The Architecture of Modern Culture: Towards a Narrative Cultural Theory

Description

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. Preface Part 1. Culture and its Narratives Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative: A Transdisciplinary Discourse Report The Hidden Narratives: Latency, Repression, Common Sense On the Narratology of Cultural and Collective Memory Romanticism and Nationalism: The Heroic Narrative - Hermann and the Battle for Germany Polyphem’s Children: (Post-) Colonial Aspects in Western Modernity and Literary Modernism Murder and Monotheism: A Detective Story in Close Reading Part 2. Space, Time and the Global Space and Borders: Simmel, Waldenfels, Musil Time in Modern Cultural Analysis Walter Benjamin and the Translational Turn The Arts and the Split of Time: On Kawara Part 3. The Heritage of Classical Modernism: Broch, Canetti, Musil, Kafka The Disappearing of Ruins: Thomas Glavinic’s The Work of the Night and an Imaginary Symposium with Benjamin, Simmel, Freud and Foucault Fear in Culture: Hermann Broch’s Massenwahntheorie Mass Hysteria and the Physics of the Crowd: Canetti and Broch -A Theoretical Divorce Musil’s Version of Round Dance in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften From Early Modernism to the Late Avant-garde Movement: The Austrian Example The Broken Mirror: The Construction of America in Lenau Images of America, Made in Austria: After Lenau - Franz Kafka Austrian Literature in a Trans-cultural Context Bibliography and References Original place of publication of single chapters