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Platform urbanisation, infrastructures and techno-politics: The turn towards urban citizenship Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Filippo Bignami, Naomi Clara Hankata
This article analyses how digital platforms challenge and redefine the way in which urban forms of citizenship are shaped. What we call ‘platform urbanisation’ accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic when digital platforms penetrated with increasing rapidity into every aspect of urban life. While these digital platforms have facilitated new possibilities for engagement, access to services, efficiency
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Technocratic totalitarianism: Gunnar Kaiser and dissident discourse in pandemic-era Germany Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Thomas Crew
This article examines the ideas, reception and social role of Germany’s most prominent cultural critic of lockdown politics, Gunnar Kaiser. In contrast to the majority of European intellectuals, Kaiser took an early public stand against the naive adoption of science as a social authority and the unprecedented overturning of core democratic principles. He argued that without vigorous, open debate, the
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Re-presenting coronavirus disease-19: Biopolitics, digitalisation, citizenship Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-07 James S. Williams, Marko Pajević
This introduction briefly traces the development of historical and philosophical responses to coronavirus disease-19 in its longue durée and considers the pandemic’s lasting biopolitical effects in contemporary digital culture and its implications for democratic mechanisms and citizenship in Europe. It is argued that the present juncture constitutes a crucial and propitious moment in European thought
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The boring apocalypse: The representation of flat affects in contemporary British pandemic novels Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-29 Raili Marling
In his 2021 opinion article in The New York Times, Adam Grant called the COVID-19 pandemic the ‘boring apocalypse’. Indeed, while pre-pandemic imaginaries of global pandemics tended to focus on spectacular killer viruses, for many people in the Global North, the challenge of the pandemic was, if not boredom, then a sense of recurring routine. Although the pandemic also created strong affects like fear
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Slovenian COVID-19 discourse in the context of verbal as well as physical violence against medical professionals Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Mojca Ramšak
During the Coronavirus epidemic in Slovenia (March 2020 to June 2021) and during the period of global public health emergency due to COVID-19 (January 2020 to May 2023), public discourse about physicians in the Slovenian media and on social media fluctuated between extremes ranging from idolisation, hero worship and contempt to verbal and physical threats. These diametrically different images of doctors
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Rethinking biopolitics: COVID-19, differential vulnerabilities and biopolitical rights Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Daniele Lorenzini
In this article, I develop a critique of the forms of differential vulnerability produced by biopolitical technologies of power which became particularly salient during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, I address some conceptual and methodological questions linked to Foucault’s work on biopolitics, and I argue that one of his most promising insights is the claim that biopolitics necessarily entails a politics
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Health versus humanity? Three recent German novels on biopolitics and citizenship Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Marko Pajević
Three recent German novels, Juli Zeh’s Corpus Delicti, 2009, Zoë Beck’s thriller Paradise City, 2020,and Martin Schäuble’s youth novel Cleanland, 2020, present dystopian views of a future society based on a health system which, on the surface, is extremely successful but on closer observation represents the collapse of humanity. These novels represent a thoroughgoing critique of biopolitics as defined
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Nowhere at ease: Listening to Syrian refugee trauma in Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo (2019) Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Ali Yiğit, Melih Kurtuluş
The ongoing Syrian civil war has inflicted wounds on the minds and bodies of countless Syrians, and it continues to influence the contemporary global agenda. The purpose of this article is to exami...
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Mirrors and envelopes: John Berger and Eva Figes’ Light (1983) Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2023-01-19 Joseph Andrew Darlington
This article explores the influence of John Berger on Eva Figes’ novel Light (1981). The novel describes a day in the life of Claude Monet. Figes’ depiction of Monet’s artistic processes reflects h...
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European dystopias/utopias in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Submission: Part I (2004) and Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015) Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2023-01-18 Arina Rotaru
This comparative analysis examines two instances of dystopian/utopian narratives and media – the film and script Submission: Part I (2004) by the Dutch-Somalian but naturalized American author Ayaa...
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The vicissitudes of bilingualism and plurilingualism in the European Union Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2023-01-16 Marko Modiano
Starting with the early twentieth century, the shifts in what languages mainland Europeans have as additional languages are described and analysed. Historical events, such as World War II, the rise...
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Cultural responses to the COVID-19 crisis in Greece: The first wave (March–May 2020) Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2023-01-16 Panagiotis Zestanakis
This article examines cultural responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Greece during the first wave in spring 2020 approaching such responses not only as resulting from the fear of the virus but also...
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Narrative space in the mapping of Diaspora Space: Liminal spaces and subjectivities of ‘Happy Multicultural Land’ in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2023-01-16 Elif Toprak Sakiz
This article explores the features of narrative space in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth by drawing on the notion of diaspora space, which is based upon Avtar Brah’s theory in Cartographies of Diaspora, ...
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Introduction: Heritage and the making of ‘Europe’ Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-11-30 Margriet van der Waal, Astrid Van Weyenberg, Sabine Volk
The notion of ‘European heritage’ plays an increasingly important role in the discursive constructions of a collective sense of European belonging. This Special Issue critically reviews some of the...
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Conceptualising Europe from the far right: The mobilisation of intellectual heritage in Germany Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-10-16 Sabine Volk
Against the backdrop of multiple European crises and the end of the ‘liberal consensus’ on European integration, this article explores the increasing politicisation of ‘Europe’ by the populist far ...
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Dialogue in and as European heritage Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Viktorija L A Čeginskas, Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus
In this article, we scrutinize the use and institutionalization of the concept of ‘dialogue’ in the cultural politics of the European Union. Our focus is on how dialogue is understood in the contex...
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‘What I shall miss’: European heritage in Tom Lanoye’s Fortress Europe (2005) Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Astrid Van Weyenberg, Didi Spaans
Tom Lanoye’s ‘theatre novella’ Fort Europa: Hooglied van Versplintering (Fortress Europe: A Canticle of Fragmentation) (2005) features a range of characters who probe Europe’s possible future by tu...
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From defying to (re-)defining Europe in Viktor Orbán’s discourse about the past Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-09-28 Andrzej Sadecki
One of the salient features of the recent populist turn in Europe has been a redefinition of the European. Traditionally, (far) right-wing parties defined themselves as Eurosceptic and focused on n...
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Enticed to settle elsewhere: Magic lantern slides and the transnational creation of European colonial citizens Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-09-26 Margriet van der Waal
During the early twentieth century, people across Europe were enticed by magic lantern slide shows about a wide range of topics and issues. This contribution examines magic lantern images depicting...
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The invention of the European legal tradition and the narrative of rights Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-09-23 Kaius Tuori
Before the Second World War, the concept of Europe was a secondary moniker in a nationalistic world, which made the post-war rise of Europe and European legal heritage as concepts remarkable develo...
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Little willies as community-building heritage: A bottom-up approach to the European Capital of Culture initiative Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-09-12 Laura van den Bergh
The ambitious 11fountains project was a flagship feature of the programme that won Leeuwarden (Netherlands) the title of European Capital of Culture for 2018. Eleven international artists were invi...
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The role of Christianity in the European Union’s heritage and history initiatives Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-09-12 Tuuli Lähdesmäki
In its political discourse, the European Union balances Christian heritage, the secularization of European societies, liberal values and Europe’s culturally and religiously diverse contemporary rea...
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Heritage and the ‘Heartland’: Architectural and urban heritage in the discourse and practice of the populist far right Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-09-06 Johanna M. Blokker
The role of architectural heritage in the discourse and practice of the populist far right is examined, referring to examples in Germany and focusing on the Alternative für Deutschland. The finding...
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Rethinking the multiple meanings of the Mediterranean through Lawrence Osborne’s Beautiful Animals (2017) Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-06-02 Christiane Steckenbiller
Lawrence Osborne’s Beautiful Animals (2017) thematizes the arrival of refugees on Europe’s shores and the division of Europe into core and peripheral regions. The psychological thriller tells the story of two young wealthy white women whose daily routines of swimming and sunbathing are interrupted when they meet a Syrian refugee on a secluded beach. In this article, I argue that the novel overlays
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Ambivalent borders and hybrid culture: The role of culture and exclusion in historical European discourses of migration Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-05-11 Lydia Ayame Hiraide
This article reflects on historical arguments about migration in conceptualisations of Europe, highlighting an ambivalent support of migration within Europe on the grounds of mutual cultural enrichment. There is a strong tradition, dating back to French and German eighteenth-century thinkers, such as Herder, Voltaire and Fichte, of citing cultural diversity, plurality and exchange to construct an idea
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Embracing embodiedness, desire and failure: Women’s fluid gender performances in Sevgi Soysal’s oeuvre from the 1960s Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-05-09 Nazan Maksudyan, Burcu Alkan
The ‘women’s liberation’ of the global 1960s did not entail a full range of women’s rights, feminist politics and sexual freedoms in Turkey. On the contrary, the Turkish 1960s were characterised by a patriarchal heteronormative order that imprisoned women in a passive and essentially asexual identity and denied them control over their bodies. In Turkey, women’s emancipation was postponed. At the same
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The temptation of luck: The Machiavellian prince and the Hobbesian sovereign facing moral and honour-motivated responsibilities Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-05-09 Ionut Untea
In political philosophy, brute or circumstantial luck entails responsibilities. Even so, leaders may be tempted to capitalize on lucky endowments or circumstances that turn in their favour without giving too much attention to moral responsibility. This is because besides moral responsibility, there is another kind of responsibility that flows out of luck. Machiavelli and Hobbes provide the classic
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Editor’s note Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-03-14 Julian Preece
As the incoming general editor of the Journal of European Studies, I would like to pay tribute to my predecessor and former colleague at the University of Kent, John Flower, and his Reviews Editor, Tony Cross, who carried out their roles for an incredible 51 years. The contributions to this issue were originally accepted for publication by John Flower. We will resume publishing book reviews in the
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The use of collective memory in the populist messaging of Marine Le Pen Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-17 Dalya Soffer
Globally populist movements are on the rise, which is why it is essential to examine this phenomenon more closely. In France, 50 years ago, Jean-Marie Le Pen founded a populist party, le Front National (now renamed Rassemblement National or RN). However, it was not until his daughter Marine Le Pen took over the Party in 2012 that it began to see significant electoral gains. This is despite the fact
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A Europe of stories: Queer cartography and the grammar of hope Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-15 Nicholas Manganas
In January 2019, 30 leading European intellectuals, including Bernard-Henri Lévy and Orhan Pamuk, pronounced that ‘the idea of Europe is in peril’. Their voices added to a general sense from all corners of the European continent that the liberal narratives that have sustained the European Union integration project are under attack. Is it true, as Pamuk suggested, that Europe no longer makes us dream
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Stephen’s neurotic self-estrangement: A case study of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-14 Hamid Farahmandian, Lu Shao
This article examines neurosis in the personality of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a means to understand his intellectual and artistic development. Although Joyce’s fictional characters have been studied from various psychoanalytic perspectives, the psycho-neurotic aspect of these characters – particularly Stephen – has been largely overlooked. We use Karen
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A liberal stand-off with deplorables: Adapting Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People from Nietzscheanism through Nazism to Neoliberalism Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-12 Mads Larsen
A pivotal question since the Enlightenment has been how to promote reason to the masses. Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and its film adaptations across four countries and seven decades let us examine this discourse across time and geography. Ibsen offers Nietzschean, elitist radicalism to save the public sphere from ignorance. Ein Volksfeind (dir. Hans Steinhoff) insists that only the Nazi Party
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Agamben’s ‘bare life’ and Grossman’s ethics of senseless kindness Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-09 Tim Christiaens
In his early works, Giorgio Agamben argues that some Auschwitz inmates practised a ‘silent form of resistance’ by shutting themselves off from the world until nothing could harm them. I argue that this conception of ‘bare life’ is both too abstract and too individualistic. Agamben’s idea of bare life’s resistance first neglects the socio-historical context that has produced particular instances of
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Introduction: The First World War and its Aftermath: Literary Networks and Cultural Encounters Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Philip Ross Bullock, Sofia Permiakova, Gesa Stedman
This introduction offers a survey of some important critical approaches to the ways in which the First World War and its aftermath have been studied, conceptualized, represented and commemorated. In particular, it notes recent scholarly interest in issues of gender, as well as a focus on widening the geographical range of the conflict beyond a dominant European paradigm. A recurrent theme is the emergence
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‘You do not become a European by choice but by necessity’: The Alsace border region and its opening up to Europe in the writings of Otto Flake, René Schickele and Hermann Wendel Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Christian Luckscheiter
The three writers Otto Flake, René Schickele and Hermann Wendel met in Straßburg in 1901. Together with other artists and writers they founded the group ‘Das jüngste Elsaß’ (also known as ‘Der Stürmerkreis’). One of the purposes of this artistic group was to shed the ‘hybrid state’ of Alsace as a border region and instead urge that Alsace take on a mediating role in a future united Europe. Their pacifist
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‘A tremor of hope’: Bloomsbury in and after 1918 Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Claudia Olk
This article focuses on Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury in and after 1918. It looks at the ways in which the Woolfs, together with members of their circle of friends and family, recorded their experience, their political views, and their attitudes towards Germany, the US and Russia during the final months of the First World War and how they received the arrival of peace. Part of the overall argument
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Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees: The liminal world of Paris in 1919 Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Sofia Permiakova
Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees is a modernist ‘curiosity’ which remained largely unknown due to the peculiar conditions of its original publication. In recent years, however, it has regained its place within the field of modernist studies due to the efforts of Julia Briggs and Sandeep Parmar. Instead of approaching the poem through established categories of urban representation, such as flânerie, urban
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Out of the ruins: Knut Hamsun’s ‘idealism’ and the inheritance of World War I Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Tore Rem
In 1920, the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for literature for his novel Markens grøde (Growth of the Soil) (1917). This article explores some of the key contexts for this work, highlighting the author’s own ambitions, the reasons why he sided with Germany during the war, and his generally völkisch perspectives on the Germanic and Nordic. It furthermore analyses the early reception
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Inventory of another country: Rebecca West and the legacy of 1918 Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Catherine Toal
Written in the late 1930s, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941) is shaped on every level by the Great War. West investigates the causes of the conflict in the place from which it originated, calling urgently for a defence of the settlement of Versailles. Her project of persuasion raises general entertainment to the heights of modernist epic and contemporary
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Symbolism at war: Charles Ricketts and the politics of the stage Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Ana Parejo Vadillo
This article considers the effect of World War I on Charles Ricketts’ work for the stage as an avant-garde set and costume designer. It looks at his cosmopolitan designs in the context of European symbolism. The first part of the essay focuses on Ricketts’ symbolist manifesto ‘The art of stage decoration’ (1913). The essay then examines his designs for three Shakespeare plays that toured Le Havre in
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By the waters of the Tiber: Viacheslav Ivanov, Aleksandr Grechaninov and Russian culture in interwar Europe Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Philip Ross Bullock
In Russia, the impact of the end of World War I was subsumed under the far greater impact of the October Revolution, which led to a bifurcation of Russian culture into Soviet and émigré branches. This article examines a hybrid literary and musical work from the interwar period: Viacheslav Ivanov’s nine Roman Sonnets (Rimskie sonety, 1924) and the musical settings that the composer Aleksandr Grechaninov
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Literary cosmopolitanism in the age of the League of Nations: Vernon Lee, Daniel Halévy and La Revue de Genève Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Stefano Evangelista
In 1921, the newly founded French-language periodical, La Revue de Genève, featured an exchange of letters between Daniel Halévy and Vernon Lee in which the two writers articulated contrasting visions of national identity and international literary relations. Reflecting on the traumatic experience of the First World War, Halévy called for literature and the role of the writer to be depoliticized. Lee
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World War I and its aftermath: Reaching for the past and across the Atlantic Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Jana Gohrisch
This article focuses on the British West Indies beginning with the involvement of African Caribbean soldiers in the Great War. It challenges the enduring myth of the First World War as a predominantly white European conflict. The main part focuses on C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian historian and playwright, following his paradigmatic trajectory from the colony to the ‘mother country’ and his involvement
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Double palimpsest: History and myth in the poetry of the Gallipoli campaign Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Richard Hibbitt, Berkan Ulu
The Ottoman defeat of the British and French imperial forces during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, known in Turkish as the Çanakkale Wars, had already shown how the theatres of war would extend beyond Europe. While much of the poetry in English that came from Gallipoli is well known in the Anglophone world, the Turkish poetry from Çanakkale is less well known outside Turkey itself. This article analyses
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‘Restoring friendship and confidence as far as possible between the inimical nations’: Post-World War I Berlin through English eyes Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Gesa Stedman
Three British women writers and their memoirs or letters serve as the key witnesses to rapid change from war-torn Berlin to a highly desired tourist destination. The war-induced transition of Berlin was matched by the social changes for women whose traces can be found in the three texts: the writer’s position changes from that of the voyeuse to the flâneuse. While the old aristocratic cosmopolitanism
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Generic images, gendered responses: Virginia Woolf and the representation of belligerent violence Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Naomi Toth
In Three Guineas (1938), Virginia Woolf voluntarily discusses images of the Spanish Civil War in generic terms. Susan Sontag famously criticized Woolf’s position, claiming that her decision to generalize ‘dismisses politics’, preventing the adoption of a clear anti-fascist stand on the Spanish conflict. I argue, on the contrary, that Woolf’s recourse to the generic turns the spotlight away from the
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Book Reviews: Reviews Editor’s valedictory note Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Anthony Cross
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Book Reviews: Thomas Honickel: Uwe Schütte and Kay Wolfinger (eds): Curriculum Vitae: Die W. G. Sebald Interviews Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Richard Sheppard
hard to believe that another devotee of Sebald’s work will want, let alone have the time, to venture down a similarly serpentine research path in order to demonstrate the superiority of her/his own views. So although Angier’s work may provoke widely differing responses, even from Sebald’s many admirers, they all owe her a large debt of gratitude for making such a sophisticated and committed case with
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Book Reviews: Nicolas Lambert: The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster: How Globalized Trade Led Britain to its Worst Defeat of the First World War Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Jeremy Black
other works by Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot and Franz Kafka. ‘If it is indeed the case, as Beckett said, and as Proust showed, that only he who forgets remembers, then’, Josipovici wonders, ‘do we have to accept that in a sense we today, as Nietzsche argued, can neither forget nor remember, neither sleep properly nor be properly awake?’ On both a literary and a psychological level Josipovici’s book
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Book Reviews: Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen (eds): Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 W. Gareth Jones
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Book Reviews: Carole Angier: Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Richard Sheppard
concludes with extracts from Reinhold Messner’s account of his ascent with two companions of the Ortler, made perilous by the instability which has resulted from global warming. Gundolf Graml’s account of the six Messner Mountain Museums forms a fitting epilogue. In one sense monuments to Messner’s own career, they also reflect Messner’s concern for the environment, for they offer the mountain experience
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Book Reviews: Dorinda Outram: Four Fools in the Age of Reason: Laughter, Cruelty, and Power in Early Modern Germany Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Joachim Whaley
limitations of ‘Western’ – not in a geographical but in an ideological, hence historical sense – thinking. The dia(in Greek, meaning both ‘divide’ and ‘crossing’) in dia-logue (διάλογος) prompts Jullien to argue that translation is ‘the logical language for dialogue’, and hence that ‘translation ought to be the world’s language’ (p. 71), while the term ‘inter-cultural’ must mean to ‘deploy interspace
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Book Reviews: Gabriel Josipovici: Forgetting Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Ian Ellison
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Book Reviews: Paul W. Werth: 1837: Russia’s Quiet Revolution Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Patrick O’meara
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Book Reviews: James Hodkinson and Benedict Schofield (eds): German in the World: The Transnational and Global Contexts of German Studies Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Joachim Whaley
and were he and his narrator simultaneous and/or fluid mélanges of all three characteristics and even more besides (see Uwe Schütte’s Introduction, pp. 9–10)? Whatever the answers, Honickel’s anthology will be a valuable and entertaining addition to SebaldLiteratur, and its open-ended final word surely goes to the English writer and translator Stephen Watts (p. 265): ‘although melancholy was important
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Book Reviews: François Jullien: There Is No Such Thing as Cultural Identity Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Paul Bishop
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Book Reviews: Robert Lethbridge (ed.): Émile Zola, Critique littéraire et artistique. Vol. 1: Écrits sur l’art Journal of European Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Nicholas White
the architecture building towards the ‘sense of an ending’. That the details of many of these lives are only intermittently recuperable is inseparable from what is declared to be ‘a circumstantial history within an infinity of possible evidence’ (p. 304). Thus is the title of this book elucidated, gesturing towards a compendium of facts of which only the most visible, by virtue of being recorded, are