The Geological Unconscious

Author(s):  
Jason Groves

Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. In The Geological Unconcious, Jason Groves traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown, let alone the technologies that could forecast those changes. Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, the author traces out a geological unconscious—in other words, unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—where it manifests in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period where this novel geological epoch, though arguably already underway, remains unnamed and otherwise unmarked. These close readings also unearth an entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of cotemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters on which The Geological Unconcious lingers, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination becomes apparent. While The Geological Unconcious does not explicitly set out to imagine alternatives to fossil capitalism, in elaborating a range of such encounters and in registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, it points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.

Author(s):  
Stefan Collini

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 327-349
Author(s):  
Zsófia Kalavszky ◽  

In my essay I trace how – by which means and through what channels – the Ukrainian song «Ĭхав козак за Дунай» (Kozak was riding beyond the Danube) reached Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth-century and then by the means of German mediation, sprang out onto Hungarian territories. In the German language area, it spread essentially as a folk song. Translated (or rather transcribed) into German by Christopher Tidge, the Ukrainian song reached the Kingdom of Hungary most likely together with the troops that took part in the Napoleon wars. At the same time, another version of the song circulated among the Hungarian elite in German culture. The latter was known as Russisches Lied in the translation of Theodor Körner – it was also in vogue and was distributed mainly in print media. The history of this song that in the first decade of the nineteenth century, gained fame in Czech, Polish, and English, has another line that may be interesting from the point of view of Russian and Hungarian literary connections. In 1814, Russian poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker translated the song into German. His translation which remained in the form of the manuscript and was not known to the reading public reveals an amazing similarity and in some places direct coincidences with the poem by the Hungarian poet Count Ferenc Teleki written presumably before 1820.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 121-127
Author(s):  
Oleg V. Lukin ◽  

The article is devoted to the place of J. Grimm's «German grammar» among school German grammar books of the XIX century Germany. The work that appeared at the beginning of the century opened a new page in the history of linguistics – the development of comparative historical language study and the formation of linguistics as a science. The paper provides information on some of the most important German grammar textbooks in Germany of the XIX century, used in secondary schools. They were grammar books by J. Ch. Gottsched, J. Ch. Adelung, J. Ch. A. Heyse, J. G. Radlof, S. G. A. Herling, F. J. Schmitthenner, M. W. Götzinger, etc. The author of the article compares J. Grimm's «German grammar» with the above-mentioned grammar works of that time and puts forward a hypothesis that in the XIX century Germany there appeared an opposition between scientific approach to grammar and that of school grammar books, which, according to the author, reflects dramatically different goals set by both sides. Unlike school textbooks which task is to consistently initiate students into the system of their native language, often on the basis of the matrix created by Alexandrian grammarians, scientific grammar is based on the results of linguistic research and seeks to answer questions about language phenomena. J. Grimm rejected any normative grammar based on logics, that resulting in the aversion on the part of the pedagogical community. Nevertheless, the publication of «German grammar» resulted in appearance of German language textbooks the writers of which tried to build their work on the basis of Grimm’s work, thereby contributing to the popularization of the ideas of the great linguist both among the pedagogical community and the students (A. F. H. Vilmar and K. A. J. Hoffmann).


2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Blackburn

This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so repugnant to inveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction, and are probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).If we now recognize that literary history is more than a history of literature, it is perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of literary history is an important subject for literary historiography. Yet literary histories are a rich source for understanding local conceptions of both history and literature. More accessible than archaeology, more tangible than ethnology, literary histories are culturally constructed narratives in which the past is reimagined in the light of contemporary concerns. Certainly in nineteenth-century India, the focus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as evidence to be advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities, language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were all asserted and challenged through literary histories in colonial India. Asserted and challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.


1975 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 667
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Ribbans ◽  
Donald L. Shaw ◽  
G. G. Brown

Romantik ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gry Hedin

During the first part of the nineteenth century, geologists developed a history of the earth so different from that accepted in previous centuries that it encouraged a rethinking of the relationship between man and nature. In this article I will argue that painters followed these changes closely and that some of them let the narratives and images of geology inform the way they depicted nature. In arguing my point, I will focus on images and descriptions of the chalk cliffs on the Danish island of Møn by both geologists and painters. I will follow the scientific advances in geology by referring to the texts and images of Søren Abildgaard, Henrich Steffens, Johan Georg Forchhammer, and Christopher Puggaard, and discuss how their changing theories correspond with paintings of the cliffs by four artists: Christopher Wilhelm Eckersberg, Frederik Sødring, Louis Gurlitt, and Peter Christian Skovgaard.


2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (1.) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarina Ivon

This paper is a preview of contemporary trends in comparative literature. The starting point of this research is the fact that change of research paradigms is a key feature of contemporary comparative literature. Change of research paradigms refers to imagery research, a new focus point of comparative literature that deals with images of certain country and its culture in another cultural surrounding, and to the notion of intercultural history of literature, which also includes the concept of interliterary community. The author also presents two new tendencies in contemporary comparative literature: cultural studies and European studies. The paper analyzes the responses of these new trends in Croatian literary history, but it also focuses on their impact on further researches in Croatian literature.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-112
Author(s):  
Marlene Schäfers

Now running in its seventh year, Kurdish Studies has established itself as the leading venue for the publication of innovative, cutting-edge research on Kurdish history, politics, culture and society. According to Scopus scores, our journal is now positioned among the top publications within the History category of the Arts and Humanities, ranking 170 out of 1138 (84th percentile). In Cultural Studies, we stand at rank 193 out of 890 (78th percentile). This year’s second issue of Kurdish Studies brings to you yet another collection of thought-provoking pieces of original scholarship. Gerald Maclean provides us with a literary history of British literary accounts of Kurds and Kurdistan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Allan Hassaniyan investigates a similar geography, though within the context of contemporary fragmentation by national borders. Our third article shifts the focus from Iran to Iraq. Samme Dick examines the recent turn to Zoroastrianism amongst a growing number of Kurds living in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. 


2021 ◽  
pp. 308-328
Author(s):  
Brian Young

The masculine world of Addison’s eighteenth-century ‘republic of letters’ was mirrored by that inhabited by Victorian ‘Men of Letters’, and hence much of the lively interest taken in him by nineteenth-century cultural commentators and makers of (and historians of) public opinion. The agnostic manliness of such men as Leslie Stephen and W. J. Courthope informed the way they wrote about Addison, whose Christianity they tended to slight and who was described by them as ‘delicate’. Macaulay had been more admiring of Addison as a Christian gentleman, while Thackeray praised him as an English humorist. Pope and Swift continued to enjoy an ascendancy in eighteenth-century English literary history, with Addison and Steele appreciated more for having been ‘characteristic’ of their age than as acting in any way as intellectually innovative figures. Matthew Arnold was notably critical of Addison, whom he found provincial and narrow. Both Addison and his Victorian critics were subjected to feminist criticism by Virginia Woolf, who happened to be Stephen’s daughter, but she in her turn slighted the most significant early Victorian study of Addison, the life written by the Unitarian Lucy Aikin. The ‘long nineteenth century’ in the English literary history of the eighteenth century is thus bookended by studies of Addison by women, and it is time that justice was paid to Aikin’s pioneering and still valuable study, submerged as it has been by readers of Macaulay’s essay on Addison, which was ostensibly a review of Aikin’s exercise in literary biography.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 835-861 ◽  
Author(s):  
NATHAN G. ALEXANDER

This article examines a previously unexplored chapter in the history of atheism: its close links with nineteenth-century racial anthropology. These links are apparent especially in many atheists’ interest in polygenesis, the theory that human races had separate origins, in contrast to the orthodox Christian doctrine of monogenesis that said all races descended from Adam and Eve. The article's focus is Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91), arguably the most important British atheist of the era, representing the radical working-class, secularist movement that emerged in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The article charts the ways Bradlaugh and other atheists used the research on polygenesis from leading scientific racists in both Britain and the United States to critique Christianity. It also explores some of the contradictions of this use, namely the ways polygenesis clashed with Darwinism and a longer chronology of the age of the Earth. Finally, the article explores how polygenist ideas informed Bradlaugh's imperial worldview and notes that, despite his acceptance of polygenesis, Bradlaugh was a supporter of the rights of nonwhites in the British Empire, particularly in India.


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