Mediality on Trial

Mediality on Trial
Author: Ehler Voss
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 559
Release: 2020-09-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110416468

This volume addresses controversies connected to the testing of the capacities and potentials of mediums. Today we commonly associate the term "medium" with the technical communication between transmitters and receivers. Yet this term likewise applies to those who cooperate with agencies that exceed the presumed domain of the material world. Insofar as one presumes a division between distinctly opposed categories of religion and the secular, technical media tend to be associated with the secular and human (trance) mediums tend to be associated with religion after 1900. This volume concerns the ways in which the term medium still marks an overlapping of – and thus problematizes – the aforementioned division between religion and the secular, the personal and the technological. The term medium carries with it a seed of doubt that is itself inseparable from investment in the medium's power: insofar as they communicate with an "other" realm, mediums offer the hope and promise of new possibilities and improved efficiency, and thus of a better life; yet they have simultaneously been under suspicion of altering (or even inventing) the messages they communicate. It is due to this combination of promise and suspicion that "mediumism" has tended to evoke scientific, religious, and moral controversies. Thus, we can speak of a "mediumistic trial" – that is, a process in which a medium is put to the test concerning its potentials and trustworthiness. Around 1800, experts were asked if a modern secular institution would be capable of inspiring, domesticating or excluding trance mediumship. This question has stayed with us ever since, and the answers have remained inconclusive. That is why the past and present of mediumship may be asked to elucidate each other.

Domestic Demons and the Intimate Uncanny

Domestic Demons and the Intimate Uncanny
Author: Thomas G. Kirsch
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2022-10-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 100076334X

This book explores local cultural discourses and practices relating to manifestations and experiences of the demonic, the spectral and the uncanny, probing into their effects on people’s domestic and intimate spheres of life. The chapters examine the uncanny in a cross-cultural manner, involving empirically rich case studies from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Europe. They use an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to show how people are affected by their intimate interactions with spiritual beings. While several chapters focus on the tensions between public and private spheres that emerge in the context of spiritual encounters, others explore what kind of relationships between humans and demonic entities are imagined to exist and in what ways these imaginations can be interpreted as a commentary on people’s concerns and social realities. Offering a critical look at a form of spiritual experience that often lacks academic examination, this book will be of great use to scholars of Religious Studies who are interested in the occult and paranormal, as well as academics working in Anthropology, Sociology, African Studies, Latin American Studies, Gender Studies and Transcultural Psychology.

Pathos and Anti-Pathos

Pathos and Anti-Pathos
Author: Tom Vanassche
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2022-12-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3110758709

Scholarship often presumes that texts written about the Shoah, either by those directly involved in it or those writing its history, must always bear witness to the affective aftermath of the event, the lingering emotional effects of suffering. Drawing on the History of Emotions and on trauma theory, this monograph offers a critical study of the ambivalent attributions and expressions of emotion and “emotionlessness” in the literature and historiography of the Shoah. It addresses three phenomena: the metaphorical discourses by which emotionality and the purported lack thereof are attributed to victims and to perpetrators; the rhetoric of affective self-control and of affective distancing in fiction, testimony and historiography; and the poetics of empathy and the status of emotionality in discourses on the Shoah. Through a close analysis of a broad corpus centred around the work of W. G. Sebald, Dieter Schlesak, Ruth Klüger and Raul Hilberg, the book critically contextualises emotionality and its attributions in the post-war era, when a scepticism of pathos coincided with demands for factual rigidity. Ultimately, it invites the reader to reflect on their own affective stances towards history and its commemoration in the twenty-first century.

On Dreams and the East

On Dreams and the East
Author: C. G. Jung
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2025-01-14
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 0691250553

Jung’s landmark seminar on the symbolism of yoga and its applications to dream analysis In the summer of 1933, C. G. Jung conducted a seminar in Berlin attended by a large audience of some 150 people, including several Jewish Jungians who would soon leave Germany. Hitler had begun consolidating his position as dictator and these students were distressed at Jung’s recent decision to accept the presidency of a German professional psychotherapy society that was rapidly becoming Nazified and purged of Jews. On Dreams and the East makes these seminar sessions widely available for the first time, offering tantalizing insights into Jung’s evolving understanding of yoga and the realization of the self. The seminar commences with a presentation on the psychology of yoga by noted Indologist and linguist Heinrich Zimmer, whose collaboration in these talks reflects Jung’s growing engagement with the Hindu tradition, particularly Tantric yoga. Jung analyzes a series of dreams of a middle-aged male patient, focusing on mandalas and the centering process. He reflects on related motifs in alchemical symbolism, Navaho healing drawings, Mithraism, baptism symbolism, the foundation of Rome, ecclesiastic dances, and labyrinths, drawing connections with the symbolism of yoga and Tantra. Featuring a richly documented introduction by Giovanni Sorge, On Dreams and the East opens a window on Jung’s deepening exploration of Eastern thought and the comparative study of the individuation process at a critical juncture in his life and work.

Literature as Pure Mediality

Literature as Pure Mediality
Author: Paul DeNicola
Publisher:
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2009
Genre: Literature
ISBN:

DeNicola argues that Franz Kafka recognizes the inherent violence in any conceptual understanding of language, and therefore conceives literary or poetic language as capable of an unjudging that deconstructs any previously judged version of the real.

Medialities

Medialities
Author: Ute Fendler
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2024-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839474191

Cultural, social and economic production is always medially constituted, since it is formed through processing, storage and transmission of certain data or materials. This is why the concept of mediality can be used to stress the performative character of all culture, whose multiplicity of techniques conversely interacts with the mediality in question. The contributors focus on a given cultural medium's genuine structure as a particular deployment without falling into some kind of hardware determinism, therefore considering culture beyond textuality.

Art Judgements: Art on Trial in Russia after Perestroika

Art Judgements: Art on Trial in Russia after Perestroika
Author: Sandra Frimmel
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2022-03-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1648893554

An unusually large number of court cases against art, artists, and curators have taken place in Russia since the turn of the century. In reference to two of the most prominent, against the organizers of the exhibitions 'Caution, Religion!' and 'Forbidden Art 2006', the author examines the ways in which the meaning of art and its socio-political effects are argued in court: How do these trials attempt to establish a normative concept of art, and furthermore a binding juridical understanding of art? How is the discussion of what is permissible in art being framed in Russia today? Research into the post-Soviet art trials has been mainly journal-driven until today. Only the fairly recent trials of the Pussy Riot activists and Pyotr Pavlensky provoked lengthy publications, but these are mostly concerned with explicitly political and activist art rather than its particular discourse when on trial. This book, however, takes a scholarly approach towards (Russian) art on trial. It puts the cases in a national-historical context, which is compared from international perspectives, and particularly focuses on the way in which these proceedings have intensified juridical power over artistic freedom (of speech) in the production of art in Russia. This book will appeal to academics and students in the areas of art history, cultural science, sociology, and Slavic studies, as well as jurists, curators and museum specialists, researchers and employees in cultural institutions.

The Ephemeral Eighteenth-Century

The Ephemeral Eighteenth-Century
Author: Gillian Russell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2020-08-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108487580

This history of printed ephemera's rise as an eighteenth-century cultural category transforms understanding of 'disposable' printed items.

Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media

Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2015-10-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004308237

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this volume brings together contributions by distinguished experts from different disciplinary fields for a multidimensional view on immersion in the visual arts and media. In the current media debate, immersion has frequently been linked to the advent of digital technology and its capacity to provide vivid sensations of being placed in or surrounded by an artificial space. The idea of ‘liquidity’ contained in this promise to plunge into another world informs wide areas of contemporary cultural imagination, referring to a myriad of phenomena that relate to experiences of uncertainty and instability, of complexity and change. Considering the fact, however, that the idea of ‘liquid’ spaces appeared long before the digital creation of augmented or virtual environments, the contributors to this volume trace its reemerging throughout the history of the visual arts and media. By focusing on selected works of painting and architecture, photography and cinema, video installation and media art, they explore the variability of immersive experiences according to the different media environments and interfaces that constitute the actual sites of historically shifting relations between media and users. Contributors are: Matthias Bauer, Jörg von Brincken, Robin Curtis, Burcu Dogramaci, Thomas Elsaesser, Ole W. Fischer, Gundolf S. Freyermuth, Ursula Frohne, Henry Keazor, Matthias Krüger, Katja Kwastek, Fabienne Liptay, Karl Prümm, Martin Warnke.

Judging from Experience

Judging from Experience
Author: Jeanne Gaakeer
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2018-12-19
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1474442501

Combining her expertise in legal theory and judicial practice in a continental European civil-law system, Jeanne Gaakeer explores the intertwinement of legal theory and practice to develop a humanities-inspired methodology for both the academic interdisciplinary study of law and literature and for legal practice. This volume addresses judgment and interpretation as a central concern within the field of law, literature and humanities. It is not only a study of law as praxis that combines academic legal theory with judicial practice, but proposes both as central to humanistic jurisprudence and as a training in the conduct of public life. Drawing extensively on philosophical and legal scholarship and through analysis of literary works from Gustave Flaubert, Robert Musil, Gerrit Achterberg, Ian McEwan, Michel Houellebecq and Juli Zeh, Jeanna Gaakeer proposes a perspective on law as part of the humanities that will inspire legal professionals, scholars and advanced students of law alike.