Introduction. Framing Contingency: History and Heterology
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The editors
Abstract
Two years ago, on May 23–25, 2002, a regular annual colloquium of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) Committee on Literary Theory took place at the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Under the title Framing Contingency: History and Heterology the Committee members as well as prominent guests were invited to dwell upon the modes in which history is nowadays (if not always already?) forced to cope with contingency. The conference memorandum, circulated in advance, read as follows:
Though it has been shaped in order to frame contingency by laying down its “hidden law,” history appears nowadays to be framed (i. e., outwitted) by the same contingency. If contingency was expected to be turned into the subject matter of human history, it suddenly turns out to be the subject, the agency that secretly shapes this history. What was intended to be carefully worked through by the unrelenting, conscious activity of a historian appears to be compulsively acted out through his or her vulnerable body. Does not, after all, the inscription of an infinitely differentiated net of memory-traces into our senses necessarily exceed any attempt at their logically coherent narrative recollection? Is the past therefore not speaking through us before we become able to speak about it; is not its interpellation the enabling condition of our speech act? Being an empowered subject of “my” past, do I not incarnate a set of inherited constraints that give it a historical shape precisely by being constitutively placed out of my control? Finally, what would be the possible consequences of the outlined “an-archic” intervention into the heart of our domesticating historical activity for the position of the constitutive parts (i.e., events, figures, focalizer, narrator, etc.) of its narrative? These are some of the questions our conference is supposed to focus upon.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Adressen der Mitarbeiter
- Introduction. Framing Contingency: History and Heterology
- Framing the Frame: Contingency, Connection and Divestiture in Literary History and Criticism
- Naming and Contingency, and Some Implications for Begriffsgeschichte
- About Artful Production of Contingency
- Zufälligkeitssinn. Adalbert Stifters Umgang mit der Kontingenz
- Subjective Contingency and Autobiographical Writing
- Counter-Memory and Phantasma
- La Panique Historique. History Encountering Contingency
- History as Effects of Power
- Neutralizing Contingency: Ammianus Marcellinus as a Participant in Julian's Persian Campaign, 363 AD
- “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East)
- “Bridge to Antiquity“. Nostalgia, Exile, and Stoicism in the Poetry of Durs Grünbein
- OΔYΣΣEYΣ OYTIΣ: Odysseus Nobody
- Darstellungen von Dora. Thomas Pynchons Gravity's Rainbow im Spannungsfeld von fiktionalen, historiographischen und erinnerungsbasierten Repräsentationen des Konzentrationslagers Mittelbau-Dora
- Die erlebte Rede als temporales Phänomen
- Rezensionen
Articles in the same Issue
- Adressen der Mitarbeiter
- Introduction. Framing Contingency: History and Heterology
- Framing the Frame: Contingency, Connection and Divestiture in Literary History and Criticism
- Naming and Contingency, and Some Implications for Begriffsgeschichte
- About Artful Production of Contingency
- Zufälligkeitssinn. Adalbert Stifters Umgang mit der Kontingenz
- Subjective Contingency and Autobiographical Writing
- Counter-Memory and Phantasma
- La Panique Historique. History Encountering Contingency
- History as Effects of Power
- Neutralizing Contingency: Ammianus Marcellinus as a Participant in Julian's Persian Campaign, 363 AD
- “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East)
- “Bridge to Antiquity“. Nostalgia, Exile, and Stoicism in the Poetry of Durs Grünbein
- OΔYΣΣEYΣ OYTIΣ: Odysseus Nobody
- Darstellungen von Dora. Thomas Pynchons Gravity's Rainbow im Spannungsfeld von fiktionalen, historiographischen und erinnerungsbasierten Repräsentationen des Konzentrationslagers Mittelbau-Dora
- Die erlebte Rede als temporales Phänomen
- Rezensionen
