Books

The European arena of lifelong learning offers rich country-specific portfolios of historical trajectories, policy frameworks and practical evidence of adult and continuing education. This book provides an introduction to the case of Norway and outlines the key features of the Norwegian system alongside issues such as political and legal agendas, schemes of participation, provision and financing or trends in professionalization, research areas and transnational linkages. Through the lens of adult and continuing education, the author invites researchers, practitioners, students and persons interested in international-comparative perspectives to a tour d’horizon of the Norwegian lifelong learning landscape.

The English language volume offers a current stock-take of central areas in adult and vocational further education in France. The author Silke Schreiber-Barsch bases her work on various types of data and information. Beginning with historical developments, Schreiber-Barsch covers the topics of political, financial and institutional framework conditions, as well as offer, participation and teaching personnel. In closing, she outlines the current research status in terms of adult education and its role in the third level education system. The regional portrait offers well founded starting point and good orientation for getting to know the French system for adult and vocational further education.

Die vorliegende Arbeit widmet sich der Frage nach den sozialen Praxen und gesellschaftlichen Bedeutungen von Schönheit bei den Karo Batak in Sumatra, Indonesien. In Tanah Karo, einer agrarisch geprägten Hochebene, säumen Aerobic- Studios und Schönheitssalon die Straßen der zwei Kleinstädte Berastagi und Kabanjahe. Weibliche Schönheit in Form von Femininität gilt als modern. Moderne Weiblichkeit, die ihren Ausdruck in einem schönen Körper findet, wird durch ein komplexes Bündel von Diskursen und Praxen lokaler, nationaler und globaler Provenienz konstituiert. Ausgehend vom Körper, der als die vermittelnde Instanz zwischen Diskursen und Praxen verstanden wird, analysiert die Verfasserin die Komplexität des Themas Schönheit und Modernität aus Perspektive der Akteurinnen. Welche Ziele verfolgen sie mit der strategischen Aneignung des Ideals der modernen Weiblichkeit? Wie strukturieren soziale Positionen die jeweiligen Aneignungsprozesse? Die Verfasserin zeigt, wie die zunehmende Bedeutung von Schönheit mit Transformationen im Bereich der Geschlechterverhältnisse, des Konsums und der sozialen Differenzierung verknüpft ist. Moderne Weiblichkeit konstituiert sich an der Schnittstelle ästhetischer, aber vor allem auch sozialer, ökonomischer, kultureller, religiöser und moralischer Diskurse. Das zentrale Motiv der Akteurinnen für die Aneignung von als modern erachteten Schönheitsidealen stellt die Erweiterung der eigenen Handlungsfähigkeit in der patrilinearen Gesellschaft der Karo Batak dar. Die jeweiligen sozialen Positionen führen zu unterschiedlichen Formen der Aneignung, die in verschiedenen Formen moderner Weiblichkeit resultieren. Am Beispiel von Frauen der städtischen Mittelschicht, jungen Frauen vom Land und waria, Menschen mit weiblicher transgender-Identität, werden diese Aneignungsprozesse und ihre gesellschaftlichen Bedeutungen vergleichend diskutiert. Die Globalisierung von Schönheit, so lässt sich resümieren, bringt – selbst auf begrenzter lokaler Ebene – verschiedene moderne Weiblichkeiten hervor.

Markus Nehl focuses on black authors who, from a 21st-century perspective, revisit slavery in the U.S., Ghana, South Africa, Canada and Jamaica. Nehl’s provocative readings of Toni Morrison’s »A Mercy«, Saidiya Hartman’s »Lose Your Mother«, Yvette Christiansë’s »Unconfessed«, Lawrence Hill’s »The Book of Negroes« and Marlon James’ »The Book of Night Women« delineate how these texts engage in a fruitful dialogue with African diaspora theory about the complex relation between the local and transnational and the enduring effects of slavery. Reflecting on the ethics of narration, this study is particularly attentive to the risks of representing anti-black violence and to the intricacies involved in (re-)appropriating slaverys archive.

»Houses, Secrets, and the Closet« investigates the literary production of masculinities and their relation to secrets and sexualities in 18th and 19th century fiction. It focusses on close readings of Gothic fiction, Sensation Novels, and tales by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Henry James. The study approaches these texts through the lens of domestic space, gender, knowledge, and power. This approach serves to investigate the cultural roots of the »closet« – the male homosexual secret – which reveals a more general notion of male secrecy in modern society. The study thus contributes to a better understanding of the cultural history of masculinities and sexualities.

Based on the structured analysis of selected North American novels, this work examines global cities as a literary phenomenon (»DiverCity«). By analyzing Dionne Brand’s Toronto, »What We All Long For« (2005), Chang-rae Lee’s New York, »Native Speaker« (1995), and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Los Angeles, »Tropic of Orange« (1997), Melanie U. Pooch provides the connecting link for exploring the triad of globalization and its effects, global cities as cultural nodal points, and cultural diversity in a globalizing age as a literary phenomenon. Thus, she contributes to a global, interdisciplinary, and multi-perspectival understanding of literature, culture, and society.

American Mobilities investigates representations of mobility—social, economic, geographic—in American film and literature during the Depression, WWII, and the early Cold War. With an emphasis on the dual meaning of »domestic«, referring to both the family home and the nation, this study traces the important trope of mobility that runs through the “American” century. Juxtaposing canonical fiction with popular, and low-budget independent films with Classical Hollywood, Leyda brings the analytic tools of American cultural and literary studies to bear on an eclectic array of primary texts as she builds a case for the significance of mobility in the study of the United States.

The booming increase of the senior population has become a social phenomenon and a challenge to our societies, and technological advances have undoubtedly contributed to improve the lives of elderly citizens in numerous aspects. In current debates on technology, however, the »human factor« is often largely ignored. The ageing individual is rather seen as a malfunctioning machine whose deficiencies must be diagnosed or as a set of limitations to be overcome by means of technological devices. This volume aims at focusing on the perspective of human beings deriving from the development and use of technology: this change of perspective – taking the human being and not technology first – may help us to become more sensitive to the ambivalences involved in the interaction between humans and technology, as well as to adapt technologies to the people that created the need for its existence, thus contributing to improve the quality of life of senior citizens.

According to relational sociology, power imbalances are at the root of human conflicts and consequently shape the physical and symbolic struggles between interdependent groups or individuals. This volume highlights the role of power relations in the African American experience by applying key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias to black literature and culture. The authors offer new readings of power asymmetries as represented in works of canonical and contemporary black writers (Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead), rap music (e.g., Jay Z), images of black homelessness, and figurations of political activism (civil rights activist Bayard Rustin,

What do literary texts tell us about growing old? The essays in this volume introduce and explore representations of ageing and old age in canonical works of English and postcolonial literature. The contributors examine texts by William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Julian Barnes, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, J.M. Coetzee, Alice Munro, Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace and, together with a medical study, they suggest solutions to the challenges arising from the current demographic change brought about by ageing Western populations.

Why did the novel become so popular in the past three centuries, and how did the American novel contribute to this trend? As a key provider of the narrative frames and formulas needed by modern individuals to give meaning and mooring to their lives. Drawing on phenomenological hermeneutics, human geography and social psychology, Laura Bieger contends that belonging is not a given; it is continuously produced by narrative. Against the current emphasis on metaphors of movement and destabilization, she explores the salience and significance of home. Challenging views of narrative as a mechanism of ideology, she approaches narrative as a practical component of dwelling in the world – and the novel a primary place-making agent.

This study is a concise introduction to Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and its application in a literary analysis of urban narratives of the 21st century. We encounter well-known psycho-geographers such as Iain Sinclair and Sam Miller, and renowned authors, Patrick Neate and Suketu Mehta. Prachi More analyses these authors’ accounts of vastly different cities such as London, Delhi, Mumbai, Johannesburg, New York and Tokyo. Are these urban narratives a contemporary solution to documenting an ever-evasive urban reality? If so, how do they embody “matters of concern” as Latour would have put it, laying bare modern-day “actors” and “networks” rather than reporting mere “matters of fact”? These questions are drawn into an inter-disciplinary discussion that addresses concerns and questions of epistemology, the sociology of knowledge as well as urban and documentary studies.

In her endeavour to overcome the established methodological, conceptual, and empirical dualism of mobility and migration, Anna Xymena Wieczorek develops a “mobilities perspective” by combining migration studies theories with approaches of the mobility studies. With the help of rich empirical data gathered among young adults of Polish heritage in Germany and Canada, Wieczorek conceptualizes three patterns of (im)mobility which illustrate the diversity of immigrants’ geographical movements after their initial migration. She thus reveals the different social configurations promoting or hindering the development, maintenance or shifting of each pattern in migrants’ biographical trajectories.

Everyday articulations of music, place, urban politics, and inclusion/exclusion are powerfully present in Istanbul. This volume analyzes landscapes of music, community, and exclusion across a century and a half.
An interdisciplinary group of scholars and artists presents four case studies: the rembetika, the music of the Asiks, the Zakir/Alevi tradition, and hip-hop, in Beyoglu, Üsküdar, the gentrifying Sulukule neighborhood, and across the metropolis.

Due to computers’ ability to combine different semiotic modes, texts are no longer exclusively comprised of static images and mute words. How have digital media changed the way we write and read? What methods of textual and data analysis have emerged? How do we rescue digital artifacts from obsolescence? And how can digital media be used or taught inside classrooms?
These and other questions are addressed in this volume that assembles contributions by artists, writers, scholars and editors such as Dene Grigar, Sandy Baldwin, Carlos Reis, and Frieder Nake. They offer a multiperspectival view on the way digital media have changed our notion of textuality.

Der Zweifel ist eine Signatur der Moderne. Im gesamten Spektrum der geisteswissenschaftlichen Disziplinen hat er derzeit Hochkonjunktur. In der Exegese führt er dagegen noch ein Schattendasein. Benjamin Schliesser spürt in der vorliegenden Studie Ausdrucksformen des Zweifels und der Zweiseeligkeit in den frühchristlichen Schriften auf und legt die zentralen Aussagen in ihrem literarischen und situativen Zusammenhang aus. Zudem zeichnet er sprach-, motiv- und traditionsgeschichtliche Entwicklungslinien nach, zieht analoge Vorstellungen aus der antiken Religions- und Geistesgeschichte bei und fängt die Rezeption und Fortwirkung der neutestamentlichen Texte exemplarisch ein. Der frühchristliche Zweifel wird dabei auch im Licht seiner Wirkungsgeschichte in Dogmatik und Ethik interpretiert. Es zeigt sich ein überraschender Facettenreichtum im frühchristlichen Diskurs, in dem sich intellektuelle, emotionale und ethische Dissonanzen Ausdruck verschaffen und auf vielfältige Weise bearbeitet werden.