For over a quarter of a century, the author has ventured systematically into the emerging field of international political economy, an area traditionally dominated by political scientists. Crossing Frontiers - the title refers both to national and disciplinary boundaries - brings together for the first time a dozen of his essays. These essays exhibit a pragmatism, a preference for practical applications over abstract theory, and a willingness to face the complexity of the real world rather than adopt simplifying assumptions.
This is the first book-length study of the history of gerontology. It shows how old age became a 'problem' worth investigating and how a mulitidisciplinary orientation took shape.
This volume brings together two very popular and active research fields: Swiss Studies and Intercultural Studies. It includes contributions on the movement of ideas, literatures, and individuals from one culture to another or one language to another, and the ways in which they have been either assimilated or questioned. All of the writers explore this general theme; some come from a literary angle, some look at linguistic inventiveness and translation, whilst others study the problems faced when crossing geographical and cultural borders or presenting ideas which do not `travel¿ well. By emphasising the connections, borrowings and mutual influences between Switzerland and other countries such as Germany, Hungary, France, the UK, and the Americas, the articles reaffirm the importance for Switzerland of intellectual openness and cultural exchange. Barbara Burns is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Glasgow. She has published books and articles on a number of nineteenth-century German writers including Theodor Storm, Detlev von Liliencron, Louise von François and Adolf Müllner, and also has an interest in Swiss Studies, in particular the work of Eveline Hasler on which she has recently been publishing. She is Germanic Editor of the MHRA journal The Year¿s Work in Modern Language Studies. Joy Charnley has co-edited eight volumes of essays on Swiss literatures and history with Malcolm Pender and in 1996 they co-founded the Centre for Swiss Cultural Studies in Glasgow. She has written books and articles on French-speaking Swiss authors such as Yvette Z¿Graggen, Alice Rivaz, Anne-Lise Grobéty, Anne Cuneo, Janine Massard and Amélie Plume.
Crossing Frontiers is an autobiography. It starts with a short historical background of the author’s home country, Germany, as it refers to his story. Growing up during the depression and under Hitler’s National Socialists, he saw the Third Reich rise and fall. He relates interesting and humorous events from his school time, his training in the Hitler youth, labor force and military. In riveting details, he describes his war experiences, his return to his home in search of his mother. He points out the dangers he encountered living under Russian and Polish rule and later being expelled. He describes the situation in Germany after the war, illustrating it from his experience in refugee camps in East Germany, and his escape to West Germany. He compares university life in Germany, where he studied for his degree in architecture and the USA where he studied on a scholarship for a year. He narrates his adventures, hitchhiking through the United States, masterfully. His story ends with his decision to immigrate to Canada.
Der Band untersucht das Genre erstmals eingehend in seinen komplexen und vielschichtigen interkulturellen Auffächerungen, die sich in nationalspezifischen Western-Variationen finden. Er eröffnet interessante Perspektiven auf diesen film- und kulturgeschichtlich kaum erschlossenen Bereich. Ein Schwerpunkt gilt den verschiedenen nationalen Western-Varianten in Osteuropa. Beiträge von Spezialisten aus Polen, Tschechien und Russland arbeiten bislang unbekannte Übereinstimmungen und Differenzen im Gebrauch des Genres in den damals kommunistischen Ländern zu Tage. Deutlich wird dabei u.a., dass das ideologisch als anrüchig betrachtete, aber beim Publikum sehr beliebte Genre vor allem in Russland und Polen über die Intervention der Regierungen dazu diente, sowohl Kapitalismuskritik als auch Überhöhungen der eigenen Nationalkultur zu inszenieren. Darüber hinaus beinhaltet der Band auch Texte mit neuen Perspektiven auf den deutschen Western sowie auf Western-Variationen im französischen, britischen, australischen, indischen und afrikanischen Kino. Auch die vielfältigen Verbindungen zwischen Western und Eastern werden u.a. anhand internationaler Koproduktionen beleuchtet. Der Band betont die Vielschichtigkeit und Komplexität der interkulturellen Transformationen des Western, die sich von Europa über Lateinamerika und Afrika bis nach Australien und Asien nachweisen lassen. Dabei wird herausgearbeitet, wie Western-Elemente in sehr unterschiedlicher Weise zur Geltung kommen, um nationalspezifische Kulturmuster und Kommunikationszusammenhänge zu verhandeln.
It is difficult to imagine modern archaeology without radio-carbon dating, geophysics, analytical chemistry, or the input of the social and historical sources. Archaeology is inevitably an interdisciplinary enterprise, perhaps more so than any other field. But with the ever-increasing specialisation of modern research in general, it becomes more and more difficult to communicate across disciplinary doundaries; this is one of the major challenges modern archaeology faces today. This volume is the outcome of a two-day conference held at the University of Oxford that focused on the opportunities and challenges of interdisciplinary approaches to archaeology.
The Korean demilitarized zone might be among the most heavily guarded places on earth, but it also provides passage for thousands of defectors, spies, political emissaries, war prisoners, activists, tourists, and others testing the limits of Korean division. This book focuses on a diverse selection of inter-Korean border crossers and the citizenship they acquire based on emotional affiliation rather than constitutional delineation. Using their physical bodies and emotions as optimal frontiers, these individuals resist the state's right to draw geopolitical borders and define their national identity. Drawing on sources that range from North Korean documentary films, museum exhibitions, and theater productions to protester perspectives and interviews with South Korean officials and activists, this volume recasts the history of Korean division and draws a much more nuanced portrait of the region's Cold War legacies. The book ultimately helps readers conceive of the DMZ as a dynamic summation of personalized experiences rather than as a fixed site of historical significance.
This collection of essays, inspired by André Breton's concept of the limites non-frontières of Surrealism, focuses on the crossings, intersections and margins of the surrealist movement rather than its divides and exclusion zones. Some of the essays originated as papers given at the colloquium 'Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers' held at the Institute of Romance Studies, University of London, in November 2001. Surrealism is foregrounded as a trajectory rather than a fixed body of doctrines, radically challenging the notion of frontiers. The essays explore real and imaginary journeys, as well as the urban dérives of the surrealists and situationists. The concept of crossing, central to a reading of the dynamics at work in Surrealism, is explored in studies of the surrealist object, which eludes or elides genres, and explorations of the shifting sites of identity, as in the work of Joyce Mansour or André Masson. Surrealism's engagement with frontiers is further investigated through a number of revealing cases, such as a political reading of 1930s photography, the parodic rewriting of the popular 'locked room' mystery, or the surrealists' cavalier redrawing of the map of the world. The essays contribute to our understanding of the diversity and dynamism of Surrealism as an international and interdisciplinary movement.
Unbounded Loyalty investigates how frontiers worked before the modern nation-state was invented. The perspective is that of the people in the borderlands who shifted their allegiance from the post-Tang regimes in North China to the new Liao empire (907–1125). Naomi Standen offers new ways of thinking about borders, loyalty, and identity in premodern China. She takes as her starting point the recognition that, at the time, "China" did not exist as a coherent entity, neither politically nor geographically, neither ethnically nor ideologically. Political borders were not the fixed geographical divisions of the modern world, but a function of relationships between leaders and followers. When local leaders changed allegiance, the borderline moved with them. Cultural identity did not determine people’s actions: Ethnicity did not exist. In this context, she argues, collaboration, resistance, and accommodation were not meaningful concepts, and tenth-century understandings of loyalty were broad and various. Unbounded Loyalty sheds fresh light on the Tang-Song transition by focusing on the much-neglected tenth century and by treating the Liao as the preeminent Tang successor state. It fills several important gaps in scholarship on premodern China as well as uncovering new questions regarding the early modern period. It will be regarded as critically important to all scholars of the Tang, Liao, Five Dynasties, and Song periods and will be read widely by those working on Chinese history from the Han to the Qing.
