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A prescient exploration of the fate of the book in the digital age.
The Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) has been recognized as a decisive past master in the emergence of contemporary media theory and media archeology. His work engages and also rethinks several mythologies of modernity, devising new methodologies, experimental literary practices, and expanded hermeneutics that trouble traditional practices of literary/literate knowledge, shared experience, reception, and communication. Working within an expanded concept of modernism, Flusser presciently noted the power inherent in algorithmic information apparatuses to reshape our fundamental conceptions of culture and history. In an increasingly technological world, Flusser's form of...
An innovative account of urban memory as a conversation across languages.
The analyses of German and Brazilian cultures found in this book offer a much-needed rethinking of the intercultural paradigm for the humanities and literary and cultural studies. This collection examines cultural interactions between Germany and Brazil from the Early Modern period to the present day, especially how authors, artists and other intellectuals address the development of society, intervene in the construction and transformation of cultural identities, and observe the introduction of differing cultural elements in and beyond the limits of the nation. The contributors represent various academic disciplines, including German Studies, Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies, Cultural Studies, Li...
This book brings together Vilém Flusser and intellectual Jewish history of the second half of the twentieth century. Flusser is viewed today by many scholars as the most original theoretician of media and photography in the second half of the twentieth century, and yet this is the first monograph about him in English. Combining elements of Flusser’s biography with a rigorous study of his writing, this book shows that concepts of ‘virtuality’, ‘medium’, and ‘embodiment’ underpin not only Flusser’s understanding of technological media, such as photography, but also his understanding of evolution and of real or imaginary biological organisms. This book argues that Flusser conte...
In four chronologically organized chapters, this study traces the conceptual dependence and deep connectivity among Claes Oldenburg’s poetry, sculpture, films, and performance art between 1956 and 1965. This research-intensive book argues that Oldenburg’s art relies on machine vision and other metaphors to visualize the structure and image content of human thought as an artistic problem. Anchored in new oral history interviews and extensive archival material, it brings together understudied visual and concrete poetry, experimental films, fifteen group performances (commonly referred to as happenings), and a close analysis of his well-known installations of The Street (1960) and The Store (1961–62), effectively setting in place a reexamination of Oldenburg’s pop art from the street, store, home, and cinema years. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, film studies, performance studies, literature, intermedia studies, and media theory.
In today’s ever-changing climate of disintegration and recombination, translation has become one of the essential metaphors, if not the metaphor, of our globalized world. Translation and Metaphor is an attempt to draw a comprehensive map of these new overlapping theoretical territories and the many cross-disciplinary movements they imply. In five chapters, this book examines: · The main metaphor theories developed in the West. · The way the notion of metaphor relates to the concept of translation. · Different theoretical perspectives on metaphors of translation in translation studies. · The main metaphors developed to describe translation in the West and in the East. · Spatial metapho...
Metaphors of Multilingualism explores changing attitudes towards multilingualism by focusing on shifts both in the choice and in the use of metaphors. Rainer Guldin uses linguistics, philosophy, literature, literary theory and related disciplines to trace the radical redefinition of multilingualism that has taken place over the last decades. This overall change constitutes a paradigmatic shift. However, despite the emergence of the new paradigm, the traditional monolingual point of view is still significantly influencing present-day attitudes towards multilingualism. Consequently, the emergent paradigm has to be studied in close connection with its predecessor. This book is the first extensi...
This study compares the substantial literary projects of Michel Leiris and Hubert Fichte, and examines how they overstep theoretical prescriptions in their explorations of the self. Throughout the book, the author contends that for Leiris and Fichte alike, life and writing become mutually defining over the protracted progressions of their self-scrutiny.
Instead of smoothing over contemporary art's violent and iconoclastic dimensions, instead of sanitizing and making complex artworks docile in terms of archival possibilities, this book suggests we abandon our fantasy of mastery over representation and respond in kind to the archive-as-artwork, to "living" archives, and to reenactments of history with their seamless connections between fiction and non-fiction. Among the concepts examined are Vilém Flusser's techno-imagination, Lygia Clark's and Hélio Oiticica's participatory aesthetics, and Paulo Bruscky's and Eduardo Kac's literal performances of the archive. They contribute to the erosion of the archive's former boundaries, stability, fun...