Papers by Nicola Glaubitz
The Tudors and Beyond (1485-1689). Politics and Representation in England
"The Tudors and Beyond (1485-1689). Politics and Representation in England" Christian Huck (ed.): Cultural Studies. An Introduction to the Study of British and American Cultural Studies. 2021.
„Ben Jonsons Volpone (1605/06) und der Gunpowder Plot. Staatliche und religiöse Medienpolitiken auf der Bühne.“ Merten, Kai, Claus-Michael Ort (eds.) Konfessionspolitik und Medien in Europa 1500-1700. Konflikte, Konkurrenzen, Theorien. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2021. 116-229.
„How useful is Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital for describing literary markets?” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 69:1 (2021): 43–55.
Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and field, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, still provid... more Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and field, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, still provide systematic reference points for studies interested in literary cultures under market conditions. These concepts have found resonance in studies observing the changing organisation, structure, and social positions involved in the writing, reading, and circulation of literature. While both the conceptual clarity and the historical results Bourdieu achieved (in particular in his study The Rules of Art, originally published in 1992) have come under attack, both his key concepts and his multi-method approach function as a theoretical toolbox for present studies. The article discusses three studies (Childress 2017; English 2005; Guillory 1993) which make use of Bourdieu's concept of capital in order to describe contemporary US publishing, the role of literary canons in higher education, and the status of literary awards. I argue that Bourdieu's framework is productive in these cases when it is used in a heuristic way, when the idea of cultural and social capital is considered as processes and practices of valuation, and when it points to the political aspects of economies.
The article gives a survey of the American comic artist Robert Crumb's work from the 1960s to the... more The article gives a survey of the American comic artist Robert Crumb's work from the 1960s to the present. It chiefly discusses Crumb's publishing policy in the transition from underground comix to alternative comics (ca. 1968-1980), and his position in the field of art and mainstream publishing. A detailed reading of Crumb's most popular comic "Keep on Truckin'" (1968) and its 1972 sequel "Remember Keep on Truckin'?" in the context of the American counterculture elaborates, firstly, Crumb's characteristic drawing style that nostalgically invokes vintage strips from the 'golden age' of newspaper funnies from the 1920s to the 1940s, and adds roughness and a crude sex appeal to 'cute', polished images of 1950s commercial comics. Secondly, it considers the commercialization of underground comix and Crumb's skeptical attitude to both the underground scene and the institutions of art, for which he was of interest as a marginal, popular artist. Thirdly, it discusses his take on the 'coffee table book' as a reflection on a culturally established, middlebrow format. Crumb's attempt to carve out a position as a craftsman in the tradition of early twentieth century entertainment is discussed critically with respect to current debates on the 'gentrification' of comics since the emergence of the graphic novel.
Miéville's short story stands out for its perhaps experimental, perhaps old-fashioned form: the s... more Miéville's short story stands out for its perhaps experimental, perhaps old-fashioned form: the story's first-person narrator adopts, in nineteenthcentury fashion, the persona of an editor and presents both his own view on the 'events' in question and a number of mock documents he has allegedly been sent. Readers are encouraged to piece together the story elementsevents and charactersfrom postcards, minutes of a meeting, memos, personal letters, and tables. Typographically distinct and juxtaposed rather than narratively linked, these text fragments suggest internal conflicts in a group of people who track rogue streetsstreets that change their location spontaneously and wreak havoc on the geographical and the political order of cities. It is no coincidence that a mix-up of names and addresses is the starting point of the story; the story's ending hints at the consequences of having or not having a fixed address. My contribution examines Miéville's use of the short story form in the context of fantastic literature. Following suggestions of Miéville's "The Conspiracy of Architecture" (1998), the foregrounding of formal and quasi-material aspects of organising and mediating knowledge is read as an engagement with the power/ knowledge dispositives made up of discursive ordering principles as well as city planning and city geography.
„Lang oder überlang? Zur Ästhetik und Pragmatik des anglophonen Langromans der Gegenwart.“ Sonderheft Ästhetik der Skalierung, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. Hrsg. Carlos Spoerhase, Steffen Siegel, Nikolaus Wegmann. Heft 18, 2020. 57-75., 2020
„Programm und Projekt. Wissen, Verzeitlichung und Politik in Francis Bacons Essay Of Innovations“, 2020
Tom McCarthy’s novels are informed by media theory, and this essay reads his novel Remainder not ... more Tom McCarthy’s novels are informed by media theory, and this essay reads his novel Remainder not only with theory in order to highlight parallels to reflections on cultural techniques and sociotechnical networks but also tries to assess its relevance as theory. My essay will, first of all, introduce the media theoretical framework of cultural techniques and show how cultural techniques are described in Remainder. The parallel agendas of cultural techniques research, I argue, converge in a shared interest in materiality, practices, and the seemingly banal details of everyday life but put them into different perspectives. I will then read Remainder as a contribution to the theoretical debate on cultural techniques and suggest that the novel draws our attention to a politics of detail in theories of practices, the everyday, and cultural techniques
Der Beitrag fragt, inwiefern sich das Konzept ambient auf Literatur übertragen lässt: Gibt es amb... more Der Beitrag fragt, inwiefern sich das Konzept ambient auf Literatur übertragen lässt: Gibt es ambient literature, und was kann ambient als ästhetischer Begriff an Literatur beobachten? Ambient wird hier ausgehend von einer Diskussion der literaturwissenschaftlich etablierten Konzepte Atmosphäre und Stimmung als Semantik und Suchbegriff innerhalb einer Ästhetik populärer Gegenwartskultur bestimmt. So kann die naheliegende Antwort – Literatur erzeugt Stimmungen und Atmosphären durch die Beschreibung von Umgebungsphänomenen – historisch genauer eingegrenzt und zugleich kulturwissenschaftlich erweitert werden. Ambient entsteht im Kontext der populären Kultur der 1970er Jahre und erschließt, bezogen auf Literatur, ihre Einbettung in ein literarisches Feld, das durch die Segmentierung und Enthierarchisierung von Lesekulturen geprägt ist. Der veränderte Status bürgerlicher Lesekultur lässt sich, wie die beiden Fallstudien zeigen, auch inhaltlich-motivisch an der Stilisierung von häuslichen Umgebungen ablesen.
This article focuses on a somewhat neglected genre in studies of literary visuality: drama. It is... more This article focuses on a somewhat neglected genre in studies of literary visuality: drama. It is generally assumed that theatrical performance takes over the work of visualising a drama text, and that drama is not a genre that chiefly evokes readerly visualisation. For early modern drama texts and in particular for printed playtexts (playbooks), these assumptions of drama theory must be questioned (→ 1.): playbooks from circa 1590 to 1642 are multifunctional texts written for readers as well as for stage performance. In this light, it needs to be asked if drama theory is able to correctly define the status of early modern dramatic texts in relation to early modern orders of the visible and the visual (→ 2.): stage design, relations between word and image, text and picture, performance space and spoken word. Following a survey of classical and early modern rhetoric and post-Reformation discourses on images and the theatre (→ 3.), exemplary analyses of plays by Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Dekker elaborate different ways of approaching dramatic visuality and demonstrate different ways of relating the levels of analysis comprised by 'literary visuality' (→ 4.). Middleton's The Puritan Widow and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra are discussed chiefly as discourses on visuality and visibility, and as commentaries on contemporary, religious and rhetorical word-image practices. Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl is analysed as an example for a playbook that attempts to conventionalise the reading of printed play texts as a practice of imagining theatrical experience. Readerly visualisation of playbooks, I argue, is not identical with modern visualisation practices shaped by prose: it has to be understood as the imagination of mediated, theatrical, and performative visibility (→ 5.).
This essay addresses a conceptual transfer from literary studies to organization studies, arguing... more This essay addresses a conceptual transfer from literary studies to organization studies, arguing that this transfer basically embeds text theory and narratology in cultural/ethnographic theory. The essay asks if this transfer opens new perspectives on literary studies 'after Theory', and argues that reflection on the pragmatics of 'doing literary studies' might reinvigorate literary studies, and result in a disciplinary self-description based on practices and modes of engaging culture (rather than on objects, theories and methods). Since the early 1990s, representatives of 'critical organization studies' discuss a so-called literary turn in organization studies, a discipline situated between the social sciences, psychology, business economics, and administration and management studies. Researchers draw on literature, postmodern literary theory, and cultural theory in order to model communication processes and organizational structures within companies, corporations, and administrations. The interest in literary texts and theories is part of a reorientation process within organization studies: the older social science methods and premisses (e.g. general systems theory) seemed inadequate for describing new forms of organization emerging in transnationally operating, decentralized corporations in the late 1980s. This conceptual transfer may come as a surprise to literary studies – after all, one of the major bones of contention in debates on the future of literary studies as a discipline is and has been the massive 'import' of approaches from other disciplines. The overarching questions this essay raises in this context are: Can the transfer of concepts and methods into organization studies be seen as an instructive example for literary studies and their position towards theory? Do the disciplinary contexts and the modes of appropriating literary theory in organization studies offer fresh perspectives for literary studies? The essay approaches these issues with a brief reconstruction of the literary turn in organization studies, focusing on processes of discipline differentiation whose results (a plurality of seemingly incompatible theoretical approaches) resemble that of literary studies. A further step singles out the phenomena and the concepts of complexity and contingency as the main problems which organization studies adresses since the 1970s. The fascination of literature and literary theories for organization studies, however, lies elsewhere, as the essay shows in a final step. The most recent turn away from text theory (e.g. deconstruction) and towards ethnographic models (e.g. Clifford Geertz and the idea of 'culture as text'; actor network theory) indicates what kind of lesson organizations studies has learned from literary studies: It begins to reflect historically, socially and discipline-bound practices of writing and reading, of perceiving, ordering and circulating information. The literary turn has resulted in a meta-pragmatic reflection on the methods and procedures of 'doing organization studies'. In the light of recent discussions on literary theory – in particular on new sociologies of literature-we can identify a shared concern of literary and organization studies in the emergence of structures of ordering and circulating information, and in their stabilization. But organization studies' more pronounced emphasis on the socially and historically contingent pragmatics of reading and writing is not shared by literary studies. A reflection on the pragmatics of literary studies (its dependence on changing material and medial conditions of reading and writing) is only just emerging here and, as the essay argues, could become a productive field of more systematic metapragmatic reflection.
Dystopian Narratives: Classics, New Tendencies, and Model Interpretations. Eds. Eckart Voigts, Alessandra Boller. Trier, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2015. 317-332., 2015
This article argues that the principles organizing the long novels The Making of Americans and Th... more This article argues that the principles organizing the long novels The Making of Americans and The Man without Qualities can be compared on the grounds of a shared origin in the empirical and experimental sciences of the nineteenth century, and that both authors address the problem of how to narrate featureless statistical or average persons. Stein and Musil develop similar techniques of presenting characters as elements of a mass and as a mass of provisionally related elements that differ in key respects from earlier, nineteenth century representations of ‘normal man’, for example in Hawthorne, Poe and Eliot. I argue that short fictional forms (as well as the realist long novel) privilege the epistemological function of narrative in order to come to terms with the dissolution of character implicit in the notion of statistical persons. The long modernist form, by contrast, abandons narrative in order to explore the scope and the limits of quantititative perspectives on human beings in society, and introduces nonlinear structures that bring the significance of long and short forms, and the micro- and macropoetic dimensions of texts into a productive tension.
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Papers by Nicola Glaubitz