The Metamorphosis of the World
The Metamorphosis of the World

Author: Ulrich Beck

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-09-02

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0745690254

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We live in a world that is increasingly difficult to understand. It is not just changing: it is metamorphosing. Change implies that some things change but other things remain the same capitalism changes, but some aspects of capitalism remain as they always were. Metamorphosis implies a much more radical transformation in which the old certainties of modern society are falling away and something quite new is emerging. To grasp this metamorphosis of the world it is necessary to explore the new beginnings, to focus on what is emerging from the old and seek to grasp future structures and norms in the turmoil of the present. Take climate change: much of the debate about climate change has focused on whether or not it is really happening, and if it is, what we can do to stop or contain it. But this emphasis on solutions blinds us to the fact that climate change is an agent of metamorphosis. It has already altered our way of being in the world the way we live in the world, think about the world and seek to act upon the world through our actions and politics. Rising sea levels are creating new landscapes of inequality drawing new world maps whose key lines are not traditional boundaries between nation-states but elevations above sea level. It is creating an entirely different way of conceptualizing the world and our chances of survival within it. The theory of metamorphosis goes beyond theory of world risk society: it is not about the negative side effects of goods but the positive side effects of bads. They produce normative horizons of common goods and propel us beyond the national frame towards a cosmopolitan outlook.

Turning Points
Turning Points

Author: Ansgar Nünning

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-10-30

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 3110297108

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At times of crisis and revolution such as ours, diagnoses of crucial junctures and ruptures – ‘turning points’ – in the continuous flow of history are more prevalent than ever. Analysing literary, cinematic and other narratives, the volume seeks to understand the meanings conveyed by different concepts of turning points, the alternative concepts to which they are opposed when used to explain historical change, and those contexts in which they are unmasked as false and over-simplifying constructions. Literature and film in particular stress the importance of turning points as a sensemaking device (as part of a character’s or a community’s cultural memory), while at the same time unfolding the constructive and hence relative character of turning points. Offering complex reflections on the notion of turning points, literary and filmic narratives are thus of particular interest to the present volume.

Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England
Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England

Author: Gesa Stedman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 135194696X

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Gesa Stedman's ambitious new study is a comprehensive account of cross-channel cultural exchanges between seventeenth-century France and England, and includes discussion of a wide range of sources and topics. Literary texts, garden design, fashion, music, dance, food, the book market, and the theatre as well as key historical figures feature in the book. Importantly, Stedman concentrates on the connection between actual, material transfer and its symbolic representation in both visual and textual sources, investigating material exchange processes in order to shed light on the connection between actual and symbolic exchange. Individual chapters discuss exchanges instigated by mediators such as Henrietta Maria and Charles II, and textual and visual representations of cultural exchange with France in poetry, restoration comedies, fashion discourse, and in literary devices and characters. Well-written and accessible, Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England provides needed insight into the field of cultural exchange, and will be of interest to both literary scholars and cultural historians.

ImageScapes
ImageScapes

Author: Christian Emden

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 9783039105731

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The relationship between different media has emerged as one of the most important areas of research in contemporary cultural and literary studies. But how should we conceive of the relationship between texts and images today? Should we speak of collaboration, interaction or competition? What is the role of literary, historical and scientific texts in a culture dominated by the visual? What is the status of images as cultural artefacts? Are images forms of representation, do they simulate reality or do they intervene in the material world? And how do literature and cultural theory - themselves essentially textual discourses - react to the much-discussed visual turn within Western culture? Does the concept of 'intermediality' allow literary, historical and cultural scholars to envisage a more general theory of media? Addressing these questions from a programmatic point of view, the articles in this volume investigate the effects of different forms of representation in modern European and American literature, media and thought.

Bodies and Boundaries in Graeco-Roman Antiquity
Bodies and Boundaries in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

Author: Thorsten Fögen

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2010-01-13

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 3110212536

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In the Graeco-Roman world, the cosmic order was enacted, in part, through bodies. The evaluative divisions between, for example, women and men, humans and animals, “barbarians” and “civilized” people, slaves and free citizens, or mortals and immortals, could all be played out across the terrain of somatic difference, embedded as it was within wider social and cultural matrices. This volume explores these thematics of bodies and boundaries: to examine the ways in which bodies, lived and imagined, were implicated in issues of cosmic order and social organisation in classical antiquity. It focuses on the body in performance (especially in a rhetorical context), the erotic body, the dressed body, pagan and Christian bodies as well as divine bodies and animal bodies. The articles draw on a range of evidence and approaches, cover a broad chronological and geographical span, and explore the ways bodies can transgress and dissolve, as well shore up, or even create, boundaries and hierarchies. This volume shows that boundaries are constantly negotiated, shifted and refigured through the practices and potentialities of embodiment.

Counternarrative Possibilities
Counternarrative Possibilities

Author: James Dorson

Publisher: Campus Verlag

Published: 2016-06-09

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 3593433834

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Counternarrative Possibilities reads Cormac McCarthy's Westerns against the backdrop of two formative tropes in American mythology: virgin land (from the 1950s) and homeland (after '9/11' ). Looking at McCarthy's Westerns in the context of American Studies, James Dorson shows how his novels counter the national narratives underlying these tropes and reinvest them with new, potentially transformative meaning. Departing from prevailing accounts of McCarthy that place him in relation to his literary antecedents, Counternarrative Possibilities takes a forwardlooking approach that reads McCarthy's work as a key influence on millennial fiction. Weaving together disciplinary history with longstanding debates over the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this book is at once an exploration of the limits of ideology critique in the twenty-first century and an original reconsideration of McCarthy's work 'after postmodernism'.

Coaching Cultures
Coaching Cultures

Author: Neil Carter

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-11

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1317983149

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Coaches are amongst the most visible figures in sport today but little is known about the history of their profession. This book examines the history of coaching from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century. It uses a number of sports as case studies that includes: cricket, swimming, rugby union, athletics, football and tennis. The focus is largely English but international examples are used to illuminate the British context. A number of themes are explored. Initially, in the 1800s, the coach was like an artisan who learned his skills on the job and coaching was similar to a craft. Early coaches were professionals but from the late nineteenth century an amateur elite governed British sport, who inhibited and in some sports banned coaching. As the twentieth century progressed, though, different sports at different stages began to embrace coaching as international competition intensified. In addition, the nature of coaching changed as a more scientific and managerial approach was applied. Finally, in football, the export of early British coaches is examined in light of the migration of international athletes and also as a process of ‘knowledge transfer’. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in History.