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Abstract
The beginning of the ‘modern’ novel usually is dated between the middle of the eighteenth until the middle of the nineteenth century when realism reshaped the centuries old design of the novel. A crucial feature of the new realist model was the turning away from the typified black-and-white characters as predetermined social representatives acting in a predictable world and the turning towards individualized characters whose actions are driven by more relatable human thoughts. However, early traces of this realist model of designing characters are already visible in some of the finest examples of Neo-Latin novel writing. By examining different Neo-Latin novels from the Early Modern Period, this article highlights the realist character development in pre-modern times.
Abstract
The article addresses the phenomenon of voice-controlled assistance systems, or more precisely: smart speakers with voice user interfaces, as they have been finding their way into private households for some time. The public discourse revolves, among other things, around the question of the extent to which the socio-technical exchange with such systems differs from social interaction or increasingly approaches it, and, related to this, whether individual users must adapt to machines or vice versa. At the same time, empirical research shows that socio-technical dialogues and social interaction are often not two separate worlds, but components of a complex practice in which prima facie ontologically different participants are involved. These circumstances make it possible to reconstruct the characteristics of both socio-technical dialogue and the social interaction which is situated around it as linguistically mediated performances from a praxeological perspective. In this context, systematic transitions between socio-technical dialogue and a “meta-interaction space” play an important role, as do various forms of “sequential” processes and their mediation with each other. This article approaches these phenomena based on empirical data from an ongoing research project, notably audio-visual recordings of situations of the initial installation/commissioning of IPA in two- and multi-person households, audio recordings of situations of everyday use, log data of socio-technical dialogue which the systems make available to the users through the corresponding smartphone app.
Abstract
The essay addresses the problem of time in lyric poetry and proposes a narrative understanding of the lyric genre. I argue that temporality belongs to the lyric discourse as part of its transtextual structure as a result of the lyric’s organization in the book form. This transtextual structure gives lyric poetry a narrative framework and a specific type of temporality, the diachronic time, which contrasts with the temporality of the single poem, the synchronic time. By focusing on the relationships between opener and closure poems, I propose a narrative-diachronic model in order to reposition the temporality of lyric poetry in the book form. By dealing with Paul Celan’s second book of poems, Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (1955), the analysis will finally show how diachronic time corresponds to the narrative structure of the collection, and how time and the narrative are deeply linked in lyric poetry by means of the book form.
Abstract
This paper examines narrative representations of authors and authorship in English-language fiction from the 1890s to the 1920s. From Henry James onwards, such narratives revise the basic, and by that time exhausted, plot elements of the novel of literary apprenticeship as featured in Dickens’s David Copperfield and Thackeray’s Pendennis, among many others. Instead of focusing on ideas of development and professional formation, they depict authors subdued by a sense of shrinking opportunities and lack of movement. Aging or dying authors in James and Mann, young but soon disappointed authors in Joyce, Forster, or Green: wherever we look, we find an ambivalence of promise that often ends in stagnation, failure, even death. In this context, my paper presents a close reading of three less frequently discussed modernist variations on the literary bildungsroman: Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams (1897/1907), E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey (1907), and Henry Green’s Blindness (1926).
Abstract
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the protagonist frequently and eloquently refers to his own taciturnity and to the fundamental insights into the ways of the world that this silence conceals from his interlocutors. It is partly due to this emphasis on a pivotal inaccessibilty that the play has provoked numerous philosophical interpretations. For example, Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy and Walter Benjamin in Origin of the German Trauerspiel have dealt with Hamlet’s loquacious refusal to communicate, and their interpretations, while problematic in some respects, can contribute to a better understanding of the drama, especially when they are placed in relation to one another. While Nietzsche’s somewhat forced interpretation traces Hamlet’s silence to the Dionysian experience of ancient tragedy, Benjamin’s counter-interpretation construes this silence as the expression of a specifically Protestant, melancholic conception of history, as well as of its dialectical overcoming. Although Origin of the German Trauerspiel convincingly demonstrates that Hamlet transforms his relationship to society and its language in the course of the play by reinterpreting the contingency of historical events as manifestations of eternal providence, a closer reading of the drama shows that this reinterpretation is not, as Benjamin claims, unfolding a genuinely Christian dialectic, at the endpoint of which stands the blissful silence of assured salvation. Rather, this reinterpretation appears as the expression of an amor fati that in many respects prefigures Nietzsche’s categorical affirmation of blind necessity; Hamlet’s interpretation of the course of the world as a circulus vitiosus resembles the idea of the eternal return, embracing this figure of thought in its most hopeless and most seminal form: as an apotheosis of endless annihilation.