SS 13
1) Culture as Text
2) Textual Culture
3) The Texture of Modernity
--1) Culture as Text
Ethnography/Anthropology
Literary Studies
Culture as Text ()
() Culture as Text
Clifford Geertz:
an interpretive theory of
culture / thick description
Doris Bachmann-Medick:
the anthropological turn
of literary studies
___________________________________________________________________________
LECTURE 4
PAGE 1
Historical Background:
a) Beginnings:
Catholic dogma monopolizing the interpretation of Scripture
vs.
Protestant insistence on the self-sufficiency of the holy text
(Luther: sola scriptura) > Reformation
understanding parts of the bible is framed by meaning of whole
> hermeneutic circle
(a part of s.th. is always understood in terms of the whole and vice versa)
prerequisite: unified meaning of the whole (Gods word)
> the problem of temporal/historical distance is avoided
___________________________________________________________________________
LECTURE 4
PAGE 2
b) Romantic Hermeneutics
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834):
a theory of human understanding which eliminates problems and
misunderstandings by means of strict methodological reflection
(i.e. a general theory of interpretation)
modes of inquiry:
grammatical/philological (comparison)
psychological (divination)
(vergleichende Erhellung und kongenialer Nachvollzug)
congeniality as prerequisite of true understanding
understanding as a deliberate and intentional process of reconstruction which
enables the reader to know a past author better than the author could know
him- or herself because access to a broader historical context than previously
available
___________________________________________________________________________
LECTURE 4
PAGE 3
Model of Understanding:
subject
object
>perceive>
expression/text <chooses<
the other
>understand>
___________________________________________________________________________
LECTURE 4
PAGE 4
___________________________________________________________________________
LECTURE 4
PAGE 5
2) Textual Culture
Problem:
The Culture as Text-Paradigm does not fully take into account the medial turn
outlined in Lecture 3 (or at least it did not do so initially).
signs/texts never allow us to access real reality through them,
they are never transparent, but they generate their own version of reality
(which we construct and accept as reality, cf. Lecture 2)
behind them there is no world as a transcendental signified
(Jacques Derrida), but only the transcendence (Kenneth Burke)
of their very own dynamics
the mediatized world around us is established by a textual culture which
should be analysed in terms of its materiality and mediality and not interpreted
along hermeneutic lines
a new mode of making sense is necessary
Literacy:
the autonomous vs. the ideological model (cf. Street 1984)
Literacy in a New Media Age (cf. Kress 2003):
literacy = the ability to read and write all kinds of texts
___________________________________________________________________________
LECTURE 4
PAGE 6
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
image
screen
showing
logic of space
(simultaneity, co-presence)
flexible reading path
'filled' meaning
imagination focused on
'order'
"[T]he shape of what there is to read has its effects on 'reading'. Reading
practices, and the understanding of what reading is, develop in constant
interaction between the shape of what there is to read and the socially located
reader[s] and their human nature." (140)
makers of meaning:
telling the world
remakers of meaning:
"As the screen becomes the dominant site of communication even if (still)
only in its social and mythic impact rather than actually in quantitative terms
'reading', as the process of getting meaning from a textual entity, will need to
deal with more than just writing and image. A CD, or a web-page, may make
use of music, of speech, of moving image, of 'sound-track', as well as of (still)
image and of writing. All these need to be 'read' together and made into one
coherent text in 'inner' representation." (142)
Reading as Design:
"At this moment in history the force of convention does not press as heavily on
makers of image or on viewers, perhaps in part because images have
remained outside the very close control of social and cultural power which has
been applied to writing in particular." (154)
"While the lexis of a language, in speech or writing, consists of (relatively
speaking) a fixed number of available elements, each element is relatively
open in meaning. In visual lexis, however, there is no fixed number of available
elements, but each element, which is each time newly produced, is fixed, in
terms of being specific about what it represents." (154)
___________________________________________________________________________
LECTURE 4
PAGE 7
___________________________________________________________________________
LECTURE 4
PAGE 8
___________________________________________________________________________
LECTURE 4
PAGE 9
Moritz Baler, Die Entdeckung der Textur: Unverstndlichkeit in der Kurzprosa der
emphatischen Moderne 1910-1916. Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1994.
Moritz Baler et. al., Historismus und literarische Moderne. Tbingen: Niemeyer,
1996.
Moritz Baler, Textur. Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, 3. Aufl.
Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007: 618f.
Michael Warner, Uncritical Reading. In: Jane Gallop, ed., Polemic: Critical or
Uncritical. New York/London: Routledge, 2004: 13-38.
Stephen Best & Sharon Marcus, Surface Reading: An Introduction. Representations
108.1 (2009): 1-21.
Hans-Georg von Arburg et al., Hrsg., Mehr als Schein: sthetik der Oberflche in
Film, Kunst, Literatur und Theater. Zrich/Berlin: diaphanes, 2008.
___________________________________________________________________________
LECTURE 4
PAGE 10
Richard H. R. Harper, Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload. Cambridge/London: The MIT Press, 2010:
Communicative practices create a texture a complex weave of bonds that tie
together those who are communicating. This texture has various forms and strengths:
some bonds are instant and others slow, some ephemeral and others more
permanent. These bonds vary according the type of act in question and in terms of
the technologies that are used to enable acts. (196f.)
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York/
London: Norton, 2011.
John Hartley, The Uses of Digital Literacy. St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2009.
Sussman, Henry, Around the Book: Systems and Literacy. New York: Fordham UP,
2011.
___________________________________________________________________________
LECTURE 4
PAGE 11
Bibliography Lecture 4:
Bachmann-Medick, Doris, Hrsg., Kultur als Text: Die anthropologische Wende in der
Literaturwissenschaft (1996). 2. akt. Auflage mit neuer Bilanz. Tbingen/
Basel: Francke, 2004.
Bachmann-Medick, Doris, Culture as Text: Reading and Interpreting Cultures. In:
Birgit Neumann/Ansgar Nnning, eds., Travelling Concepts for the Study of
Culture. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter 2012: 99-118.
Berensmeyer, Ingo, Methoden hermeneutischer und neohermeneutischer Anstze.
In: Vera & Ansgar Nnning, Hrsg., Methoden der literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Textanalyse. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010: 29-50.
Geertz, Clifford, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. In:
The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973: 3-30.
Hoffman, Katherine E., Culture as Text: Hazards and Possibilities of Geertz
Literary/Literacy Metaphor. The Journal of North African Studies 14.3/4
(2009): 417-430.
Kress, Gunther. Literacy in the New Media Age. London/New York: Routledge, 2003.
Lenk, Carsten, Kultur als Text: berlegungen zu einer Interpretationsfigur. In:
Renate Glaser, Matthias Luserke, Hrsg, Literaturwissenschaft
Kulturwissenschaft:
Positionen,
Themen,
Perspektiven.
Opladen:
Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996: 116-128.
Reinfandt, Christoph, Reading the Waste Land: Textuality, Mediality, Modernity. In:
Hannes Bergthaller, Carsten Schinko, eds., Addressing Modernity: Social
Systems Theory and U.S. Cultures. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2011: 6384.
Reinfandt, Christoph, 'Texture' as a Key Term in Literary and Cultural Studies. In:
Rdiger Kunow, Stephan Mussil, eds.,Text or Context: Reflections on Literary
and Cultural Criticism. Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 2013: 7-21.
Schneider, Mark A., Culture-as-Text in the Work of Clifford Geertz. Theory &
Society 16.6 (1987): 809-839.
Schulenberg, Ulf, Hermeneutics and Critical Theory. In: Martin Middeke et al., eds.,
English and American Studies: Theory and Practice. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2012:
186-190.
___________________________________________________________________________
LECTURE 4
PAGE 12