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…
Finance has gone farming. Since the financial and food price crises of 2007/ 8, the world has seen a stark rise in financial investments in farmland and agri-cultural production by investment banks, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, private equity funds, insurance companies, family offices, endowment funds and high- net-worth individuals (HNWIs). Indeed, finance has been …
Volcanic unrest is a complex multi-hazard phe-nomenon of volcanism. Although it is fair toassume that probably all volcanic eruptions arepreceded by some form of unrest, the cause andeffect relationship between subsurface processesand resulting unrest signals (geophysical orgeochemical data recorded at the ground surface,phenomenological observations) is unclear andsurrounded by uncertainty (e.…
Buku ini merupakan kumpulan hasil kerjasama penelitian melalui proyek EFForTS (Ecological and Socioeconomic Functions of Tropical Lowland Rainforest Transformation Systems) dan difokuskan sebagai buku yang dapat memberikan informasi mengenai nilai penting dari keanekaragaman hayati serangga dan dampak dari perubahan tata guna lahan terhadap keberadaan serangga. Hasil penelitian dalam buku ini …
The financial crisis and the recession that followed caught many people off guard, including experts in the financial sector whose jobs involve predicting market fluctuations. Financial analysis offices in most international banks are supposed to forecast the rise or fall of stock prices, the success or failure of investment products, and even the growth or decline of entire national economies.…
Pirates, it is frequently claimed, have existed since the dawn of history, as long as there has been traff ic and commerce at sea.1 Presumably, the origins of piracy would thus be sometime in the pre-historic past, when people f irst took to the sea for commercial purposes, probably around eight thousand years ago, along the coast of the Persian Gulf.2 Historical records over close to three and…
At the origin of the cooperation that eventually led to this book, there is the idea of emphasizing the gap between the ordinariness of diversity, as it occurs in everyday life, and the many ways of representing and addressing it as something exceptional, independently of whether those representations and practices carry with them posi-tive or negative connotations. On the on…
The aims of this chapter revolve around three arguments. First, in agreement with the contributions this volume consists of, it demonstrates the continu-ing force and reality of the nation form as the only mode of politics world-wide currently. Against arguments seeing the demise of nationalism as integral to the march to globalization, globalism or a cosmopolitan future on the one ha…
Energy poverty occurs when a household is unable to secure a level and quality of domestic energy services—space cooling and heating, cooking, appliances, information technology—sufficient for its social and material needs. This somewhat contested and broad definition lies at the tip of a vast scientific and policy iceberg, involving complex socio-technical relat…
As we use money every day without much thought, it is important to understandhow it does work before discussing its future. Money is “the set of assets in aneconomy that people regularly use to buy goods and services from other people”[2]. In particular, money serves certain desiredeconomic functions, which requirecertainphysical propertiesof assets. Over time, different approaches have evo…
"Placing itself within the burgeoning field of world literary studies, the organising principle of this book is that of an open-ended dynamic, namely the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange. As an adaptable comparative fulcrum for literary studies, the notion of the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange accommodates also highly localised literatures. In this way, it redresses what has repeatedly been i…