issues of modernization, history of elites, history of ideas, and the diffuse relationship between history and memory. Special attention is given to the Association’s journal, Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju/Annual for Social History, which published studies on economic history, social groups, gender issue, cultural history, modernization, and the history of everyday life in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Methodologically routed in social history, these research projects are interdisciplinary, being a joint endeavor of sociologists, art historians, and scholars of visual culture.

“Slavic World: Commonality and Diversity” Young Scholars Conference 13–14 October 2020. Session “Literary studies. Cultural history”

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 255-259
Author(s):  
Natalia A. Lunkova
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture ◽  
Public Organisations ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
First Time ◽  
Young Researchers

The Young Scholars Conference at the Institute of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, has been held since 2014. In 2020, the organisers had to change the previous timing of the event –it had previously been timed to correspond with the Day of Slavic Writing and Culture (May 24th), but for the first time it was not held in May but in October. The format of the Conference was also changed: the participants made their presentations remotely on the ZOOM platform. As usual, there were three broad topic areas: “History”, “Linguistics”, and “Literary Studies. The History of Culture”. The wide geographical coverage of the participants should be mentioned. This year, young scholars from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Kaliningrad, Kirov, Rostov-on-don, Chisinau (Moldova), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Macerata (Italy), and Minsk (Belarus) presented their research. Historians discussed many issues, including the problems of governance and modernisation in multinational states, memory policy in Slavic countries, and the role of parties and public organisations in overcoming crises. The section “Literary Studies. The History of Culture” focused on the reception and translation of works in Slavic languages and the problems of poetics in literature and cinema. Linguists paid attention to issues surrounding the grammar of modern Slavic languages, dialectology, and paleoslavistics. Moderators’ comments made the Conference, as usual, a kind of “school” for the young researchers. The conference proceedings have been published.

The Future of the Literary Past

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 959-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith L. McGill ◽  
Andrew Parker
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Media History ◽  
Paper Machine ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Serial Publication ◽  
Technology Grant

[B]y carrying us beyond paper, the adventures of technology grant us a sort of future anterior: they liberate our reading for a retrospective exploration of the past resources of paper, for its previously multimedia vectors.—Jacques Derrida, Paper MachineThis essay explores some of the ways that the contemporary mediascape has begun to transform the questions we can ask of our students and ourselves. Our subject derives from an undergraduate English course, Literary History and/as Media History, that we designed to address the lack of critical attention paid in the curriculum to the media of literary works. The course, whose catalog description follows, was intended to cover a lot of historical ground while highlighting theoretical questions that generally remain unasked in Norton Anthology–style surveys:Living in an era of rapid technological innovation, we tend to forget that print itself was once a new medium. The history of English and American literature since the Renaissance has been as much a response to the development of new material formats (scribal copying, printed playtexts, newspaper and serial publication, “little magazines,” radio, film, television, the internet) as it has been a succession of ideal literary forms (poems, plays, and novels). This course will survey literary works from the sixteenth to the twentieth century in relation to the history of media. What can these histories say to each other? Are they, indeed, one history?

scholarly journals Central European History since 1989: Historiographical Trends and Post-Wende “Turns”

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew I. Port
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
European History ◽  
German History ◽  
German Studies ◽  
Central European ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

In a luncheon address at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association in 2013, David Blackbourn delivered an impassioned plaidoyer to “grow” German history, i.e., to rescue it from the temporal “provincialism” that has, he believes, increasingly characterized the study of Germany over the past two decades. Blackbourn was critical of the growing emphasis on the twentieth century and especially the post-1945 period—not because of the quality of the work per se, but rather because of the resultant neglect of earlier periods and the potential loss of valuable historical insights that this development has brought in its wake. There have been other seemingly seismic shifts in the profession as a whole that have not left the history of Germany and German-speaking Central Europe untouched: greater emphasis on discourse analysis and gender, memory and identity, experience and cultural practices (i.e., the “linguistic turn” and the “new” cultural history). Accompanied by a decline in interest about Germany exclusively as a “nation-state,” the last decade in particular has seen a spike in “global” or “transnational” approaches. And, like other fields, the study of Germany has also witnessed greater interest in the study of race, minorities, immigration, and colonization—what Catherine Epstein referred to as the “imperial turn” in a piece that appeared in the journal Central European History (CEH) in 2013.

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