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All cultures produce stories; all humans are storytellers. Hence, by implication, narratives must serve a fundamental cultural and existential function in human life. This article suggests the term “cultural embedment” to characterize this function. This article points out that, for narratives to play the role as a tool for cultural embedment, the double structure of narratives always switches back and forth between an object level and a meta level. To capture this reduplication as a contextualized and historical dynamics, Clifford Geertz’s term “thick description” is introduced together with Jurij Lotman’s conception of culture as an interconnected primary and a secondary modeling system. After a short outline of six important approaches to narratives that have to be taken into account, the article proposes a thick description that characterizes narratives as tools for cultural embedment. A final analytical sketch of Chigozie Obioma’s novel An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) briefly demonstrates a non-formalistic approach to narratives as tools for cultural embedment in a dynamic interchange between several levels.

Anmeldelse af Europæisk litteratur 1500–1800 bind 1–4, redigeret af Helge Jordheim, Knut Ove Eliassen, Anne Fastrup, Christian Dahl og Tue Andersen Nexø. Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2021, 260 + 263 + 299 + 277 sider.

Stunde Null – this expression is used to indicate the end of the German Nazi regime in 1945 and the beginning of a new Germany. This historical turning point was marked by the re-naming of the former Germany in both East and West, and Nazi symbols, institutions, values and paraphernalia were taken to the tip. Naming and re-naming were part of this iconoclastic attempt to undo a recent past by turning the memory of it into a negative memory soon to disappear out of sight. However, Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a cumbersome process in which iconoclasm acts both as a singular event and as a moment in an ongoing historical process. The iconoclastic destruction in 1562 of the cathedral in Lyon opens a discussion of the interdependence of event and process in iconoclasm as an intervention in collective memory. Using re-naming to exemplify this cultural dynamic, the motto of the French Revolution, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, serves as a brief illustration of how revolutionary iconoclasms were exploited later to redesign French history. To finish, post-colonial India sets the scene for a demonstration of the ambiguities embedded in iconoclastic processes in the short story ‘Lawley Road’ (1956) by R.K. Narayan, an ironic account of a back-and-forth process of re-naming of streets and places in the aftermath of Indian independence.

Literature consists of works of language, but it has never been able to function as literature without being part of a cluster of interconnected media. From time immemorial, oratures require performances to work and thus cannot exist without use of bodily signs or use of various tools and instruments. Today, of course, this extended media landscape is vaster and more complex and distributed through more differentiated and numerous agencies than ever before, which also changes the mutual relation among the media involved in the production, dissemination, and use of literature, as well as changing the position of literature in the media landscape. A growing anonymity of the agents for mediation also challenges the articulation of history and memory in today’s cultures. The aim of the paper is to contribute to an understanding of the dynamics of the entire cluster of media with literature at its center, rather than making an account of the separate media involved. The canonical Anglo-Irish eighteenth-century writer Jonathan Swift will serve as my primary material.

Svend Erik Larsen is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark, and a member of Academia Europaea. He has authored more than 10 books and 400 articles. His latest works include journal articles, ‘Australia between White Australia and Multiculturalism: A World Literature Perspective’ (2017), ‘Migration and Translation in a World Literature Perspective’ (2017), ‘World Literature in an Extended Media Landscape’ (2017),Yingyong Fuhaoxue(2018) and the monographLiterature and the Experience of Globalization: Texts without Borders(2017), translated asWu bianjie wenben: wenxue yu quanqiuhua(2020). Professor Larsen was interviewed by Doctor Li Shuling while he was in China to give a series of lectures on literature and globalisation. Speaking about the problems in the current research on literature and globalisation, Professor Larsen suggests viewing globalisation as a cultural process and to reread literary works from both historical and global perspectives. This implies studying literature and world literature framed against the concrete everyday experience of globalisation in highly developed societies as well as in poor marginalised regions. He expounds the focal points of literary studies in globalised conditions, the dynamic relationship between local literature and world literature, the challenges and opportunities before minor literature and micro literature today, and the path for local literature to become global. He believes that world literature will help democratise the study of literature in global conditions.

One of the most significant connections between power and responsibility occurs in relation to the past. The post-revolutionary political powers of the new nations in the nineteenth century reinterpreted or, less politely formulated, invented their past to fit the process of nation building and only then take responsibility for future development of the nations. And they were not alone: pre-nineteenth century periods and the 20th and 21st centuries abound with examples. In our personal lives, self-empowerment often depends on the capacity to take responsibility for one’s past, including all its happy and traumatic moments. In a court room the forensic evidence of past events alone gives the judges the power to decide the fate of the defendant. In neither of the cases power and responsibility can work together without activating individual and collective memory and without finding a language to express responsibility as a manifestation of political, formal and personal power in a process of political legitimization, legal affirmation of justice and personal identity formation. With literary examples from South Africa this article discusses power and responsibility in their relation to a troubled political, legal and personal past.

The article asks the question whether the term ‘spatial turn’ implies the same reference to a fundamental paradigmatic shift as Kant’s Copernican revolution or the ‘linguistic turn.’ The answer is no. The article considers the topical interest in spatiality as a more loose recontextualization of basic notions of time and space of a long standing, more in line with a gradual change of meaning from antiquity to the present than with a conceptual revolution

Interdisciplinarity has entered the agenda of researchers, teachers and policy makers and will remain there in the future. This does not mean that interdisciplinarity is understood the same way, let alone is appreciated everywhere. Researchers are challenged by increasingly complex problems in culture, nature and society beyond disciplinary boundaries; higher education has to cater to a volatile job market where known disciplines no longer define their own niches in terms of topics or practices for their candidates; and decision makers are confronted with challenges that do not respect ideologies of political parties and reports based on mainstream knowledge. In this context, interdisciplinarity is an ongoing re-consideration of the creation, the communication and the application of knowledge uniting the perspectives of research, teaching and decision making. While most discussions on interdisciplinarity focus on its theoretical and methodological complexity in an exclusively contemporary perspective, this article will discuss interdisciplinarity in a historical perspective as central to European history of knowledge as well as in an intercultural perspective.*

Lingvistkredsen Den 24. september 1941 fejrede Lingvistkredsen i København sit 10 års jubilæum. Bortset fra at han skulle vide, hvor mange der skulle have kaffe og brød, behøvede sekretæren Harry Pihler ikke at spørge nogen om dagsordenen, ja knap nok at udsende den.

The leading Danish comparative literature scholar, Svend Erik Larsen, responds to the findings of the volume. Writing from the perspective of a smaller European literature, but with a wealth of experience and knowledge of world literature scholarship, his conclusion assesses how the volume confirms, challenges or changes prevailing theoretical views of the type of national literatures under discussion and highlights where the need for further research and theoretical conceptualization is most pressing.

Within written history, Europe is rich in post-imperial situations. In the twentieth century the dwindling empires of this century, born during European colonial expansion after Columbus, gave rise to new post-imperial conditions with a global impact. Europe is no exception. On other continents, empires have also emerged and faded away: Latin-America with the Mayas and the Aztecs, and, notably, Asia where the Chinese Empire has disappeared and re-emerged at different historical junctures. On their way down, European empires have produced what could be labelled a post-imperial stress syndrome, very much like a PTSD, producing certain defensive ideological configurations of parochialism, xenophobia and nostalgic illusions, binding them to a past they have left, but are still chained to, mentally and ideologically. The fall or fading away of an empire is not just an event with a precise date, but a process, which, inevitably, shows cracks before it actually happens. Such frictions anticipating a future reality can only be caught by imagination. This article will concentrate on two such imaginative post-imperial prefigurations before the fact is generally recognized, both concerning the dissolution of the British Empire. It can be argued that, with Brexit, Britain is still trying to come to terms with its post-imperial reality. One such prefiguration will be seen through the eyes of the centre, J.M. Forster’sA Passage to India(1924), the other from the periphery, Chinua Achebe’sThings Fall Apart(1958).

Truth is never self-evident or based on ocular proof alone. It has to be based on an argument and, thus, to be shaped for communication, which makes knowledge with a truth-claim a social phenomenon that can only be obtained through a complex mediation of theoretical preconditions, research technology, interdisciplinary collaboration and significant financial investments. Moreover, it is always disseminated in a politically charged context through complex media platforms, today ranging from journals and monographs to social media. The contemporary debate on truth-claims, and thus on ontology and epistemology, often lacks historical perspective beyond its contemporaneity nurtured by the debates about fake news. Yet, the awareness of the lies and fake knowledge this modern complexity may release was clear already in the emerging modern entanglement of science and culture during the Enlightenment, before electronic media. A reading of the comedy “Erasmus Montanus” (1731) by Ludvig Holberg serves as a case in point.