Journals an der JLU Gießen (Justus-Liebig Universität)
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Caught in the net. The emergence of network society between utopia and reality
No full textEs geht in der vorliegenden Arbeit Vernetzt. Zur Entstehung der Netzwerkgesellschaft von Clemens Apprich um die Vorgeschichte der Netzwerkgesellschaft im europäischen Kontext. Er untersucht die historischen Bedingungen eines inzwischen allgegenwärtigen Netzwerkdiskurses und lüftet den ideologischen Schleier um Utopien der 1990er Jahre, wie etwa der Emanzipation der Frauen, des Individuums oder der Teilhabe aller an den neuen Medientechnologien. Der Autor geht hart mit den großen Medien-Unternehmen ins Gericht und kritisiert die massenmediale Logik der kommerziellen Online-Medien welche dazu dienen, eine normative Subjektivität herzustellen. Abschließend werden alternative Vorschläge unterbreitet, die einen neuen Weg im Umgang mit dem Internet vorzeigen.The focal point of this work is the history of network society in the European context. It examines the historical conditions of a now ubiquitous discourse about networks, and uncovers the ideological veil of the utopias presented in the 1990’s, such as the emancipation of women or the individual, as well as community participation in new media technologies. The author is harsh with big media companies and criticizes the mass media logic that equates to commercial online media, which serves to establish a normative subjectivity. Eventually, alternative proposals are presented, which suggest new ways of dealing with the Internet
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth? Digital Animals, Simulation, and the Return of ‘Real Nature’ in the Jurassic Park Movies
No full textThis essay argues that the digital reanimation of dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park series not only epitomizes mankind’s tortured relationship with other animal species on this planet, but also demonstrates how technology transforms animals into spectral post-animal beings. Both in its diegesis and in its production, the Jurassic Park movie franchise emblematizes humanity’s compulsive desire to control the rest of the planet. This desire has culminated in the most recent addition to the series, in which animatronics were practically completely replaced by digital dinosaurs the filmmakers could control more easily. Yet despite the tangibility, the material reality of the animatronics, throughout the movie series, the spectral dinosaur bodies animated by digital technologies not only seem much more ‘alive’ than their mechanical counterparts, but shape viewers’ conceptions of what dinosaurs are and what they looked like, lending the digital animals a hyperreal quality that stands in stark contrast to their symbolic equation with material nature. In this way, the Jurassic Park movie franchise presents a telling example of the conflicted and paradoxical interrelations between technology and spectral animal bodies (and, thus, nature) in the digital age
“Che tempo, che tempo”: Geology and Environment in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän
No full textCritical readings of Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän [Man in the Holocene] have tended to read its heterogeneous and inter-medial form as a code for the mental disintegration of its protagonist. This paper argues instead that this feature can be seen as a poetological engagement with geological and climatic timescales. Due to its hybrid form, the incorporation of a multiplicity of textual fragments and pictorial representations, the text undermines both conventional definitions of narrative and representations of nature. Holozän’s non-linear structure establishes an aesthetic of slowness that ushers in an awareness of the utterly different time schemes of geological and climatic processes. Furthermore, the importance of the material features, such as an interplay between text and image and the disconnected, paratactical arrangement of sentences mirrors the novel’s focus on natural phenomena. Frisch’s narrative establishes a poetics that tries to reach beyond the confinements of an anthropocentric perspective and thereby subverts the borders between culture and environment
Affective Bodies: Nonhuman and Human Agencies in Djuna Barnes\u27s Fiction
No full textDjuna Barnes’s work is an intriguing example of the ways fiction makes its readers face the nonhuman as having potential for agency, and shows the entanglements between human and nonhuman. In the stories, objects tend to steal the attention from the main characters and become agents in their own right. At the same time, a lot of Barnes’s human characters remain “unreadable,” and thing-like or animal-like; as such, nonhuman themselves.
This article asks why readers become engaged with such texts and how we make sense of them. Drawing on new materialist and posthumanist conceptions of distributed agency and affect, I explore the entangled human and nonhuman agencies that contribute to the action of the narratives and, arguably, to their affective appeal, the two being closely intertwined. To discuss the reading processes the texts invite, I employ embodied cognitive approaches to the process of reading fiction. Based on the analysis of Barnes’s novel Nightwood and her less researched short fiction, I propose that reading these texts is largely a process of affective, embodied sense-making that pertains equally to human and nonhuman fictional agents, revealing their mutual dependence and their equal capacity to affect
In Search of New Perspectives: Rethinking the Dissolution of Yugoslavia
Get PDFThe edited volume Debating the End of Yugoslavia by Florian Bieber, Armina Galijaš, and Rory Archer represents the most recent assessment of the state of the art and new research directions concerning the scholarly debate on the dissolution of Yugoslavia. It comprises selected papers from a conference held at the University of Graz in 2011. The volume consists of multidisciplinary contributions by scholars with an expertise in Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav space, examining the existing literature from the region and beyond and identifying particular research gaps. Furthermore, the volume explores the new methodological and source-based approaches in the study of the end of Yugoslavia