Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature, and the Arts
Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature, and the Arts

Author: Markus Winkler

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-08-31

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 3476044858

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This two-volume co-authored study explores the history of the concept ‘barbarism’ from the 18th century to the present and illuminates its foundational role in modern European and Western identity. It constitutes an original comparative, interdisciplinary exploration of the concept’s modern European and Western history, with emphasis on the role of literature in the concept’s shifting functions. The study contributes to a historically grounded understanding of this figure’s past and contemporary uses. It combines overviews with detailed analyses of representative works of literature, art, film, philosophy, political and cultural theory, in which “barbarism” figures prominently. Diese auf 2 Bände konzipierte komparatistische und interdisziplinäre Studie in englischer Sprache geht der Geschichte des Barbarenbegriffs vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart nach. Seit der griechischen Antike spielen Bild und Begriff des Barbarischen eine eminente Rolle für das abendländische Selbstverständnis. Die Studie verbindet Epochenüberblicke mit der Analyse herausragender literarischer, philosophischer, politik- und kulturtheoretischer, aber auch bildkünstlerischer und kinematographischer Werke und legt einen besonderen Akzent auf den Beitrag ästhetischer Verfahren zur Aufdeckung der Herkunft und der Implikationen des Barbarenbegriffs.

Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature, and the Arts
Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature, and the Arts

Author: Markus Winkler

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 3476046117

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Since Greek antiquity, the ‘barbarian’ captivates the Western imaginary and operates as the antipode against which self-proclaimed civilized groups define themselves. Therefore, the study of the cultural history of barbarism is a simultaneous exploration of the shifting contours of European identity. This two-volume co-authored study explores the history of the concept ‘barbarism’ from the 18th century to the present and illuminates its foundational role in modern European and Western identity. It constitutes an original comparative, interdisciplinary exploration of the concept’s modern European and Western history, with emphasis on the role of literature in the concept’s shifting functions. Critically responding to the contemporary popularity of the term ‘barbarian' in political rhetoric and the media, and its violent, exclusionary workings, the study contributes to a historically grounded understanding of this figure’s past and contemporary uses. It combines overviews with detailed analyses of representative works of literature, art, film, philosophy, political and cultural theory, in which “barbarism” figures prominently.

Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature, and the Arts
Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature, and the Arts

Author: Markus Winkler

Publisher: J.B. Metzler

Published: 2023-08-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783476046109

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This two-volume co-authored study explores the history of the concept of barbarism from the eighteenth century to the present and highlights its foundational role in modern European and Western identity. It constitutes an original comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of the concept’s modern European and Western history and combines overviews with detailed analyses of representative works of literature, art, film, philosophy, and political and cultural theory. Volume 2 broaches figurations of barbarism and mobilizations of the barbarian across diverse contexts, media, and fields from the early twentieth century to our present: from avant-garde manifestoes to contemporary multilingual literature and adaptations of the Medea myth, from anti-colonial to eco-socialist texts, from political philosophy and ethno-anthropology to contemporary pop culture, from Russian poetry to Western political rhetoric, from Europe to Latin America, from cinema to art biennials, and from (neo-)Marxists to the Alt-Right.

Mapping Medea
Mapping Medea

Author: Anna Albrektson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-08-26

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0192884301

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The late-eighteenth century witnessed multiple Medeas take to the stages of Europe, in the Americas, and across the Russian empire. Performances took place in Moscow and São Paulo, in London and Lisbon, in Gotha, Stuttgart, and Venice. This lively collection of essays examines the various reasons why Medea, the ancient mother who killed her own children, attracted the attention of authors, audiences, actors, and rulers in Europe and its dominions during the pivotal period 1750 to 1800, and to what effects. As a migrant and iconoclast, Medea crosses a number of eighteenth-century borders: linguistic, cultural, national, temporal, spatial, aesthetic, ethical, and generic. Moreover, the fact that late-eighteenth-century playwrights, poets, composers, and choreographers all turned to one of the most problematic characters of Greco-Roman antiquity offers a unique opportunity to examine the remarkable flexibility of the reception process itself. Medea therefore functions as an intriguing case study, reflecting a wider context of cultural and political change within Europe and its colonies in the late-eighteenth century. By drawing together eighteenth-century specialists working across multiple languages and disciplines with the reception perspective of classical scholars, this volume brings much rare material from a range of archives across continental Europe to critical attention for the first time. Mapping Medea shows how the eighteenth century made Medea modern, and Medea helped to shape modern performance.

Subjects Barbarian, Monstrous, and Wild
Subjects Barbarian, Monstrous, and Wild

Author: Maria Boletsi

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-11-20

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 9004352015

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Subjects Barbarian, Monstrous, and Wild responds to a contemporary political climate in which historically invested figures of otherness—barbarians, savages, monsters—have become common discursive currency. Through questionable historical comparisons, politicians and journalists evoke barbaric or primitive forces threatening civilization in order to exacerbate the fear of others, diagnose civilizational decline, or feed nostalgic restorative projects. These evocations often demand that forms of oppression, discrimination, and violence be continued or renewed. In this context, the collected essays explore the dispossessing effects of these figures but also their capacities for reimagining subjectivity, agency, and resistance to contemporary forms of power. Emphasizing intersections of the aesthetic and the political, these essays read canonical works alongside contemporary literature, film, art, music, and protest cultures. They interrogate the violent histories but also the subversive potentials of figures barbarous, monstrous, or wild, while illustrating the risks in affirmative resignifications or new mobilizations. Contributors: Sophie van den Bergh, Maria Boletsi, Siebe Bluijs, Giulia Champion, Cui Chen, Tom Curran, Andries Hiskes, Tyler Sage, Cansu Soyupak, Ruby de Vos, Mareen Will

Beyond 'Hellenes' and 'Barbarians'
Beyond 'Hellenes' and 'Barbarians'

Author: Kirill Postoutenko

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2022-10-14

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1800736800

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Forty years ago, German historian Reinhart Koselleck coined the notion of ‘asymmetrical concepts’, pointing at the asymmetry between standard self-ascriptions, such as ‘Hellenes’ or ‘Christians’, and pejorative other-references (‘Barbarians’ or ‘Pagans’) as a powerful weapon of cultural and political domination. Advancing and refining Koselleck’s approach, Beyond ‘Hellenes’ and ‘Barbarians’ explores the use of significant conceptual asymmetries such as ‘civilization’ vs. ‘barbarity’, ‘liberalism’ vs. ‘servility’, ‘order’ vs. ‘chaos’ or even ‘masters’ vs. ‘slaves’ in political, scientific and fictional discourses of Europe from the Middle Ages to the present day. Using an interdisciplinary set of approaches, the scholars in political history, cultural sociology, intellectual history and literary criticism bolster and extend our understanding of this ever-growing area of conceptual history.

Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes
Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes

Author: Maria Boletsi

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 3030364151

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This collection rethinks crisis in relation to critique through the prism of various declared ‘crises’ in the Mediterranean: the refugee crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the Greek debt crisis, the Arab Spring, the Palestinian question, and others. With contributions from cultural, literary, film, and migration studies and sociology, this book shifts attention from Europe to the Mediterranean as a site not only of intersecting crises, but a breeding ground for new cultures of critique, visions of futurity, and radical imaginaries shaped through or against frameworks of crisis. If crisis rhetoric today serves populist, xenophobic or anti-democratic agendas, can the concept crisis still do the work of critique or partake in transformative languages by scholars, artists, and activists? Or should we forge different vocabularies to understand present realities? This collection explores alternative mobilizations of crisis and forms of art, cinema, literature, and cultural practices across the Mediterranean that disengage from dominant crisis narratives. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Cultures of Currencies
Cultures of Currencies

Author: Joan Ramon Resina

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-03-10

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 100054320X

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This book’s premise is not only the commonly accepted cultural relativity of economic concepts, but also the observation that the current shift in the meaning of concepts like “market,” “currency,” “exchange,” and “money” suggests that culture is undergoing a change with unpredictable economic and political consequences. The essays in the book raise basic questions concerning exchange – what is exchanged, who exchanges and how, which kind of currency is used, and indeed what is money and how does it convey and retain value over time. These issues are all classical objects of economic theory, but less often have they been approached from a cultural perspective. Works treating economic and monetary issues from a cultural perspective are few and far apart, and this book aims to contribute to such a perspective with a variety of approaches.

Specters of Cavafy
Specters of Cavafy

Author: Maria Boletsi

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2024-07-02

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0472904493

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The Greek Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) has been recognized as a central figure in European modernism and world literature. His poetry explored the conditions for animating the past and making lost worlds or people haunt the present. Yet he also described himself as “a poet of the future generations.” Indeed, his writings address concerns and desires that permeate the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How does poetry concerned with the past, memory, loss, and death, carry futurity? How does it haunt, and how is it haunted by, future presents? Specters of Cavafy broaches these questions by proposing spectral poetics as a novel approach to Cavafy’s work. Drawing from theorizations of specters and haunting, it develops spectrality as a lens for revisiting Cavafy’s poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, as well as his poetry’s bearing on our present. By examining Cavafy’s spectral poetics, the book’s first part shows how conjurations work in his writings, and how the spectral permeates the entanglement of modernity and haunting, and of irony and affect. The second part traces the afterlives of specific poems in the Western imagination since the 1990s, in Egypt’s history of debt and colonization, and in Greece during the country’s recent debt crisis. Beyond its original contribution to Cavafy studies, the book proposes tools and modes of reading that are broadly applicable in literary and cultural studies.