The subject of immigration

Book synopsis: Witness presents a new body of work in the field by an international cast of scholars who engage with a complex set of questions concerning notions of witnessing and attestation in twentieth- and twenty-first century Western culture. Providing insight into this vital yet relatively unexplored concept –and the wide range of media and subject areas to which it lends itself – the volume not only establishes links with existing, currently canonical contributions to witness literature – from Primo Levi through Victor Klemperer to Imre Kertész – but also goes on to provide a set of analyses of exemplary and very recent literary works in that area. Furthermore, Witness extends and changes the previous scholarly tendency to focus strongly on historical evidence and the witness’s vocalization of true remembrance so as to include difficult theoretical and interpretative questions posed by studies today of traumatic experience, amnesia, visual culture, new media, and technology. The book includes contributions from the acclaimed Romanian-German author Herta Müller, Nobel laureate of literature 2009, and Cathy Caruth, the internationally recognized scholar in trauma studies

Altermodern: movement or marketing?

To coin a new term and have it, if not exactly universally established, then at least acknowledged in the already overcrowded vocabulary of contemporary art speak might be ambition enough for most critics. Indeed, to offer a name for a movement, a group or a new ‘spirit’ in art is something that most writers concerned with contemporary art would be very wary of doing, given that we live in an irreversibly pluralist age. Writer and übercurator Nicolas Bourriaud appears to know no fear, however, when it comes to generating terminology. Indeed, not only did he coin many of the most recent terms for the type of practices predominant among younger artists over the past two decades (‘relational aesthetics’, ‘postproduction’, ‘semionaut’), but now he appears to actually want to coin a term for the age that we – the artists, the theorists and the audience – find ourselves in. It’s as if Greenberg, not content with bestowing on the world a grand definition of modernist painting, then wanted to actually rechristen modernity too. Nonetheless, Bourriaud wants to give us ‘The Altermodern’, an alternative reading of the contemporary, global situation as it effects both the production and reception of whatever is left of the ‘avant garde’ in art

Neo-Kantianism and Messianism: origin and interruption in Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin

Book synopsis: No other single author has so commanding a critical presence across so many disciplines within the arts and humanities, in so many national contexts, as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). The belated reception of his work as a literary critic (dating from the late 1950s) has been followed by a rapid series of critical receptions in different contexts: Frankfurt Critical Theory and Marxism, Judaism, Film Theory, Post-structuralism, Philosophical Romanticism, and Cultural Studies. This collection brings together a selection of the most critically important items in the literature, across the full range of Benjamin's cultural-theoretical interests, from all periods of the reception of his writings, but focusing upon the most recent, to produce a comprehensive overview of the best critical literature

Origin and becoming : anticipation, orientation and creatureliness in the work of Walter Benjamin, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig and Hugo von Hofmannsthal

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