Luxus und Moderne
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Edited by:
Hans Georg von Arburg
Luxus und Moderne, herausgegeben von Christine Weder und Hans-Georg von Arburg:
Die Reihe basiert auf einem vom Schweizerischen Nationalfonds geförderten Forschungsprojekt zur ambivalenten Rolle des Luxus in der Moderne seit dem 18. Jahrhundert. Der Fokus liegt auf literarischen und kunsttheoretischen Darstellungen in ökonomischen, philosophischen, anthropologischen und soziologischen Kontexten. Das Luxuriöse fungiert dabei als relative und stets neu auszuhandelnde Kategorie des Überflüssigen, Überschüssigen oder Übermäßigen in materieller wie zeitlicher Dimension.
Topics
This volume examines the role played by luxury in Gottfried Keller’s oeuvre between the poles of aesthetics and politics. It conducts readings of selected texts in order to reveal the different facets of his ambivalent position toward luxury.
Modern human identity has been shaped by consumer practices. Contemporary discourses about consumption between addiction and self-determination have their origins in the eighteenth-century luxury debate. This volume is the first to examine Enlightenment writings about practices like drinking alcohol, masturbating, and reading in connection with luxury, a contested concept in the struggle between traditional conservatism and capitalist modernity.
The superfluous and the excessive are frequently associated with specific sites. This volume brings together articles that shed light on this topography of luxury from a literary studies perspective. Alongside the imaginative potential of sites of luxury and the rhetoric, narrative, and (inter)medial means by which they are staged, the contributions focus on the specific role played by literature in their genesis, tradition, and criticism.
Excess and abundance are phenomena that contradict the core ideal of the bourgeois Enlightenment: the demand for temperance. However, the "right measure" was by no means a transcendental given, but was the subject of critical negotiations in the European debates of the eighteenth century. The contributions in this volume look at the epistemological, social, and medial shifts in excess that took place during the age of reason.
