Sabine Coelsch Foisner Boeken

This volume brings together papers given at the 18th British Cultural Studies Conference, held in Salzburg in 2007. As the title 'High Culture and / versus Popular Culture' suggests, it addresses an unsettled issue. On the one hand, it recalls the dissatisfaction with the distinction between high culture and popular culture characteristic of both post-fifties debates, which resulted in a complete re-orientation in cultural criticism, and of more recent suggestions of the 'collapse of boundaries'. On the other hand, it calls attention to the many ways in which this distinction still makes sense, as has been argued in defence of cultural pluralism. Dealing with literature, music, the theatre, film and television, the papers collected in this volume address the following questions: Does high culture 'borrow' from popular culture? Or vice versa? What kinds of transformation or adaptation between the cultural hierarchies are involved? Why, when and how do the relationships between high and popular culture change, either within a single cultural phenomenon or among different ones? What do such changes mean in terms of taste, class and gender as well as in terms of genre, form, and language? If high and pop are more conveniently considered as working terms rather than as having any essentialist connotations, who categorizes cultural products as 'high' or 'low' or 'popular'? Who is interested in such distinctions? Who negotiates these terms - 'high', 'pop', 'low', 'high-pop' - between a work of art, the artist / producer, and the recipient / consumer?

'The Museal Turn' explores the dynamics of contemporary museum culture with regard to its ethics and aesthetics as well as its institutional, social and political frameworks. Aiming at a fuller understanding of both changes in museum culture and shifting interests in it, this collection of talks given at two interdisciplinary conferences held in Salzburg between 2009 and 2010 brings together the voices of practitioners and scholars from Europe, the USA and New Zealand. Grouped into five sections: „Museum Perspectives“, „Museum Visiting“, „Museum Narratives“, „Performing the Museum“ and „Museum Practice“, 26 papers address the 'museal turn' in terms of the museum's history and cultural diversity, its materiality and mediality, its representation in literature as well as its political and educational agenda. Drawing, inter alia, on debates about consumer cultures, narratology and performance studies, this book reveals the 'museal turn' to negotiate some of present-day culture's most pressing dichotomies: loss and conservation, private and public, self and other, high and popular, individual and collective, learning and entertainment, authority and democracy

Revolution in Poetic Consciousness is a considerable and groundbreaking piece of work. It provides a most substantial, perceptive, and well-informed account of a neglected body of English poetry from the middle years of the twentieth century. Starting from the hypothesis that an excessive concern with movements, schools and literary generations has generated maps of English poetry from which important and interesting poets – especially women poets – have been effaced, Revolution in Poetic Consciousness recovers, situates and re-situates a lost and undeservedly ignored generation of writers in the poetic landscape between 1938 and 1965: Frances Bellerby, Lilian Bowes Lyon, Frances Cornford, Phoebe Hesketh, Elizabeth Jennings, Kathleen Nott, Ruth Pitter, Kathleen Raine, Anne Ridler, E. J. Scovell, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Dorothy Wellesley, and Sheila Wingfield. For the purpose of reading these poets, a new typology of poetic categories (types of ethos, modes, voices) is evolved, which is disturbingly relevant to both genre theories and current discussions of the self. Revolution in Poetic Consciousness won the Kardinal-Innitzer Förderungspreis 2001. Volume II: Poetic Consciousness and Lyrical Expression focuses on the ethos of interiority (divided into the pastoral mode and the autobiographical mode), and the ethos of the numinous (divided into the archetypal, Christian, and epiphanic modes). The readings of Bellerby, Cornford, Jennings, Pitter, Raine, Ridler, Scovell, and Wellesley in accordance with these categories are extensive, lucid and discriminating and supported by material from Coelsch-Foisner’s own interviews and correspondence, from broadcasts, handwritten documents, and from a rich body of reviews collected in special archives and never brought together in this wealth.

Mit dem Begriff ‚transmedial‘ wird der Fragebezug zwischen medialen Konfigurationen und dem, was gemeint ist, ins Blickfeld der Forschung gerückt. Digitale Technologien und weltweite Netzwerke haben ein Neudenken dieses Sinnzusammenhangs gefordert und Debatten über das transmediale Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Mediengebundenheit und Mediendurchlässigkeit um die Annahme einer radikalen Transitivität aller Inhalte und Verfahren erweitert. Um aktuelle Um- bzw. Neuwertungen geht es im jüngsten Band der Arbeitsgemeinschaft „Kulturelle Dynamiken“. ‚Transmedialisierung‘ widmet sich Prozessen der Formation und Transformation im Spannungsfeld von ‚Transitivität‘ und ‚Kreativität‘. Aktuelle Beispiele liefern Comic, Literatur und Film, Mode, zeitgenössisches Musiktheater und kulturelles Erbe, bildgebende Verfahren in der Neuromedizin, Akustikdesign, Franchises, Spieleindustrie und kommerzielle ‚cross-promotion‘, digitale Lern-Apps, Simulation und Augmented Reality. In einem übergreifenden Sinn wird Transmedialisierung als Leitkonzept kultureller Produktionsforschung und als Forschungsprinzip an sich diskutiert.

‚Theatralisierung‘ verhandelt die Brisanz des Theaters als gesellschaftlichen Ort innovativer Wissensproduktion, als genuinen Raum des Erfahrens und als Verweis auf kulturelle Handlungsfelder und Praktiken, die das Kunsttheater ebenso wie Prozesse jenseits des Theaters betreffen. In unterschiedlichen epistemischen Gattungen gibt der Band einen transdisziplinären Aufriss über unterschiedliche Verortungen der Theatralisierung aus Sicht der Literaturwissenschaft, der Theaterwissenschaft, der (vergleichenden) Kulturwissenschaft, der Philosophie, Theologie, Anthropologie und Soziologie, der Sportwissenschaft und der Geschichtswissenschaft sowie unterschiedlicher Kunstsparten (Theater, Literatur, Film, Komposition und Bildhauerei). Damit soll zum einen gezeigt werden, wie das Theater gleichsam Fluchtpunkt verschiedenster Theoriebildungen ist, zum anderen sollen deren Perspektiven auf die Dynamik des Theaters als Kunst- und Kulturpraxis zurückgebunden werden. In diesem Spannungsfeld werden auch die aus der Produktionsforschung entwickelten Konzepte des ‚Paratheatralen‘, ‚Genetischen‘ und ‚Semiophorischen‘ positioniert.

The book presents contributions to the 2012 conference of the Austrian Association of University Teachers of English in which scholars of various fields of English Studies discuss aspects of contact and conflict in Anglophone literatures, critical theory, cultural studies, interdisciplinary and comparative English studies and English linguistics. The papers reflect current research in these areas and show that disciplinary classifications are no longer as rigid as they used to be: Topics are as widely spread as linguistic variation, Māori English, English as a lingua franca, intergenerational conflict, hip hop discourse, literature and the creative arts, science drama, childhood in crime fiction, and the crisis of «high art».

Asking how we cope with change and compensate for loss, both cognitively and culturally, ‘Memorialisation’ brings together leading scholars in museum studies and art history, literature and trauma studies, theology, psychiatry, neuroscience and cultural anthropology. In nine papers, this book traces the changing role of cultural vehicles for memorialisation and offers thought-provoking insights into biological, economic and political reasons for collecting and museum-building as well as into the practice of forensic archaeology pushed by sites of atrocity and genocide. Exploring discourses in trauma and (self-)life writing, this volume also ventures into new fields of research, such as digital mourning, and deals with practical examples of memorialisation from (auto-)biography, music, stage-design and sculpture to city-wide exhibitions. ‘Memorialisation’ addresses issues of topical concern (the role of memory in post-conflict states, the cultural and religious contexts for commemorating victims of history) and aims to make cultural theory and practice meet.

Since the end of the Cold War a significant number of fantastic texts, films, artworks and new media practices across Europe have raised social and political questions. The fantastic typically works to disrupt the mimetic through supernatural, magical and visionary means. In this sense it breaks through boundaries of genre, space and identity. This volume explores a variety of contemporary fantastic literature and films, television, comics and cultural practices, ranging from new trends in European cinema over Polish fantasy novels to the role of the fantastic in contemporary European paganisms. The contributions show how the fantastic is used to comment on, and come to terms with, traumatic events; how it renegotiates the good-versus-evil opposition as well as the figure of the hero in texts produced after the end of the Cold War and in the wake of 9/11. A special focus is given to genre developments and to major themes such as the formation of national, cultural and personal identities or the blurring and redefinition of boundaries. 'New Directions in the European Fantastic' is an invaluable contribution both to the study of the traffic of the fantastic across genres, cultures and media and to critical debates about post-Cold-War and post-9/11 culture.

Representations of the human life cycle in literature have varied with time, social conditions and value systems and may be seen as projections of, or deviations from, an 'ideal life'. The cult of childhood, the focus on initiation or conversely aging, life extension and immortality are indicative of what has been valued about life and how life-course models have been shaped according to these ideals. Focusing on how individual literary genres, such as the Bildungsroman, the gothic, science fiction and travel literature deal with the human life cycle, the papers collected in this volume address the following questions: how is life patterned in literature? What mode of narration, perspective or structure is required for the presentation of a particular life course? How do particular life-course models impose certain features onto narratives, and in what way do narrative genres influence our perception of real phenomena? This book sheds light on the poetics of the human life course in different periods and cultural contexts.

Der vorliegende Band ist das Ergebnis einer bilateralen Forschungskooperation zwischen der Universität Salzburg und der Universität Reims und widmet sich der Verschränkung von Raumtheorie und Kunstpraxis. Die auf Deutsch, Englisch und Französisch verfassten Beiträge konzentrieren sich auf den metamorphen Raum und beleuchten einerseits, wie sich unser Verständnis von Raum historisch bedingt ändert, andererseits wie räumliche Erfahrung auf einem dauernden Perspektivenwechsel beruht und der Raum in der Wahrnehmung ständig zum Erinnerungsraum oder zum schöpferischen Phantasieraum umgeformt wird. Fallstudien zu Literatur (Ferdinand von Saar, J. G. Ballard, Rosamunde Pilcher, Danièle Sallenave, Durs Grünbein), Theater, Oper, Tanz und Film ebenso wie raumgeographische, philosophische, erziehungswissenschaftliche und kulturpolitische Analysen wollen nicht nur den Diskurs zwischen den Disziplinen fördern, sondern den künstlerischen Umgang mit dem Konzept Raum für die wissenschaftliche Forschung und umgekehrt fruchtbar machen und damit einen originellen Beitrag zur gegenwärtigen Raumdebatte in den Kulturwissenschaften liefern.