Lively Histories

In recent decades, the concept of “complexity” has been one of the leitmotifs of social science used to open the conceptual baggage needed to understand the dynamics of “post-modernity,” primarily the composition and structure of society, and the mutations of the technologies of government. Alex Williams, a British political scientist, is best known for the important work Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, co-written with Nick Srnicek, which posed the politically dense and central problem of the collective use of technologies to “accelerate” the overcoming of capitalism. His latest book, Political Hegemony and Social Complexity: Mechanism of Power After Gramsci, elaborates on some of the diagnoses set out in the previous one, especially those concerning neoliberalism as not merely an economic but a total social phenomenon, and those on the ambivalent, porous, and productive intertwining of politics and technology. The focus on hegemony allows Williams to con...

Knjiga Ant Spider Bee: Chronicling Digital Transformations in Environmental Humanities istodobno obuhvaća dva nova, zanimljiva i drugačija područja humanistike – digitalnu i ekološku/okolišnu humanistiku. Budući da su dva navedena polja veoma kompatibilna i popularna, očekivano je da će doći do premrežavanja i prožimanja u novu disciplinu nazvanu digitalna ekohumanistika. Taj se proces i događa kroz posljednjih nekoliko godina – projekti poput Digital Environmental Humanities na Sveučilištu McGill u Kanadi, The Digital Environmental Humanities na Sveučilištu Umea u Švedskoj, Environment and Society na Sveučilištu LMU u Münchenu itd., zatim počeci sveučilišne nastave iz digitalne ekohumanistike na spomenutim sveučilištima. Upravo su potonja dva projekta (iz Švedske i Njemačke) iznjedrila blog Ant Spider Bee (Mrav pauk pčela), pokrenut 2011. pod uredničkom palicom trojca Kimberly Coulter, Wilko Graf von Hardenberg i Finn Arne Jorgensen. Duhovito nazvan prema usporedbi o mravima, paucima ...

This paper explores the politics of Holocaust representations without dealing with the problem of the ethics of the representation itself, but rather indirectly: by asking what the strengths and limitations of film media representation are, it deals with the problem of the politic/politics of the Holocaust cinema. Furthermore, it looks at the heteronomies of a certain number of movies in relation to the autonomous field of art which also sets limitations of the media, especially by taking into account the dominant social contexts, politics, and the approved representational ethics. By applying the case study method to three documentary films – Night and Fog (1995) by Alain Resnais, Shoah (1985) by Claude Lanzmann, and Respite (2007) by Harun Farocki, what is being presented is the discrepancy between the concepts of politics and ethics of Holocaust representation. The chosen films represent three different points in time and three different dominant and avant-garde discourses of Holoca...

Contemporary Austrian novels with a family theme go beyond the problematization of two-generational conflicts and tell the story of at least three generations of the family. These are generational novels that often deal with the phenomenon of crisis and the collapse of the family as a result of the crisis. The paper shows that historical caesuras run through the generational novel, showing the causes and consequences of major socio-political changes on the family, which is the basis for all family conflicts in the novel Es geht uns gut (We’re Doing Fine) by Austrian writer Arno Geiger. The approach to the topic begins with a conceptual definition of the crisis and the family, and a reflection on their interconnectedness. When it comes to crisis, the starting point is that it requires a reaction within the community, and that the lack of an appropriate response leads to disintegration; in this particular case it concerns the family but can be reflected in the wider society. The aim of t...

This article aims to identify conceptual metaphors in the Middle English text of The Miller’s Prologue and The Miller’s Tale and to find their equivalents in the Croatian translation done by Luko Paljetak, in order to deduce which metaphors are conventional in both languages and cultures. The investigation of conventionality will be based on the comparison of source concepts in English and Croatian linguistic expressions used in conceiving of metaphorical targets. Metaphors in both languages will be classified according to their cognitive function into structural, ontological, and orientational, which will appoint to the type(s) of metaphors with the greatest and smallest amount of overlapping. Finally, the analysis will lead to the conclusion whether the differences in metaphor usage in two languages are the consequence of cognitive differences between their speakers or the consequence of socio-cultural development that took place in the period of about 600 years which have passed bet...

Recent years have witnessed the trend that comedy studies combine with what were once considered separate disciplines, such as translation studies. Nevertheless, few studies have been conducted to investigate the linkages in the areas of comics studies and comedy studies. Rewriting Humour in Comic Books: Cultural Transfer and Translation of Aristophanic Adaptations, which is part of the series of Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting, timely fills the gap by excavating humor in comic book adaptations of Aristophanes’s comedies.The book is composed of six chapters, including an introduction (chapter 1), a main body of 4 chapters, and a conclusion (chapter 6), together constituting a theoretically rich and empirically rigorous study. The first chapter starts by stressing that Marvel Comics may use humor for branding purpose, considering that humor is something memorable that readers are instinctively willing to appreciate and share. The author then explains why he chooses the ...