There is no doubt that the beginning of the twenty-first century was marked by crises of debt. Less well known is that literature played a historical role in defining and teaching debt to the public. Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt addresses how neoliberal finance has depended upon a historical linking of geopolitical inequality and financial representation that positions t…
What makes a reading experience »powerful«? This volume brings together literary scholars, linguists, and empirical researchers to elucidate the effects and reader responses to investigate just that. The thirteen contributions theorize this widely-used, but to date insufficiently studied notion, and provide insights into the therefore still mysterious-seeming power of literary fiction. The co…
Through the interpretative lens of today’s leading thinkers, The Philosophical Salon illuminates the persistent intellectual queries and the most disquieting concerns of our actuality. Across its three main divisions—Speculations, Reflections, and Interventions—the volume constructs a complex mirror, in which our age might be able to recognize itself with all its imperfections, shadowy sp…
What do the bizzare etymologies of Jean-Pierre Brisset, made-up languages for literary fiction, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Latin grammarians, Horace’s Epodes, and the Papyrus of Ani have in common? Absolutely nothing. Yet, taken together they provide an unusually coherent picture of a hitherto unacknowledged non-tradition of linguistic investigation. At these moments, particularly within…
The aim of this open access book is to take stock of, critically engage, and celebrate feminist IR scholarship produced in Europe. Organized thematically, the volume highlights a wealth of excellent scholarship, while also focusing on the politics of location and the international political economy of feminist knowledge production. Who are some of the central feminist scholars located in Europe…
What distinguishes an adventure novel from a historical novel? Can the same text belong to several genres? More to one than to another? Have some existing genres been overlooked? To answer these and similar questions, José Calvo Tello combines methods from Linguistics (lexicography), Literary Studies (genre theory), and Computer Science (machine learning, natural language processing). Located …
Since the relational turn, scholars have combated methodological universalism, nationalism, and individualism in researching social-spatial transformations. Yet, when leaving the gaps between the traveling and local epistemic assumptions unattended, engaging relational spatial theories in empirical research may still reproduce established theoretical claims. Following the sociology of knowledge…
Roman Charity« investigates the iconography of the breastfeeding daughter from the perspective of queer sexuality and erotic maternity. The volume explores the popularity of a topic that appealed to early modern observers for its eroticizing shock value, its ironic take on the concept of Catholic »charity«, and its implied critique of patriarchal power structures. It analyses why early moder…
Introduction to Art: Design, Context and Meaning offers a comprehensive introduction to the world of Art. Authored by four U.S.G. faculty members with advance degrees in the arts, this textbook offers up-to-date original scholarship. It includes over 400 high-quality images illustrating the history of art, its technical applications and its many uses. Combining the best elements of both a tradi…
For more than 40 years, Jesper Hoffmeyer has been committed to the idea of developing “a semiotics of nature, or biosemiotics as he chose to call this effort, that could intelligibly explain how all the phenomena of inherent meaning and signification in living nature – from the lowest level of sign processes in unicellular organisms to the cognitive and social behavior of animals – can em…