Developing the Research Infrastructure in the Social Sciences: The Role and Contribution of the German Research Foundation

The DFG’s (German Research Foundation) strategy for future data research infrastructures should be based on what has been achieved thus far and the lessons that can be learned: First, the focus should be on “providing data” rather than on “sharing data.” Second, projects whose primary purpose is to provide a common good should seek to build research infrastructure. The DFG has powerful means at its disposal for funding outstanding infrastructure projects. It is up to the scientific community to adapt and utilize these funding instruments. Strategic cooperation is required among all the interested parties in the field: cooperation on thematic priorities within the research community; cooperation on options for funding between the research community and funding institutions; cooperation on the division of labour between the funding institutions (including ministries), both on the national and on the international level. The DFG is prepared to play an active role in this cooperation under the leadership of its elected bodies (Fachkollegien and Senat).Large Scale Studies; Strategic Cooperation

Rev up Your Résumé: Determining Factors in the Race for an Academic Library Position

Like Indianapolis 500 drivers preparing for the race, LIS students today are gearing up for a job search in a tight market. We are examining how certain choices impact a graduate’s success in the job market. Our survey of recent graduates determines the extent to which program rankings, coursework, activities, and internships provide a competitive edge in the academic library job market

Displaced romanticism: searching for the self in J.M.Coetzee's autobiographical fiction

Includes bibliographical references.This thesis is a literary critical investigation into the strategies of self-definition at work in the autobiographical fiction of J.M. Coetzee. My focus falls on those of his novels that have a more-or less explicit autobiographical resonance (Boyhood, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, Diary of a Bad Year, Summertime), with supplementary forays into two additional books (Age of Iron and The Childhood of Jesus). My argument centres on the observation that Coetzee's work derives its affective force from the conflict he stages, time and again, between the desire for a transcendent sense of being, Romantic in origin, and the realization that being derives its co-ordinates from the discursive formations - ideological, socio-historical, philosophical, linguistic - that provide the structure of meaning for self-expression in writing. I introduce my argument by situating Coetzee's work according to a post-structuralist critical framework that emphasizes his strategies of subjective displacement. Our reading of his work, I then suggest, might benefit from a more considered evaluation of the persistent influence of a Romantic ideal concerning the primacy of subjective experience. In the first chapter I explore the conceptual tension that derives from these contrasting points of view by considering Coetzee's engagement with the tradition of confessional writing, arguing that he foregrounds the textual subject as the locus in which the truth of the self is to be sought. The second chapter examines the central role of the Karoo farm in the formation of the autobiographical subject in Coetzee's writing, and links it to a Romantic model of identification between the self and nature. In the third chapter I argue that Coetzee's awareness of socio-political realities inhibits the Romantic yearning for an authentic sense of self, even while he reformulates the idea of authentic voice as the expression of a politically and historically compromised subjectivity. Finally, in the last chapter I turn my attention to the authorial imprint that derives from the consistency of Coetzee's depiction of conflict between transcendent and contextual realities, and conclude by tracing the afterlife of this dynamic in his most recent novel, The Childhood of Jesus

Die Kehre als völlige Umwendung des Menschen. Von der Verwirklichung des „mystischen” Antriebs der Phänomenologie im Denken Martin Heideggers

The article first outlines Edmund Husserl’s idea of “complete transformation” (völlige Umwendung) and the philosophy of “the turn” (Kehre) of Martin Heidegger. In the following chapter it is shown that you can understand both Husserl as well as Heidegger in the light of “the essential turn” in the German mysticism of the fourteenth century. In this way it becomes clear that Husserl’s idea of a “complete transformation” seems to be a forgotten “mystical” impetus of phenomenology, which was much more realized by Martin Heidegger than by Husserl. In this way Heidegger’s philosophy of “the turn” appears as an important modern approach of the mystical philosophy of transformation