Band 51, Heft 2 - Special Issue: Schiff und Schrift: Zum Verhältnis zwischen Literatur und Globalisierung / Issue Editors: Federico Italiano and Helga Thalhofer

In Luís de Camões’s epic The Lusiads , diverse semantic levels of writing overlap. The intertwining of poetry and documentation results here in perspectives on writing that judge it in different ways, since a tension springs up in The Lusiads between poetry and the new fields of knowledge concerning experimental ‘New Science’ and nautical experience. With respect to the poetics of The Lusiads , this tension becomes evident when a line is drawn from the Renaissance to classical antiquity. A further level of writing can be seen in the field of the shipping of writings – primarily of the founding work of The Lusiads – which was, from a textually external point of view and from that of the history of the media – facilitated by book printing; conversely, the process of writing down ships, that is, their routes registered on maps and in the periplus, manifests itself in Camões’s epic in the form of a documentary mode of writing.

A hallmark of the Odyssey ’s topography is its deterritorialization. Assuming that, in antiquity, sailing manuals had to reckon with the nautical and existential disorientation experienced on the high seas, these nautical expedients must have been reflected in Homer’s epic. And in fact, technical manuals and poetical imagination, topos and tropus here translate into each other. But if the Odyssey is actually based upon those sailing manuals, then certainly not as a mere versification of their underlying sources. Rather, it discloses their ‘poetic’ character, viz. their creativity in determining and describing places within the ‘placeless’ sea. The Odyssey obviously has recourse to those manuals, but only in order to carry on the proto-cartographic operations of their writing. This principle of ‘recursion’ – harking back to a putative origin, in order to re-determine it in a self-referential way – also characterizes post-Homeric adaptations of the Odyssey . Whether in a Roman epic, or in medieval romance or in a modern novel – in any case, a new ‘original’ Odyssey is created to rely upon. But particularly in the highly reverberatory modern Odyssies, the charts are overstretched, the tools become dysfunctional, and explorations go methodically astray. The more complex modern world-description, the more fatal its shortcomings – as if Odysseus, at the edge of modern cartography, had returned to the state of deterritorialization that spurred his very first departure.

“Mobilis in mobili,” the motto of Nemo, captain of the submarine Nautilus, denotes the utopic concept represented by Jules Verne’s water crafts – motion in motion, calm dynamics in a save, egg-shaped vessel equipped with all conveniences. As a bestselling author, Jules Verne established a floating scriptorium on his private yacht. Similarly, he furnished his imaginary vessels with studies and map rooms, libraries as well as new electronic storage and communication media. But in the same vein the autarchy of these vessels causes refusal of communication and isolation of their possessors and passengers. The reason for this is also a poetological one, since the ubiquity of media and their aim of unimpeded communication collide with the requirements of the adventure novel. Its momentum results from interferences and communication failures, and often culminates in natural disasters and explosions that destroy the vessels. In the alternation of control and disturbance, Verne’s novels display the materiality of media, and at the same time they claim, rather ungently, the dominance of writing over all other media by having the last say. Since the competition between various forms of literature, especially the adventure novel, and contemporary non-literary technological media, as seen in Jules Verne’s novels, has not yet been addressed sufficiently in literary studies, this paper opens new perspectives not only on the important role media takes in Verne’s works, but also on how popular literature reacts to the increasing importance of new media in communication and in public life.

Questioning the well-known interpretation of the Pequod as a microcosm, this article focuses on passages in Melville’s Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale in which the ship serves as an arena for testing and questioning various definitions of the ‘world.’ Starting with Ishmael’s claim that he wants to “see the world” by travelling aboard the Pequod , this article isolates different meanings of ‘world’ as they are invoked by the text – pointing to a meaning beyond the cartography of the planet earth. As will be shown, Moby-Dick distinguishes between the extrinsic perspective on planet earth, as cartography applies it, and contrasts it with a level, intrinsic perspectives that one adopts standing on the deck of a ship, looking out on the ocean. The intrinsic perspective can furthermore be related to the object of Ahab’s hunt, the white whale, which carries another understanding of ‘world’ as a deep space that cannot be grasped by cartography. In a final step, the crew and its composition of international members will be analyzed by focusing on the metaphor of the “common continent of men,” which surprisingly raises serious doubts about the unity of the Pequod ’s crew.

Even though Coleridge’s fantastic romantic poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) and Rimbaud’s hallucinatory symbolist poem “Le bateau ivre” (1871) use very different procedures, both of them show, each in their own way, a ghostly movement of the ship: a movement that seems to lead into the vastness of the globe but finds itself confined to the narrowness of one’s own self. Both of these sea poems draw a route that in the end is aimless in its bouncing and circular movement. The haunted ghost ship as a wooden skeleton without crew flies over water in Coleridge’s ballad, or falls into unattainable depths in Rimbaud’s long poem. Can these poetic travel narratives be described as forms of a “haunted globalization,” in which leaving the known for the unknown turns out to mean always moving around the same – the self, the known, the own writing process? Even if in the self, there will always be found the other, the foreign, too.

A close reading of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poems “Brod und Wein” and “Mnemosyne” demonstrates that Hölderlin intended to create a new religion as he and Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel had projected in their manifesto “Ältestes Systemprogramm.” This venture must be seen as part of the fight against monotheism and as an attempt to establish a counter-religion, characteristic for the threshold period between 1770 and 1800 in Western Europe. This attempt failed, as Hölderlin’s final desperation about the ambiguity of nature shows.

The character of the monster serves not only as an empty body onto which people can project dark aspects of their selves; it can embody wishes and desires. By these means, it does not simply call into question the rules and order of society, it may help restore the personal order. Something similar can be said of the abject. Under special circumstances, such as for the protagonist of Genevieve Valentine’s novel Mechanique. A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti , it is not the parting from the abject, but its inclusion and subversive quality which leads to the development of the subject’s identity.

NW by Zadie Smith opens with a multicultural and multiracial scene and revolves around the crises in the lives of four people with longstanding connection to Northwest London. The Northwest London in NW is a besieged city, and the people therein could not see any possibility of getting out because the gate has been latched with the concept of social class. In NW , the social class is materialized as space, economic position and race. Geographically NW features the main areas of London, and considers the role of that city in shaping the consciousness of the major characters, a partly spatial configuring of identity. In addition, the major characters in NW also suffer from occupational exclusion and economic exploitation, which then lead to their lower-class position since social class is constructed in such a way that agents are distributed according to their positions in the statistical distribution based on the economic and cultural capital. Finally the racial discrimination encountered by the characters in NW shows that class relations shape the form that racial oppression takes. The racialization of class issues becomes a politically effective tool for the wealthy to divide and rule the lower classes. In NW , Smith thus has adopted a more political attitude than in her previous books, so the relatively new perspective of her fiction might be the attention she draws to the persistent obstacles to class crossing and the acknowledgment of the rigid lines that still define the social classes.