In an age of accelerating ecological crises, global inequalities and democratic fragility, it has become crucial to achieve renewed articulations of human commonality. With anchorage in critical theory as well as world literary studies, this volume approaches literature – and modes of literary thinking – as a key resource for such a task.
I introduce this volume with distinct pleasure, since it marks the final step in a journey that started seven years ago, at the ICLA 2013 at the Sorbonne. The deci-sion to host the ICLA 2016 at the University of Vienna meant that, from 2013 to 2016, I had to face the biggest organizational challenge of my career, since I had the honour to support Achim Hölter, the chair …
Wandering religious poets – that is to say, poets for whom wande-ring is a way of life and whose poetry deals with religious themes – can be found in a variety of ancient and modern cultures. In India, Tibet, and Japan the ascetic or saint who travels from place to place has been the subject of both veneration and fear for hund-reds, or even thousands, of years, as is evident i…
Am 7. und 8. Juli 2017 versammelten sich in den Hamburger Messehallen Vertreter*innen der reichsten Länder der Welt für das Treffen der Gruppe der 20. Verschiedene Bündnisse und Initiativen riefen zu Protesten gegen das Treffen auf. Organisiert wurde ein vielfältiges Repertoire an Protest-aktionen, das von einem Gegengipfel und Protestcamps über Performan-ces, …
World literature is not an object, it’s a problem.’ This was Franco Moretti (2000: 55), famously, in 2000. But what is the problem of world literature today, two decades later? In broad strokes, the disciplinary challenge would seem to be the same: to devise methods and reading practices that offer alternatives to entrenched national and civilizational frameworks. Scholars…
Human relationships with our oceans date back millennia. They have shaped the rise of civilizations, provided food and story, and seeded a diversity of coastal cul-tures and engagement practices around the world. However, they have also been a source of conflict, oppression and turmoil. Human-ocean stories are not new, but the magnitude of changes now incurred from these relationshi…
In June 1947, a group of nuclear scientists from the former Manhattan Projectlaunched theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a magazine that monitors newdevelopments in the life sciences and technology that could inflict irrevocableharm to humanity. That first issue had a simple image on its cover, a clock with itshands set at 7 min to midnight, that was the Bulletin’s visual metaphor to warn …
The design of hybrid materials that can be manipulated by magnetic fields is possibleby incorporating inorganic magnetic nanoobjects into complex soft matrices such asgels [1], elastomers [2], liquid crystals [3], or biologicalfluids [4] in a predeterminedway. A proper setup allows the application of external magneticfields to either analyzeor alter the material properties of such systems on a …
The IoT European Platforms Initiative (IoT-EPI) projects are address-ing the topic of Internet of Things and Platforms for Connected Smart Objects and aim to deliver an IoT extended into a web of platforms for connected devices and objects that supports smart environments, businesses, services and persons with dynamic and adaptive configu-ration capabilities. The specific areas of …
f a poll were carried out to establish which form of manuscript, the codex or the roll, the public associated more with the Middle Ages, the result would probably see the codex taking most votes. A monk handling a codex is a stereotypical image of and for the Middle Ages promoted by medieval evidence as much as by modern movie productions such as the film adaptation…