Culture & Conflict

Talk of repair has become ubiquitous in recent years. In the age of trauma culture, art and literature have a new purpose: to do justice, to console, comfort, and heal. Drawing on works of twenty-first-century French-language literature, this monograph shows how literature can not only serve as a means of "personal development", but expand our capacity for empathy, help repair the "brokenness" implied in victimhood, and redress individual and collective traumas. Centered on a critical reflection on discourses of repair (and reparations), it questions the canonical theories on the functions of literature and proposes a new way of writing (and reading) literary history.

Praise

"Repair the World is an invigorating and essential call to arms. The modern category of the literary, it declares, is being outpaced by the contemporary uses of literature: as a medium of exorcism, empathy, reparation, testimony, commemoration, existential renewal, and ethical or political connectivity. Neither celebrating nor condemning such uses, Gefen models a much-needed style of criticism – interdisciplinary, pragmatic, relational – that comes to grips with their importance."

– Rita Felski, the John Stewart Bryan Professor and Professor of English at the University of Virginia (USA)

"In an era where self-help, memoir, and autobiography command more than their fair share of publisher’s lists in France, it’s tempting, some fifty years after post-structuralism’s heyday, to ascribe an impending ‘death of literature’ to a taste for narcissistic exhibitionism in French literary culture. But why bemoan the waning relevance of the question ‘what is literature?,’ asks Alexandre Gefen, when evidence abounds in the new century that literary writing increasingly posits itself as a restorative, reparative act? In the best instances, authors who give form to embodied experience imaginatively forge with their readers empathetic bonds of the sort that secular and religious institutions long sustained. Repair the World is not only a capacious study of writers who hail from surprisingly broad sectors of French society, from health and social workers to skilled laborers, journalists, and educators; it’s a situated call for a pragmatics of reading that makes of each book an intervention into the fabric of the real. Harnessing sources in affect theory, trauma studies, ethics, and cognitive science, Alexandre Gefen performs a critically reparative act all his own, reminding us that the notion of literature as autonomous object was itself a historical construct, in short: an ideology. Reading and writing have always conjoined care for the self and care for others, and it’s upon that reciprocity that the communities of sense of tomorrow can flourish in a spirit of reparative humanism".

– Derek Schilling, Professor of French, Director of the Centre Louis Marin, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Johns Hopkins University (USA)

"Alexandre Gefen’s wide-ranging, thought-provoking study takes stock of a paradigm shift in contemporary French literature, away from a model of autonomy and intransitivity to ways of writing and reading that seek to repair, restore, reassure, and rebuild. From the varied forms of expressivity found in self-narratives to the empathetic projections of fiction, Repair the World maps out an expanding literary territory that seeks not critical negativity but rather the power to intervene for good in individual and collective life. While reserving judgment on the actual extent of literature’s effects, Gefen demonstrates that contemporary projects and discourses undeniably center the therapeutic and remediative uses of literature. With its nuanced readings and keen insights, Repair the World has been rightly influential in France; its powerful diagnosis of contemporary sensibilities resonates far beyond, revealing both the promises and predicaments of literature in the twenty-first century".

– Alison James, Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago (USA)

"What would it mean to ask Sartre’s post-war question ‘What is literature?’ in the 21^st century? In this wonderful essay, Alexandre Gefen argues convincingly that the main purpose of literature today is to repair a broken world and memorialise forgotten lives. Taking examples from, predominantly, contemporary French literature, he proposes that literature as therapy has replaced religions of salvation, a politics of emancipation and formal experimentation. Today, literature’s mission is to heal traumatised individuals and communities, resurrect the lives of the vulnerable and commemorate their deeds in the face of the forces of oblivion. For Gefen, Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997) is ‘the contemporary literary archetype of these lost identities to be rehabilitated and reinhabited’. Gefen describes this new role for literature without taking sides; the writing is lucid, compelling and non-partisan. In an age of victimhood, testimony, empathy, self-expression and identity, Gefen’s reparative paradigm is as persuasive as Sartre’s political version in the age of ideology."

– Max Silverman, Professor of Modern French Studies, University of Leeds (UK)

This book deals with the work of twentieth-century women artists and literary authors from Portugal, Brazil and Portuguese-speaking African countries against the backdrop of political dictatorships. The essays in this volume reflect upon and challenge canonical perspectives on the arts and literature, bringing to light some of the hidden and silenced faces of Lusophone culture. By doing so, they highlight how dominant ideologies marked the artistic and literary practices of Portuguese-speaking women, and how these women in turn developed strategies of resistance through their creative work. The volume brings together contributors working in a range of disciplines, including literary criticism, the visual arts, and film studies, all of whom reflect on themes such as the reactions of women artists to authoritarianism, the representations of political repression in their work, the colonial war, and the critical revision of this historical moment by a younger generation of artists. It addresses scholars, critics, students and cultural workers with an interest in post-colonial and feminist studies in the Portuguese-speaking context.

The trope of humans being ‘replaced’ by ‘AI’ is one of the most familiar examples of the rhetoric of replaceability. Not only have questions about what is unique and what is replaceable gained momentum in digital culture, but notions of ‘fungibility’ have emerged in many other contexts as well such as ecology, management theory, and, more sinisterly, in racist and conspiracist thinking. This volume argues that there is a ‘replaceability paradigm’ at work throughout the culture of modernity, from the European Renaissance, through Freudian psychoanalysis, Chinese science fiction and postcolonial theory, all the way to neural network programs such as Google’s DeepDream. This collection will be of interest to anybody engaged with the conceptual architecture of contemporary culture, whether through film, literature, or new digital media.　

What is there to see in invisible artworks, empty books, or blank screens? How do formal absences generate meaning? Constructing an argument by way of montage, this book is an annotated inventory of textual, visual, and conceptual figures of absence. Spanning different media, it reveals a creative tradition that uses absence not as a negative aesthetic category, but as a productive state of radical indeterminacy with its own politics and poetics.

Although post-structuralism highlighted the importance of what is offstage, lost, forgotten, hidden or discarded, silent or silenced, the poetics and politics of absence (much like its ethics and aesthetics) have rarely been discussed across media and disciplines. This book proposes the concept of ‘radical absence’ to describe a certain tradition of resistance to ontology, predication, and representation, contesting their reliance on a metaphysics of presence. Apophatic speech, empty signifiers, and figural voids are some of the figures through which radical absence becomes apparent with unprecedented intensity in twentieth-century theory, literature, film, and the arts. Phantasmatic and outrageous, such figures play with creative strategies of dematerialization, irony, and other forms of discursive undoing. Therefore, absence becomes more than a simple theme; it reflects back on the medium and the meaning-making conditions under which it operates. Elusive and imprecise as an object of study, absence requires more subtle and flexible epistemological frameworks than have been available to date. This monograph proposes we think of it not only as a counter-concept for presence, but also – and perhaps more productively – as infinite spacing, deferral, fragmentation, and displacement.

While the contemporary era has witnessed a series of spectacular failures with severe and widespread global consequences, failure is still broadly understood on an individual level, while its broader causes and consequences receive little attention. This book reconceptualises failure as a method for characterising and critiquing systems and institutions on both a global and a local level. It defines global failure as comprising global inequality, economic crisis, and ecological disaster, and as a condition which informs and is informed by localised failure. It examines the negotiation between global and local failure in narratives of failed quests by four contemporary authors: Cormac McCarthy, Julia Kristeva, Michael Ondaatje, and Basma Abdel Aziz. As a genre, the quest narrative is associated with the idea of hard-won success. The failed quest narrative, or the narrative of the failed quest, is therefore the ideal vehicle through which to examine the socio-political and institutional conditions of failure. Primarily a contribution to the field of world literature, this book is also relevant to those with an interest in the contemporary novel, failure studies, and the quest narrative.

Myth in the Modern Novel: Imagining the Absolute posits a twofold thesis. First, although Modernity is regarded as an era dominated by science and rational thought, it has in fact not relinquished the hold of myth, a more "primitive" form of thought which is difficult to reconcile with modern rationality. Second, some of the most important statements as to the reconcilability of myth and Modernity are found in the work of certain prominent novelists. This book offers a close examination of the work of eleven writers from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, representing German, French, American, Czech and Swedish literature. The analyses of individual novels reveal a variety of intriguing views of myth in Modernity, and offer an insight into the "modernizing" transformations myth has undergone when applied in the modern novel. The study shows the presence of the "subconscious", the mythic layer, in modern western culture and how this has been dealt with in novelistic literature.

To what extent do minority writers feel represented by the literary canon of a nation and its body of "great works"? To what extent do they adhere to, or contest, the supposedly universal values conveyed through those texts and how do they situate their own works within the national tradition? Building on Edward W. Said’s contrapuntal readings and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reflections on the voice of the subaltern, this monograph examines the ways in which Rafik Schami, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zaimoglu have re-read, challenged, and adapted the German canon. Similar to other writers in postcolonial contexts, their work on the canon entails an inquiry into history and a negotiation of their relation to the texts and representations that define the "host" nation. Through close analyses of the works of these non-native German authors, the book investigates the intersection between politics, ethics, and aesthetics in their work, focusing on the appropriation and re-evaluation of cultural legacies in German-language literature. Opening up a rich critical dialogue with scholars of German Studies and Postcolonial Theory, Christine Meyer provides a fresh perspective on German-language minority literature since the reunification.

Watch our talk with the editor Christine Meyer here: https://youtu.be/bIOn-8q5QIU

While filmic representations of ‘enemies’ are legion, film studies have so far neglected the way in which filmic mediations of enemy images have contributed to shaping cultural memories.

The present volume investigates the (de)(re)constructions of enemy images in international film since the 1970s. The three parts deal with (re)configurations of the enemy in contemporary global cinemas, analysing films on the two world wars, on regional military conflicts, ethnic, racial and gender conflicts, socio-political conflicts and forms of terrorism. The essays concentrate on film aesthetics and contemporary (geo)politics, on filmic renderings of identity crises caused by troubled national pasts, and on the way films explore the collective psychological mechanisms at play in the construction, perpetuation or problematizing of enemy images.

The volume aims to show how in spite of the diversity of national cinemas, moving images are constitutive of national collectivities by rendering conflicts involving an external or internal enemy as the defining points in national or communal histories. It also points out how the dynamics of internalism and exteriority (of ‘we’ and ‘they’) has proved vital in this process.     

The volume examines from a comparative perspective the phenomenon of aesthetic disruption within the various arts in contemporary culture. It assumes that the political potential of contemporary art is not solely derived from presenting its audiences with openly political content, but rather from creating a space of perception and interaction using formal means: a space that makes hegemonic structures of action and communication observable, thus problematizing their self-evidence. The contributions conceptualize historical and contemporary politics of form in the media, which aim to be more than mere shock strategies, which are concerned not just with the ‘narcissistic’ exhibition of art as art, but also with the creation of a new common horizon of experience. They combine the analysis of paradigmatic works, procedures and actions with reference to theoretical debates in the fields of literature, media and art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The essay-collection shows how textual, visual, auditive or performative strategies disclose their own ways of functioning, intervene in automated processes of reception and thus work on stimulating a sense of political possibilities.
The editors acknowledge support from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP 7/ 2007–2013), ERC grant agreement no. 312454.

Narrative/s in Conflict presents the proceedings of an international workshop, held at the Trinity Long Room Hub Dublin in 2013, to a wider audience. This was a cross-disciplinary cooperation between the comparative research network 'Broken Narratives' (University of Vienna), the research strand 'Identities in Transformation' (Trinity College Dublin) and the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at the University of Giessen.

What has brought this informal network together is its credo that theories of narrative should be regarded as an integral part of cultural analysis. Choosing exemplary case studies from early Habsburg days up to the the wars and genocides of the 20th century and the post-9/11 'War on terror', our volume tries to analyze the relation between representation and conflict, i.e. between narrative constructions, social/historical processes, and cultural agon. Here it is crucial to state that narratives do not simply and passively 'mirror' conflicts as the conventional ‘realistic’ paradigm suggests; they rather provide a symbolic, sense-making matrix, and even a performative dimension. It even can be said that in many cases, narratives make conflicts.

Even though much has been said and written about 9/11, the work developed on this subject has mostly explored it as an unparalleled event, a turning point in history. This book wishes to look instead at how disruptive events promote a network of associations and how people resort to comparison as a means to make sense of the unknown, i.e. to comprehend what seems incomprehensible. In order to effectively discuss the complexity of 9/11, this book articulates different fields of knowledge and perspectives such as visual culture, media studies, performance studies, critical theory, memory studies and literary studies to shed some light on 9/11 and analyze how the event has impacted on American social and cultural fabric and how the American society has come to terms with such a devastating event. A more in-depth study of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close draws attention to the cultural construction of catastrophe and the plethora of cultural products 9/11 has inspired. It demonstrates how the event has been integrated into American culture and exemplifies what makes up the 9/11 imaginary.

Rousseau has been seen as the inventor of the concept of nature; in this collective volume philosophers and literary specialists from France and the United States examine how Rousseau's philosophy can be reinterpreted from the point of view of a constant dialectical debate between nature and culture. In this, Rousseau is our true contemporary.

Focused on the recently hotly debated topic at the crossroads of various human and social sciences, this book investigates the emergence of the cosmopolitan idea of literature and its impact on the reconfiguration of the European and non-European political spaces. The birthplace of this idea is its designers’ traumatic experience as induced by the disconcerting condition of their abode.The thesis is that the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s cosmopolitan projects that grow out of such deep frustrations trace the twentieth century’s global democracy. This hidden origin of cosmopolitan projects dismantles the usual European representation of modernization as universal progress as myopic. Rather than being a generous action of prominent subjects such as Voltaire, Kant, and Goethe, or Bakhtin, Derrida and Deleuze, cosmopolitanism is an enforced reaction of the instances dispossessed by injury that search for the ways of healing it. Yet as soon as their remedy establishes itself as the ground for universal reconciliation, it risks suppressing other’s trauma, i.e. turns from politics into a police. Articulating the author’s position in the recent debates on the structure of democracy, the epilogue suggests an alternative strategy.

The book discusses how culture simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the economy. Over the past few years, as the world has staggered from one financial crisis to another, the neat separation of economics and culture has been consistently challenged. To understand the current state of affairs, it has become increasingly necessary to understand the conjuncture that rules the production of value in economic systems, how money shapes social relations and affects discursive practices. By discussing the vocabulary, by understanding the rhetoric and interpreting the narratives, be it of crisis, austerity, growth, welfare, neo-liberalism or socialism, new modes of imaging the economic system may be made possible. The book is structured in four chapters dealing with theory and conjuncture (“Philosophies of Money”), with the visual arts and investment (“The Arts and Finance”), with literary representation and narrativity (“Literature and Money Matters”) and with the cognitive impact of fiduciary representation (“Cognitive Moneyscapes”). This collection analyses the process whereby a material icon invested with the symbolical power to rule social exchange becomes an explanatory narrative determining the way societies produce meaning.

Poverty and precarity have gained a new societal and political presence in the twenty-first century's advanced economies. This is reflected in cultural production, which this book discusses for a wide range of media and genres from the novel to reality television. With a focus on Britain, its chapters divide their attention between current representations of poverty and important earlier narratives that have retained significant relevance today.
The book's contributions discuss the representation of social suffering with attention to agencies of enunciation, ethical implications of 'voice' and 'listening', limits of narratability, the pitfalls of sensationalism, voyeurism and sentimentalism, potentials and restrictions inherent in specific representational techniques, modes and genres; cultural markets for poverty and precarity. Overall, the book suggests that analysis of poverty narratives requires an intersection of theoretical reflection and a close reading of texts.

Stories about border crossers, illegal aliens, refugees that regularly appear in the press everywhere point to the crucial role national identity plays in human beings' lives today. The National Habitus seeks to understand how and why national belonging became so central to a person's identity and sense of identity. Centered on the acquisition of the national habitus, the process that transforms subjects into citizens when a state becomes a nation-state, the book examines this transformation at the individual level in the case of nineteenth century France. Literary texts serve as primary material in this study of national belonging, because, as Germaine de Staël pointed out long ago, literature has the unique ability to provide access to "inner feelings." The term "habitus," in the title of this book, signals a departure from traditional approaches to nationalism, a break with the criteria of language, race, and ethnicity typically used to examine it. It is grounded instead in a sociology that deals with the subjective dimension of life and is best exemplified by the works of Norbert Elias (1897–1990) and Pierre Bourdieu (1931–2002), two sociologists who approach belief systems like nationalism from a historical, instead of an ethical vantage point. By distinguishing between two groups of major French writers, three who experienced the 1789 Revolution firsthand as adults (Olympe de Gouges, François René de Chateaubriand and Germaine de Staël) and three who did not (Stendhal, Prosper Mérimée, and George Sand), the book captures evolving understandings of the nation, as well as thoughts and emotions associated with national belonging over time. Le Hir shows that although none of these writers is typically associated with nationalism, all of them were actually affected by the process of nationalization of feelings, thoughts, and habits, irrespective of aesthetic preferences, social class, or political views. By the end of the nineteenth century, they had learned to feel and view themselves as French nationals; they all exhibited the characteristic features of the national habitus: love of their own nation, distrust and/or hatred of other nations. By underscoring the dual contradictory nature of the national habitus, the book highlights the limitations nation-based identities impose on the prospect for peace.

These collected essays contain fundamental contributions to contemporary cultural analysis and theory as well as exemplary interpretations of film, literature and other media. Central issues of current cultural studies are addressed: cultural narratives, cultural identity, collective memory and post-colonial thinking. The oeuvre of cultural and literary critic Wolfgang Müller-Funk encompasses historic analyses such as readings of Broch, Canetti and Musil, and the heritage they passed on. Other essays move from the beginning of the 20th to the 21st century and address questions of space, time and globalization discussing, for example, Walter Benjamin and 9/11.

‘Panic’ and ‘mourning’ are two pivotal constructs that often emerge and interplay under circumstances of conflict, violence, crisis, and catastrophe, both natural and man-made. Whereas panic tends to crop up during the experience of violent events, mourning, on the other hand, relates to the aftermath of a brutal disruption and to the way humans try to make sense of it retrospectively. Conversely, violent events can leave a thread of panic in their aftermath, while mourning can be unsettled, interrupted or even refuelled by another catastrophic incident.

From an international and inter-disciplinary outlook, this volume wishes to address questions at the interface of panic and mourning and their impact on practices in literature, media, and the arts. Since violent events take place within cultures that will draw from their traditions, memories and systems of beliefs in order to process them, the authors of this book aim precisely at discussing the effects of calamity upon the cultural structure and the way literary, artistic and media practices not only reproduce individual and collective anxieties but also generate knowledge and reshape the cultural formation within which they emerge.