Description
Book SynopsisThis essay collection embarks on a historical voyage into the idea of the West, while contextualising its relevance to the contemporary discourses on cultural difference. Although the idea of the West predates both colonial and Orientalist projects, it has been radically reshaped by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 attacks. In the wake of these developments, this collection attends to the nebulous paradigm shifts that account for a reconfiguration of the conventional coordinates of the West (West vs. Rest, Orient vs. Occident). The essays featured in this collection draw upon a wide range of theories from a comparative perspective. Taken together, the collection covers a vast terrain of textual and non-textual sources, including novels, political and poetological programs, video-clips and hypertexts, while exploring the formal-aesthetic representations of the West from interdisciplinary perspectives as diverse as German classicism, (post-)modern Britain, Canada, China, Ireland and the postcolonial world.
Table of ContentsAleida Assmann: Vorwort Ines Detmers and Birte Heidemann: Einleitung: Annäherungen an den Westen Projekte, Praktiken, Prozesse Anil Bhatti: Der Orient als Experimentierfeld. Goethes Divan und der Aneignungsprozess kolonialen Wissens Katrin Schmeißner: Goethe als Korrektiv: Klassiker-Entwürfe Benedetto Croces und José Ortega y Gassets Kathleen Starck: A Lot of Catching Up to Do – The West as a Civiliser of Post-Cold War Eastern Europe in Rose Tremain’s The Road Home Oliver Lindner: The End of the West in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction Michael Ostheimer: Im Zeichen des Wolfs. Die Schriftsteller Jiang Rong und Lu Xun als Grenzgänger zwischen chinesischer Tradition und westlicher Moderne Susan Nitzsche: Regional (Re)Conceptions of the Irish West Malreddy Pavan Kumar: Pulp, Sci-fi and the Politics of Other Fictions: Face to Face with Mohsin Hamid Birte Heidemann: Embodiments of the West: Texture and Textuality of the Symbolic Body in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist Niven Kumar & Lucyna Swiatek: Contradictions of Human Agency from Victorian Cosmopolitanism to Postmodern Eclecticism Denis Simon: New Narrative Forms as a Subversion of Established Literary Norms: Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and the Negative Bildungsroman of the 1880s and 1890s Ines Detmers: ‘Look West in Anger’: Exklusive Emotopien in Christian Krachts 1979 und Salman Rushdies Fury. Ein Beitrag zur Affektpoetik des neo-dekadenten Romans Ana Sobral: Towards a ‘World Revolution’? Forging a Transnational Emancipation Narrative from Tahrir Square to Wall Street Notes on Contributors
