Books published by Verlag Peter Lang

Polemical stupidity ¿ a critical concept drawn from Bakhtin ¿ denotes the strategic refusal to understand. It appears most familiarly in the character of the Fool (like Candide), who genuinely does not understand the world, thus unmasking its incoherence. But in literature it can cover too the stance of the narrator or author (who pretends to misunderstand). It also functions at the levels of genre and style, embracing parody and rewriting in general. It is a dialogic or open form of critical engagement. Though it can be found throughout Western literature, polemical stupidity is most richly characteristic of the writing of the French Enlightenment. This book suggests why, and traces its rise and fall as a discursive practice in the century from Pascal to Rousseau. Early chapters consider the concept itself, its emergence in Pascal¿s Lettres provinciales, worldliness and unworldliness, and the new writing of 1660-1700 (critical history to fairy tales). The main part of the book, on the age of Enlightenment itself, contains successive chapters on Regency theatre, Montesquieüs Lettres persanes, Marivaux, Voltaire, Diderot, and finally Rousseau who will not play.

One of the most remarkable features of Diderot¿s work is the refusal of closure in a large number of his texts which appears to leave philosophical, aesthetic or even narrative issues unresolved, and consequently invites a more active participation from the reader than more conventional works. Since it is in the nature of critical discourse to wish to answer questions, this aspect of the works has remained relatively unexplored, with some critics even choosing to ignore the questions asked by the endings in their efforts to give a specific and unambiguous meaning to texts that, in reality, seek to blur their meaning or even to avoid having one. This study addresses the problems posed by Diderot¿s endings directly, seeking through them to illuminate readings of the works as a whole. Hence it looks not just at the endings, but at what the endings can tell us about the complete texts, and how they are characteristic (or not) of the rest of the works.

Queneaüs novels are extremely popular for their wit and linguistic ingenuity but they also pose a serious challenge to the reader¿s reconstruction of the fictional world, which can often go unrecognised. This study takes us back to the fundamental elements of Queneaüs worlds, demonstrating how his idiosyncratic style can affect the reader¿s mental processing of the text (¿world-building¿). It also demonstrates the internal organisation of Queneaüs fictional worlds. Drawing on cognitive discourse models and the philosophical notion of ¿possible worlds¿, the book provides both comparative and general analysis of Queneaüs novels and case studies of Le Vol d¿Icare, Les Fleurs bleues, and Loin de Rueil, exposing the resistance that these worlds present to stable cognitive reconstruction, notably through the subversion of world boundaries (¿world-play¿), and the positing of impossible spaces (¿heterotopiae¿).

This volume presents a selection of essays in English and French initially delivered at the interdisciplinary conference of the Association of Modern and Contemporary France held in Leicester in September 2000. Frontiers are defined broadly in terms of material and symbolic inter- and transnational spaces where French and Francophone artists, communities and nations face their own selves and each other. Contributors reflect on the relationships between various cross-boundary contacts and perceptions of identity, power and marginality.

Refugee research and debate have focused on international agreements, border controls and the legal status of asylum seekers. The lived, daily life of refugees in different phases of their flight has thus been unduly neglected. How have refugees experienced policies of reception and resettlement, and how have they individually and collectively built up their own cultures of exile? To answer these questions the author of this study has undertaken long-term fieldwork as a community worker in a Norwegian municipality. Refugees from Chile, Iran, Somalia, Bosnia and Vietnam were on occasions subjected to exclusionary and discriminatory practices. Nevertheless, restistance was seen in the form of a Somali women¿s sewing circle, the organisation of a multi-cultural youth club, running refugee associations and printing their own language newspapers. Moreover, in activities such as these, refugees addressed and came to terms with a limited number of shared existential concerns: morality, violence, sexuality, family reunion, belonging and not belonging to a second generation. Drawing upon these experiences a general theory of refugeeness is proposed. It states that the cultures refugees create in exile are the necessary prerequisite for self-recognition and survival.

Der vorliegende Band vereinigt ausgewählte Beiträge einer interdisziplinären Konferenz zum Thema «Berlin ¿ Wien ¿ Prag. Moderne, Minderheiten und Migration in der Zwischenkriegszeit», die im September 2000 an der Queen¿s University of Belfast stattfand. Die literaturwissenschaftlichen, publizistischen, judaistischen und architekturhistorischen Beiträge (in deutscher oder englischer Sprache) vermitteln neue Perspektiven in Bezug auf die spannungsreiche Kultur dieser Städte in den zwanziger und dreissiger Jahren. This volume comprises selected papers from the conference «Berlin ¿ Wien ¿ Prag. Modernity, Minorities and Migration in the Inter-War Period» which was held at the Queen¿s University of Belfast in September 2000. The contributions (in English or German) offer new perspectives on the exciting culture of these cities during the 1920s and 30s from a variety of disciplines: Literary History, Media Studies, Jewish Studies and History of Architecture.

Celebrated for its ancient water wheels, the town of Hama is located on Syriäs longest river, the Orontes. Ottoman Hama was a stopover on the major north-south road of Syria as well as the center of a local economic zone of its own. Intertwined social networks linked townspeople to the peasants and pastoral nomads of Hamäs hinterland. By the early twentieth century a few elite and notable families had come to dominate the political and economic life of Hama and its outlying villages, setting the stage for the city¿s dramatic entry into Syrian national life during the French Mandate and post-colonial periods. Based principally on local judicial archives, this book is a social history of Hama during the last two centuries of Ottoman rule. It examines the social and economic structures that defined people¿s lives and that conditioned their participation in the historical changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dramatis personae include men and women, commoners and notables, merchants and artisans, and others who, taken together, represent a cross-section of a Middle Eastern society as they entered the world of global markets, European empires, and modern states.