Symbolism
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Edited by:
Rüdiger Ahrens
Symbolism. An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed annual dedicated to pursuing fundamental questions on the forms and functions of the symbolic. Symbolism publishes high-profile research on various topics related to the use of figurative language, thought and signification in artistic expression and constructions of reality. While maintaining a strong literary focus, the annual also enquires into practices of the symbolic across various media.
Supplementary Materials
Throughout literary history and in many cultures, we encounter an astute use of conspicuous absences to conjure an imagined reality into a recipient’s mind. The term ‘omission’ as used in the present study, then, demarcates a common artistic phenomenon: a silence, blank, or absence, introduced against the recipient’s generic or experiential expectations, but which nonetheless frequently encapsulates the tenor of the work as a whole. Such omissions can be employed for their affective potential, when emotions represented or evoked by the text are deemed to be beyond words. They can be employed to raise epistemological questions, as when an omission marks the limits of what can be known. Ethical questions can also be approached by means of omissions, as when a character’s voice is omitted, for instance. Finally, omission always carries within it the potential to reflect on the media and genres on which it is brought to bear: as its efficacy depends on the recipient’s generic expectations, omission is frequently characterized by a high degree of meta-discursiveness. This volume investigates the various strategies with which the phenomenon of omission is employed across a range of textual forms and in different cultures to conclusively argue for its status as a highly effective and near-universal form of artistic signification.
Special Focus: Law and Literature
This special focus issue of Symbolism takes a look at the theoretical equation of law and literature and its inherent symbolic dimension. The authors all approach the subject from the perspective of literary and book studies, foregrounding literature’s potential to act as supplementary to a very wide variety of laws spread over historical, geographical, cultural and spatial grounds. The theoretical ground laid here thus posits both literature and law in the narrow sense. The articles gathered in this special issue analyse Anglophone literatures from the Renaissance to the present day and cover the three major genres, narrative, drama and poetry. The contributions address questions of the law’s psychoanalytic subconscious, copyright and censorship, literary negotiations of colonial and post-colonial territorial laws, the European ‘refugee debate’ and migration narratives, fictional debates on climate change, contemporary feminist drama and classic 19th-century legal narratives. This volume includes two insightful analyses of poetic texts with a special focus on the fact that poetry has often been neglected within the field of law and literature research.
Special Focus editor: Franziska Quabeck, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany.
Special Focus editor: Natasha Lushetich
Series editors: Rüdiger Ahrens, Florian Kläger, Klaus Stierstorfer
Symbolism is cohesive. It gathers heterogeneity over time, across fields of human endeavor and systems of communication. Non-sequiturs, paradox and tautology, appear dissipative. Yet they are highly productive in reticular and fractal ways. Suffice it to look at the philosophical tautology of Parmenides’s kind, which suggests that being "is"; at the practice of the koan, which collapses dualistic thinking by way of incompatible propositions, such as "the Eastern hill keeps running on the water"; at logical paradoxes in which the operative logic is sabotaged by its own means, as in Hempel’s paradox; at absurdist dramatic texts in which protagonists record empty time in order to mark the emptiness of the time they are recording, as in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape; or at paradoxical games like Maciunas’s Prepared Table Tennis played with paddles that have huge holes in them. In all of these examples, the existence-apprehending processes occur via unexpected itineraries, in vacant but nevertheless enunciative codes, in seemingly futile, yet calibrating performances, and in a temporality that is the cumulative time’s "other." They catapult the mind into the realm of the extra-linguistic, the para-logical and the meta-experiential, or they transfigure it through a series of reticular iterations.
Forty years after Varela et al’s groundbreaking work on the embodied, emotional and environmentally embedded mind – that marked a definitive departure from its former strictly rational conception – there is a need to re-examine the territory that lies beyond mind for a different reason: the proliferation of algorithmic logics that rely on the idea of a rational agent (human or algorithmic) making logical, self-serving decisions. This special issue explores neither-rational-nor-irrational forms of thinking and making. It sketches a cartography of a-rational processes of meaning- and knowledge-production that operate across numerous sites, practices, and disciplines: visual and media art; literature; art history; music; dance; film; intermedia and photography. Part I "Ahistoricity, Assemblages and Interpretative Reversals" focuses on the legacy of the (neo) avant-garde and amodernism. Part II "Destinerrance, Labyrinths and Folds" investigates the ways in which the Derridian delays/detours and the Deleuzian folding function as concrete ways of embodied knowledge-production. Part III, "Immanent Transcendence", offers a glimpse into the reticular and iterative structuring of transcendence that does not pre-exist immanence but is its residue.
Essays in this special focus constellate around the diverse symbolic forms in which Caribbean consciousness has manifested itself transhistorically, shaping identities within and without structures of colonialism and postcolonialism. Offering interdisciplinary critical, analytical and theoretical approaches to the objects of study, the book explores textual, visual, material and ritual meanings encoded in Caribbean lived and aesthetic practices.
While paratexts – among them headnotes, footnotes, or endnotes – have never been absent from American literature, the last two decades have seen an explosion of the phenomenon, including (mock) scholarly footnotes, to an extent that they seem to take over the text itself. In this Special Focus we shall attempt to find the reasons for this astonishing development. In our first (diachronic) section we shall explore such texts as might have fostered the present boom, from fictions by Edgar Allan Poe to Vladimir Nabokov to Mark Z. Danielewski. The second (synchronic) section, will concentrate on paratexts by David Foster Wallace, perhaps the “father” of the post-postmodern footnote, as well as those to be found in novels by Bennett Sims, Jennifer Egan and Junot Diaz, among others. It appears that, while paratexts definitely point to a high degree of self-reflexivity in the author, they equally draw attention to the textual and authorial functions of the works in which they exist. They can thus cause a reflection on the boundaries between genres like fiction, faction, and autobiography, as well as serving to highlight a host of pedagogical and social concerns that exist in the interstices between fiction and reality.
Symbolic representation is a crucial subject for and a potent heuristic instrument of diaspora studies. This special focus inquires into the forms and functions of symbols of diaspora both in aesthetic practice and in critical discourse, analyzing and theorizing symbols from Shakespeare to Bollywood as well as in critical writings of theorists of diaspora. What kinds of symbols and symbolic practices, contributors ask, are germane to the representation, both emic and etic, of diasporics and diasporas? How are specific symbols and symbolic practices analyzed across the academic fields contributing to diaspora studies? Which symbols and symbolic practices inform the academic study of diasporas, sometimes unconsciously or without being remarked on? To study these phenomena is to engage in a dialogue that aims at refining the theoretical and methodological vocabulary and practice of truly transdisciplinary diaspora studies while attending to the imperative of specificity that inheres in this emerging field. The volume collects a range of analyses from social anthropology, history and ethnography to literary and film studies, all combining readings of individual symbolic practices with meta-theoretical reflections.
Magic realism has become a significant mode of expression in Jewish cultural production. This special focus of Symbolism for the first time explores in a comparative and transnational approach the magic realist engagement of Jewish writers, artists, and filmmakers from the Diaspora and from Israel with issues of identity, oppression and persecution as well as the Holocaust.
