Clemens Peck / Florian Sedlmeier (Hg.)

Kriminalliteratur und Wissensgeschichte

Genres – Medien – Techniken

Die Gattungsbewegungen der Kriminalliteratur und deren erzählerische Formen sind unauflöslich mit der Herausbildung neuer Wissensordnungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert verbunden. Als Kreuzungspunkt dieser epistemischen Ordnungen erscheint die Kriminologie, die sowohl an der Identifizierung des Verbrechens als auch an einem umfangreichen Wissen über Devianzen und Verbrechertypologien arbeitet.
Die Beiträge des Bandes verstehen die Genres der Kriminalliteratur als Schauplatz dieser Diskurse und ihrer Inszenierungsmöglichkeiten. Damit rückt das Verhältnis von Techniken der Narration und der Spurensicherung sowie von medialen Praktiken und der Produktion von Subjektpositionen in den Blick.

Thomas Dikant: Landschaft und Territorium. Amerikanische Literatur, Expansion und die Krise

der Nation, 1784-1866. München: Fink, 2014.

Florian Sedlmeier with Eric Erbacher and Nicole Maruo-Schröder.

Rereading the Machine in the Garden: Nature and Technology in American

Culture. Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2014.

Florian Sedlmeier: The Postethnic Literary: Reading Paratexts

and Transpositions around 2000. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2014.

Ulla Haselstein (Hrsg.), Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit (Hrsg.), Catrin Gersdorf (Hrsg.), Elena

Giannoulis (Hrsg.): The Cultural Career of Coolness

Lexington Books (Verlag), 2013, 978-0-7391-7316-9 (ISBN)

Cool is a word of American English that has been integrated into the vocabulary of numerous languages around the globe. Today it is a term most often used in advertising trendy commodities, or, more generally, in promoting urban lifestyles in our postmodern age. But what is the history of the term "cool?" When has coolness come to be associated with certain modes of contemporary self-fashioning? On what grounds do certain nations claim a privilege to be recognized as "cool?" These are some of the questions that served as a starting-point for a comparative cultural inquiry which brought together specialists from American Studies and Japanese Studies, but also from Classics, Philosophy and Sociology. The conceptual grid of the volume can be described as follows: (1) Coolness is a metaphorical term for affect-control. It is tied in with cultural discourses on the emotions and the norms of their public display, and with gendered cultural practices of subjectivity. (2) In the course of the cultural transformations of modernity, the term acquired new importance as a concept referring to practices of individual, ethnic, and national difference.
(3) Depending on cultural context, coolness is defined in terms of aesthetic detachment and self-irony, of withdrawal, dissidence and even latent rebellion. (4) Coolness often carries undertones of ambivalence. The situational adequacy of cool behavior becomes an issue for contending ethical and aesthetic discourses since an ethical ideal of self-control and a strategy of performing self-control are inextricably intertwined. (5) In literature and film, coolness as a character trait is portrayed as a personal strength, as a lack of emotion, as an effect of trauma, as a mask for suffering or rage, as precious behavior, or as savvyness. This wide spectrum is significant: artistic productions offer valid insights into contradictions of cultural discourses on affect-control. (6) American and Japanese cultural productions show that twentieth-century notions of coolness hybridize different cultural traditions of affect-control.