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This study investigates the representation of anarchists in Early Modernist fiction. What is the function of the recurring stereotype of the anarchist schemer, conspirator, or terrorist in the fiction of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and G.... more
This study investigates the representation of anarchists in Early Modernist fiction. What is the function of the recurring stereotype of the anarchist schemer, conspirator, or terrorist in the fiction of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and G. K. Chesterton? It traces the use of anarchists as scapegoats, figures of political Otherness, upon which turn-of-the-century Britain can project anxieties regarding its own political system, sovereignty, and Empire.
Multi-narratives are constituted by acts of juxtaposition which put distinct narratives side by side in a way that produces a productive and sometimes irreconcilable tension between the constituent narratives and the larger work. In... more
Multi-narratives are constituted by acts of juxtaposition which put distinct narratives side by side in a way that produces a productive and sometimes irreconcilable tension between the constituent narratives and the larger work. In contemporary literature, readers encounter multi-narratives in the form of novels (Nicole Krauss, David Mitchell, Ann Enright among many others), poetry sequences (e.g. Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s Rocket Fantastic or Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers), memoirs, and also graphic narratives (e.g. Richard McGuire’s Here). Movie-goers know the format from so-called anthology or ensemble films such as Magnolia, Short Cuts, or Cloud Atlas. These objects invite interpretation as single narratives: the novel’s book jacket and marketing suggest the embrace of a single plot; the film’s opening and closing credits presume to frame a single story; a poetry sequence’s title(s) and/or typographical markers such as chapter titles, headings, and gaps or breaks are the overt manifestation of the boundedness and unity of such works.
This special issue asks which of Kropotkin's ideas might require 'updating' to be made relevant to our historical conjuncture, or whether it is our image of Kropotkin that ought to be revised. How does his corpus already speak to the... more
This special issue asks which of Kropotkin's ideas might require 'updating' to be made relevant to our historical conjuncture, or whether it is our image of Kropotkin that ought to be revised. How does his corpus already speak to the interrelated and overlapping crises of the Capitalocene (Moore 2016)? These are the principal questions that guide this issue as well. Our authors variously re-emphasise and reconstruct elements of Kropotkin's work across the gamut of disciplines to which he turned his hand: philosophy, ecology, evolutionary biology, agriculture, and anarchist praxis.
This article reads Richard McGuire's 'Here' as a Multi-Narrative. The juxtaposed constituents of this comic are decomposed into mutually incompatible series, each of which is associated with different degrees of narrativity. These range... more
This article reads Richard McGuire's 'Here' as a Multi-Narrative.  The juxtaposed constituents of this comic are decomposed into mutually incompatible series, each of which is associated with different degrees of narrativity. These range from barely narrative arrays of thematically linked panels to decade-spanning family histories and sudden, cataclysmic changes of state in the world’s future. Instead of foregrounding its shared storyworld, Here prompts the observer to perform tilts of attention between several available distributions of the proto-narrative medium and narrative form. The interplay between multiple virtual narratives and their selective narrative actualization allows the comic to suggest non-anthropocentric scales of change beyond the human.
In fantastic fiction, ‘animal’ is an uncertain category. As readers encounter animal characters that talk, wear clothes, become heroes or villains, go on quests and return home, they are constantly beset by limit cases. Is Toad in The... more
In fantastic fiction, ‘animal’ is an uncertain category. As readers encounter animal characters that talk, wear clothes, become heroes or villains, go on quests and return home, they are constantly beset by limit cases. Is Toad in The Wind in the Willows (1908) still an animal, despite the surfeit of human-like traits? Does the restrained anthropomorphism of Watership Down (1978) maintain real-world characteristics of rabbits? How do the human traces at the limit of the mole epic Duncton Wood (1980) inflect worldbuilding? The limits of animality are far from certain in the scenarios proposed in and by these fantastic narratives. However, such boundary work – where do animals begin, where does animality end – is unobtrusive. The fantastic mode (Attebery 2) primes readers to accept the degree of anthropomorphism presented to them. In other words: we adjust our model of the fictional world to include a range of hybrid figures, just as we expand it to include deviations from our ‘actual-world encyclopedia’ (Doležel 181) in other varieties of fantasy. In this chapter, I trace how fantasy fosters immersion in the world of its animal beings – yet also calls into question the status of its unstable, hybrid characters. As a result, it will not only become clear that animal fantasy (henceforth: A.F.) makes unique use of the fantasy-specific construction of ‘worlds’. What is more, I argue that this subgenre can bring to the fore the strategic instability of worldbuilding more generally. The example of A.F. shows that the uncertainties, gaps, and inconsistencies of secondary worlds are not a drawback, but rather a unique formal possibility of fantastic modes and genres.
Das latente Potenzial abstrakter Zeichen wiederum wird in Comics selber zur semantischen Ressource, mittels derer ein Bruch dominanter Erzählungen inszeniert werden kann. Dadurch können nicht-narrative Formen hegemoniale Narrative... more
Das latente Potenzial abstrakter Zeichen wiederum wird in Comics selber
zur semantischen Ressource, mittels derer ein Bruch dominanter Erzählungen inszeniert werden kann. Dadurch können nicht-narrative Formen hegemoniale Narrative destabilisieren. Um diese Störung des Erzählflusses zu plausibilisieren, möchte ich anhand der Comics der walisischen Künstlerin Carol Swain zeigen, wie eine Verhandlung individuellen und sozialen Todes mit dem Potential einer Narrativitäts-Unterbrechung kurzgeschlossen wird. In ihren Werken der 80er und 90er Jahre konfrontiert Swain fragmentarische diegetische Welten mit Darstellungen des Todes, die erzählerisch kaum motiviert werden können. Endlichkeit wird hier radikalisiert – im Angesicht einer neoliberal revolutionierten Welt, in der es, in Margaret Thatchers Worten, ‚keine Gesellschaft gibt‘, werden der formale Entzug des Sinns ebenso wie der diegetische Rückzug und der selbstbestimmte Tod zu subversiven Gesten. Diese verschließen sich der Einhegung durch nunmehr wenig überzeugende gesellschaftliche Semantiken ebenso wie der pan-narrativen Lobpreisung unbedingter Comic-Narrativität. ‚No Future‘ – dieser Slogan der Sex Pistols wird in Swains Comics buchstäblich, in denen Charaktere die Inszenierung des Todes als einzige verbleibende Alternative zu einem scheinbar alternativlosen ‚kapitalistischen Realismus‘ wahrnehmen. Der Zurückweisung jeglicher Zukunftsorientierung entspricht auf der formalen Ebene das Aufdecken der Möglichkeit des Bruchs, mit dem Resultat einer Endlichkeit, die den gutter zwischen den Panels unüberwindlich erscheinen lässt.
Der Artikel stellt die multiversale Proliferation der Superheldenfiguren als ihren bestimmenden Widerspruch heraus. Dieser Heldentypus ist einerseits durch seine herausgehobene Handlungsmacht bestimmt, die seine Vertreter über... more
Der Artikel stellt die multiversale Proliferation der Superheldenfiguren als ihren bestimmenden Widerspruch heraus. Dieser Heldentypus ist einerseits durch seine herausgehobene Handlungsmacht bestimmt, die seine Vertreter über Normalsterbliche erhebt. Gleichzeitig wird er allerdings immer schon in einem Prozess der Vervielfältigung dargestellt: Superhelden sind kopierbar, ihre Eigenschaften transferierbar und ihre Einzigartigkeit steht auf dem Prüfstand. Zwar wird in kulturkritischen Lesarten immer wieder betont, dass diesen Figuren ein »Autoritarismus« innewohne , den die »Superheldinnen und Superhelden verkörpern, die weder vom Volk gewählt noch von der Regierung beauftragt sind«.  Ich dagegen möchte aufzeigen, dass diese Heroen trotz ihrer scheinbaren Übermächtigkeit als in ihrer Wirkkraft beschränkt dargestellt werden. Das serielle Erzählen erfordert es, sie immer wieder auf einen Ursprungszustand zurückzusetzen,  während  Handlungsalternativen  in  Paralleluniversen verlagert werden. So können neue Autor_innen und Zeichner_innen die Geschichte einzelner  Superhelden-Universen  über  verschiedene  parallel  verlaufende Serien hinweg fortschreiben – während sich zugleich nichts ändert.
What connects two panels placed side by side? The default answer, more often than not, is ›narrative.‹ Scott McCloud, for one, calls for an unravelling of the »[m]ysteries surrounding the invisible art of comics storytelling« (74). Issue... more
What connects two panels placed side by side? The default answer, more often than not, is ›narrative.‹ Scott McCloud, for one, calls for an unravelling of the »[m]ysteries surrounding the invisible art of comics storytelling« (74). Issue #8 of CLOSURE contests this narrative reduction and uncovers a non-narrative art of comics beyond storytelling. From a variety of perspectives, our articles show how comics subtract narrative, withhold closure, stall storytelling – and theorize the unfamiliar formal, abstract, nonfictional or poetic constellations that emerge as a result. »Must Narrative Be Renounced?« (Groensteen, 174) Our contributors experimentally answer ›yes‹ to this question and outline the logical, affective, designed connections that emerge in place of narrative.
Narrative has proven itself a continuous as well as adaptable means for environmentally oriented expression. Its role goes beyond the mediation of pre-existing knowledge imported into the realm of storytelling from other domains; rather,... more
Narrative has proven itself a continuous as well as adaptable means for environmentally oriented expression. Its role goes beyond the mediation of pre-existing knowledge imported into the realm of storytelling from other domains; rather, influential models of the natural world tend to circulate as storyworlds (Herman 105). This special issue of SubStance proceeds from the premise that narratives are not only a sequence of (material) signs encoding a story but also “invisible, elusive representations that exist only in the mind” (Ryan 526). Narrative forms generate and transfer environmental knowledge; moreover, any specifically narrative concerns are important contributing factors to the models of agency, change, and nonhuman subjecthood that serve as the basis of environmental thought and action at a given time. Narrative, in other words, influences what is considered knowable (and doable) in an environment. In no small part, it also determines what the contested term ‘environment’ encompasses in the first place: any “terrains located at the intersection of economic, political, social, cultural, and sexual ecologies” (Alston 93) can also be conceived as matters of narrative negotiation.
Consequently, inquiries into eco-narrative form allow us to put into focus the exclusionary limits, perspectival narrowings, and restrictions of agency (Bunting 3) that precede and underlie any seemingly ‘pristine’ environment. Who is granted narrative agency? What are the bounds of the imagined human world surrounded by an environment? Which storyworld connections express the ecological relations between organisms? The environmental impact of these entangled ecological/ narrative questions becomes particularly conspicuous whenever there is a change in the models of nature we live by.
This article reads twentieth-century Nature Writing as an inquiry into limits of narrative in confrontations with nonhuman animals. I argue that in their nonfiction accounts of nonhuman animals, J. A. Baker and Emma Louisa Turner settle... more
This article reads twentieth-century Nature Writing as an inquiry into limits of narrative in confrontations with nonhuman animals. I argue that in their nonfiction accounts of nonhuman animals, J. A. Baker and Emma Louisa Turner settle on forms that express what it is like to be a peregrine falcon or a skylark. Subsequently, however, readers are given to understand the degree to which the imagined identification falters. Far from aspiring to mimetic accounts of the environment, I approach these texts as sophisticated negotiations of differential form. From this point of view, narrative is a temporary effect set apart from alternative forms.
By considering ‘disnarration’ as much as narration, the incompatibility of environmental themes and narrative form emerges as an affordance in its own right.
We are not afraid enough — this is the charge repeated in Paul Kingsnorth’s and Dougald Hine’s 2014 Dark Mountain Manifesto. After all, their argument goes, advancing ‘ecocide’ finds little resonance in a culture “trapped inside a runaway... more
We are not afraid enough — this is the charge repeated in Paul Kingsnorth’s and Dougald Hine’s 2014 Dark Mountain Manifesto. After all, their argument goes, advancing ‘ecocide’ finds little resonance in a culture “trapped inside a runaway narrative.” Engendering fear, then, is paramount: if it is “hard, today, to imagine that the word of a poet was once feared by a king”, a degree of appropriately scaled fear-inducement is to be reclaimed. My paper traces this search for a ‘word of’ fear that animates contemporary narratives of environmental apocalypse.
The texts generated by the Dark Mountain collective are geared towards interlinked affective charges in the face of unravelling environmental collapse. Accordingly, their work is to convey (1) fear of scale: the ‘Uncivilisation’ advocated by Kingsnorth et al. is to be precipitated by an environmental horror which never quite settles on a determinate object. In this apocalyptic retardation, (2) extended fear forms the last vestige of a communal response, with a sense of ‘we’ entering the manifesto only as a common apprehension of collapse: “we find ourselves poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it.” The Dark Mountain pivots around anxieties of the coming storm, prolonging  the trembling poise rather than ‘uncoupling’ from civilisation with the rugged bravado they advocate.
Underlying these scaled-up and extended fears, I want to consider the (3) subterranean fears that animate eco-pessimist attempts to ‘immanentize the eschaton’ (Voegelin). For all its gritty posturing, The Dark Mountain is suffused with anxieties of the metropolitan, the artificial, and the European. As a result, ‘Unhuman’ sublime is subject to decidedly human, cultural, as well as parochial and neo-reactionary containment. The Dark Mountain keeps fear of the non-English other at bay within the bounds of an eerie picturesque.
It is these ‘affective economies’ (Ahmed) of eco-apocalypse that the paper will investigate —an interplay of performative fearlessness and a subterranean ‘fear and trembling’ (Kierkegaard) generated by the Dark Mountain, yet circulating widely throughout the British ecological imaginary.
What is the ecology of comics? For all the currency of a cultural, political or critical account of ›ecology‹, the term still carries traces of its disciplinary, scientific sense. From this perspective, reading a comic as ›ecological‹... more
What is the ecology of comics? For all the currency of a cultural, political or critical account of ›ecology‹, the term still carries traces of its disciplinary, scientific sense. From this perspective, reading a comic as ›ecological‹ allows us to scour panels for the »distribution and abundance of different types of organism« (Begon/Townsend/Harper). Proceeding from this foundation, a literal-minded account could attend to the comics version of »physical, chemical but especially the biological features and interactions that determine these distributions and abundances« (ibid.). Any cursory account of »creaturely genealogies« (Yezbick, 29), however, will have to reckon with ambivalent, hybrid cartoon figures, subject to varying degrees of anthropomorphism and abstraction. What is more, the storyworld environments of comics animals – for all that they diverge from our presumed actual world – do not necessarily strike readers as strange or unusual.
In Luke 18:27, Jesus tells his disciples, “What is impossible with Man, is possible with God,” thus positing an onto-theological relation between the possible and the impossible that allows utopia to be thought but negatively. In... more
In Luke 18:27, Jesus tells his disciples, “What is impossible with Man, is possible with God,” thus positing an onto-theological relation between the possible and the impossible that allows  utopia  to  be  thought  but  negatively.  In  the  sphere  of  Realpolitik—characterized  today  by  pervasive  neoliberal  governance  and  rhetoric—negativity  as such is habitually disavowed. But while few have demarcated Im/possibility as crudely as then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (“there is no alternative”) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (“unsere Politik ist alternativlos”), affirmative humanist and progressive neoliberal discourse such as Barack Obama’s “Yes, we can!” or Merkel’s by now infamous “Wir schaffen das!”—which squarely and involuntarily echos the Jacobin’s and sans-culottes’s  “Ça  ira!”—likewise partakes in  the  material-symbolic production, distribution, and articulation of the possible and the impossible.
Different, persecuted, and barred from re-entering Europe: on occasion, the reality effect of the Monster family becomes tenuous, and allegory looms. In addition to being monsters, mummies, and vampires, the Elliotts are also immigrants,... more
Different, persecuted, and barred from re-entering Europe: on occasion, the reality effect of the Monster family becomes tenuous, and allegory looms. In addition to being monsters, mummies, and vampires, the Elliotts are also immigrants, both literally persecuted and metaphorically associated with a whole host of diasporic movements. In my essay I want to argue that this negotiation of migrant and refugee identity is a feature of the subgenre of the ‘Family Gothic’. Narrating the tribulations of the Elliot family enables a double negotiation of immigration: difference is (1) ascribed from outside and (2) affirmed by the family itself.
The article considers 'Dehnung' – i.e. temporal distension – as an aesthetic 'proper time'. To begin with, it sets out the "explosive interim" in the work od Conrad, Woolf, and William James. After tracing the narratological consequences... more
The article considers 'Dehnung' – i.e. temporal distension – as an aesthetic 'proper time'. To begin with, it sets out the "explosive interim"  in the work od Conrad, Woolf, and William James. After tracing the narratological consequences of distension, the article inquires into the possibility of non-relational 'Dehnung', a slowing-down not primarily defined by its relation to a normative and normal temporality. Such "darker, slow-motion encounters with all that is concealed beneath things" (Artaud) is discussed with particular reference to filmic technique.
In: Patterns of Dis|Order
Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Un|Ordnung
Ed. Anna-Sophie Jürgens, Markus Wierschem
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In: Antje Kley/Kai Merten (eds.) What Literature Knows. Forays into Literary Knowledge Production. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018. 173-192. This essay investigates Early Modernist literary confrontations with the humanly unknowable. In... more
In: Antje Kley/Kai Merten (eds.) What Literature Knows. Forays into Literary Knowledge Production. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018. 173-192.

This essay investigates Early Modernist literary confrontations with the
humanly unknowable. In Edwardian novels, short stories, or popular scientific tracts such limits of knowledge are associated with a realm of their own: the Fourth Dimension. Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1917), Charles Hinton’s Scientific Romances (1886/1896) as well as Joseph Conrad’s and Ford Madox Ford’s 1901 novel The Inheritors each stage attempts to represent this space beyond the limits of familiar perceptual and cognitive faculties. These narratives of hyperspace, however, deprive their readers of immediate paths towards dimensional transcendence. The journey towards the Fourth Dimension stalls: in their various pursuits of impossible knowledge, these texts self-referentially mark the breakdown of their representational strategies. As a consequence, analogies falter, the unlearning of conventions stagnates, and, ultimately, literature can only register impossible 4-D knowledge as a perpetual absence. This failure is far from elegiac, however. Their marked impasses propel these speculative fictions towards a constant flight from generic constraint and cliché. The article demonstrates that it is precisely by barring easy access to
‘supra-sensible’ knowledge that the texts inculcate ever-renewed narrative experiments and readerly speculation alike.
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We Speak a Different Tongue: Maverick Voices and Modernity 1890–1939. Ed. Anthony Patterson and  Yoonjoung Choi. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2015.
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This special edition was born of a conference organised to commemorate the centenary year of Kropotkin’s death in 2021. Our discussions there cohered around the relevance of Kropotkin’s revolutionary anarchism, his evolutionary... more
This special edition was born of a conference organised to  commemorate the centenary year of Kropotkin’s death in 2021. Our discussions there cohered around the relevance of Kropotkin’s revolutionary anarchism, his evolutionary timescales, and his scientific commitments in a world quite unrecognisable from the one he left behind. We asked which of his ideas might require ‘updating’ to be made relevant to our historical conjuncture, or whether it is our image of Kropotkin that ought to be revised. How does his corpus already speak to the interrelated and overlapping crises of the Capitalocene (Moore 2016)? These are the principal questions that guide this issue as well. Our authors variously re-emphasise and reconstruct elements of Kropotkin’s work across the gamut of disciplines to which he turned his hand: philosophy, ecology, evolutionary biology, agriculture, and anarchist praxis.
What connects two panels placed side by side? The default answer, more often than not, is ›narrative.‹ Scott McCloud, for one, calls for an unravelling of the »[m]ysteries surrounding the invisible art of comics storytelling« (74). Issue... more
What connects two panels placed side by side? The default answer, more often than not, is ›narrative.‹ Scott McCloud, for one, calls for an unravelling of the »[m]ysteries surrounding the invisible art of comics storytelling« (74). Issue #8 of CLOSURE contests this narrative reduction and uncovers a non-narrative art of comics beyond storytelling. From a variety of perspectives, our articles show how comics subtract narrative, withhold closure, stall storytelling – and theorize the unfamiliar formal, abstract, nonfictional or poetic constellations that emerge as a result. »Must Narrative Be Renounced?« (Groensteen, 174) Our contributors experimentally answer ›yes‹ to this question and outline the logical, affective, designed connections that emerge in place of narrative.

Although our issue investigates non-narrative comics beyond the diegetic, beyond sequence, or beyond character, it is not solely dedicated to the absence of familiar modes of storytelling. Rather, we ask about the reservoir of possibilities obscured by the notion of an eventful, narrative-inducing change of state knitting together dispersed panels. ›Abstraction,‹ particularly, makes itself felt once the continuity of drawn characters and their spatio-temporal development is suspended. However, rather than a subgenre of ›abstract comics‹ deliberately poised at the experimental limits of the medium, non-narrative can be explored as an affordance that always already undergirds comics forms. From this angle, non-narrative is a substrate, a potential for story-suspension that exploits the basic building blocks of comics:
their double perspective on sequence and layout; their braiding of dissimilar signs; their changeable distribution of textual and visual elements; their marks on the page that do not have to coalesce into narrative worlds. This movement » beyond the diegetic and the narrative« (Molotiu, 87) finds prototypical expression in abstract and experimental comics, yet is not exhausted by them. Consequently, our articles also locate the possibility of non-narrative in the margins of popular storyworlds and propulsive plots.
The special section of CLOSURE #7 is dedicated to the exploration of ›Eco-comics‹. Our contributors ask how comics visualise, sequentialise, frame, and annotate relationships of nature and culture. How can sequential art convey our... more
The special section of CLOSURE #7 is dedicated to the exploration of ›Eco-comics‹. Our contributors ask how comics visualise, sequentialise, frame, and annotate relationships of nature and culture. How can sequential art convey our position in and against the nonhuman world? Do comics do justice to the perspective of others – microbes and trees, great apes and laboratory animals, terrestrials and extraterrestrials? Which forms enable graphic media to ›unflatten‹ (Sousanis) our view of the environment, offering multiple, skewed perspectives on the nonhuman in the process? Our authors trace the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman in real and imagined graphic natures relating to biospheres and animals, microorganisms and ecosystems, landscapes framed and unframed. However, even if no trees nor any conventionally ›natural‹ entities make an appearance whatsoever, the comics analysed in this issue still feature environmental imaginaries worth investigating.
Androids, algorithms and automated transport: forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are more present in public discourse than ever before. From playful experiments such as The Next Rembrandt (2016) to the gloomy predictions of Elon Musk... more
Androids, algorithms and automated transport: forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are more present in public discourse than ever before. From playful experiments such as The Next Rembrandt (2016) to the gloomy predictions of Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking, where technological singularity would herald the end of humanity, to current publications by Thomas Ramge (2018), Manuela Lenzen (2018) or Yuval Noah Harari (2015), the contributions to the discourse on AI range from sober stocktaking to euphoric promises of salvation to dark science fiction dystopias.
Am 11. November 2014 ist die erste Ausgabe des interdisziplinären Journal-Projekts erschienen. Es enthält Beiträge von Lukas Wilde, Janina Wildfeuer, John A. Bateman, Karen Genschow, Véronique Sina, Betül Dilmac und Janwillem Dubil.... more
Am 11. November 2014 ist die erste Ausgabe des interdisziplinären Journal-Projekts erschienen. Es enthält Beiträge von Lukas Wilde, Janina Wildfeuer, John A. Bateman, Karen Genschow, Véronique Sina, Betül Dilmac und Janwillem Dubil. www.closure.uni-kiel.de
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3rd issue of CLOSURE, the Kiel e-journal for comics studies!

Special issue on 'stuff matters' – from virtual immersion to radioactivity in comics

read at www.closure.uni-kiel.de
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In John Lyly’s Galatea (1588), we are introduced to an environment in constant flux. Any pastoral timelessness is offset by its setting near a coastal plain estuary that suffers from regular flooding. This protean landscape is intertwined... more
In John Lyly’s Galatea (1588), we are introduced to an environment in constant flux. Any pastoral timelessness is offset by its setting near a coastal plain estuary that suffers from regular flooding. This protean landscape is intertwined with human activity, up to and including a history of past human sacrilege which the inhabitants use as an explanatory device for its changing contours. Their environmental history itself, however, is far from assured. Particularly, it is uncertain to what extent the current occupants bear responsibility for their precarious circumstances, a source of indecision that is mirrored by the unstable nature of sacrifice. While the community is obliged to hand over a young woman to Neptune’s creature, Agar, in order to hold off disastrous flooding, it remains ambiguous what, exactly, happens to the sacrificial victim: it is a matter of “conjecture” (1.1.61).

In what follows, I want to argue that Galatea as a whole represents just such conjecture as a productive response to the uncertain relationship between humans and the nonhuman world. The comedy confronts us with several competing versions of the environment, none of which can, finally, claim to be based on natural rights. Nature is subject to such a changeable constellation of stakeholders that it appears as unnatural from the get-go. It is this unnatural nature, however, that also directs the audience to the necessity of an ethos of conjecture. I will work my way backward towards Lyly’s conjectural environments by first showing traces of “ecology without nature” in Jacques’ ecological elegy in As You Like It.  It is my overarching point that once ‘nature’ is divested of its claim to normative force, the green worlds of Early Modern comedy become radically negotiable. Instead of prescribing any one environmental practice, the pastoral-comedic mode gives voice to alternative human-nonhuman obligations, none of which are grounded in a universally valid concept of nature. By dramatizing vastly distributed epistemological uncertainty – as well as types of vigilance steeped in ongoing conjecture – both plays register competing rights in unstable environments.
If the world is in pieces, how can it be put back together again? In John Donne’s 1611 elegy The First nAnniversarie, the speaker encounters a universe of dissected and disconnected parts. In this paper, I argue that the 17th century... more
If the world is in pieces, how can it be put back together again? In John Donne’s 1611 elegy The First nAnniversarie, the speaker encounters a universe of dissected and disconnected parts. In this paper, I argue that the 17th century natural philosophy of Thomas Browne (and contemporaries such as Margaret Cavendish) sets out to respond to such fears of disaggregation by performing an “intercreatural communalism” (Wolfe). In this world held in common, humans are intertwined with creaturely life and death in an ever-renewed exchange of matter. There is, however, a caveat to such an interstitial world: before a creaturely continuum can be imagined, 17th century essays and tracts have to reduce the primacy of the human.
In Religio Medici (1642), but especially in Urne-Burial (1658) and The Garden of Cyrus (1658), Browne takes an argumentative detour to imagine himself an “industrious flye, / Buzzing thy praises” (RM). In order to perform such imaginative leaps towards a human/nonhuman aggregation,  readers are first
of all enjoined to question what a ‘human’ might be in the first place – and to dismantle those characteristics bit by bit. More than just renouncing anthropocentrism in this way, Browne attempts to slough off any remnants of exclusive humanity altogether. What beckons at the end of this negative
procedure is a worldview in which matter on all scales circulates between humans and animals alike: “‘All flesh is grasse’, is not only metaphorically, but literally true, for all those creatures which we behold, are but the herbs of the field, digested into flesh in them” (Religio). In this paper, I will examine
the preconditions for this equivalence being ‘literally true’.  If the intercreatural commons require a reduction of the human, such  anthropic diminution can only be accomplished indirectly.  Any state in which the human is finally only a node in a latticework of mingled components can be pointed out, yet never quite represented outright. In Browne’s adaptation
of apophatic approaches, human priorities ultimately re-establish themselves, the human-as-author makes a comeback, and anthropocentrism re-enters the frame. However, in the brief interim before the return of a world governed by anthropocentrism, Early Modern natural philosophy attempts to
think the end of the human. The creaturely commons as a ‘more-than human futurity’ emerge in the gaps of the human world – and of the paradoxical essays that evoke them.
This text-exploration workshop reads the final scenes of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam—the first known published play authored by a woman in England—as an adaptation of the revenge tragedy genre. Although the play references... more
This text-exploration workshop reads the final scenes of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam—the first known published play authored by a woman in England—as an adaptation of the revenge tragedy genre. Although the play references multiple acts of murder and execution, Cary's conceptualization of the play as a closet drama means that none of these violent scenes are shown. This workshop asks how the displacement of these events affects the representation of violence overall within the play. While the execution of Mariam is witnessed only through messenger’s report, the play shifts its critique of violence from the scene of execution to the disturbing behavior of her husband and murderer, Herod, who regrets his actions before they have even taken place. The play thus presents a modern retake on the revenge tragedy mode, which normally delights in spectacular violence, by placing violence off-stage. Instead, the play appears to focus on the instability of the male revenging figure. The damning phrase of the messenger, “Her body is divided from her head” becomes the only sign that bears witness to Mariam’s demise. This workshop examines the consequences of this decentering of violence for audiences and readers of the play. It raises key questions on the issue of adaptation within early modern and contemporary contexts: would early modern readers have recognised Cary’s play as an adaptation of revenge tragedy? Does the centering of Herod’s instability in the final act do Mariam justice? Should a contemporary adaptation enable  a modern audience, to bear witness to Mariam’s unjust and unfounded murder in a more explicit way?
Im Anthropozän bedarf es neuer medialer Formen, um der Verknüpfung menschlicher und nicht-menschlicher Wirkkräfte Ausdruck zu verleihen. Dieser Beitrag soll zeigen, wie aktuelle Eco-Comics sich dieser Aufgabe stellen, indem sie vernetztes... more
Im Anthropozän bedarf es neuer medialer Formen, um der Verknüpfung menschlicher und nicht-menschlicher Wirkkräfte Ausdruck zu verleihen. Dieser Beitrag soll zeigen, wie aktuelle Eco-Comics sich dieser Aufgabe stellen, indem sie vernetztes Wissen über Grenzen des Menschlichen hinaus inszenieren.
Insbesondere steht dabei die Darstellung mehr-als-menschlicher Handlungsträger im Mittelpunkt. Statt einzelne Protagonist*innen mit Umweltfragen zu konfrontieren, setzen dargestellte Comic-Ökologien vernetzte Akteure ins Bild. Diese sind das Resultat von Aushandlungsprozessen zwischen menschlichen und nicht-menschlichen Akteuren, deren Handlungsmöglichkeiten sich aus ihren wechselseitigen Verbindungen in Netzwerken ergeben.
This talk gages the multinarrative potential of theory fiction, particularly Jane Bennet's Vibrant Matter (2009) and Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia (2008). My approach to multinarratives takes at its starting point not fully-fledged... more
This talk gages the multinarrative potential of theory fiction, particularly Jane Bennet's Vibrant Matter (2009) and Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia (2008). My approach to multinarratives takes at its starting point not fully-fledged narrative strands, but rather textual and visual material in which narrative and non-narrative elements are unevenly distributed.
From this heterogeneous material, local narratives have to be determined by the reader themselves.
If MultiNarratives, as our Working paper puts it, emphasize the juxtaposition of local narratives, Cyclonopedia presents an extreme form of  “disruption, which may interrupt or sever the linearity and sequential order of the overarching narrative, and create a concomitant lack of cohesion and coherence.”
This is not to say that there is no such coherence. On the contrary, Cyclonopedia suggests a grand conspiratorial narrative in which Oil acts as a vast compound actor. But in order to point towards this vast overarching plot, the narratives of Cyclonopedia have to fail to cohere. Consequently, I argue that:

(1) any local narrativity is liable to interruption;
(2) the relationship between juxtaposed narratives is unstable; and that (3) the scale at which we are expected to assemble any narrative at all is called into question.
What results from these entangled strategies is a multinarrative failure – apophasis emerging from the gaps between stories
The juxtaposition of panels plays a key role in graphic narrative. However, if comics are “juxtaposed pictorial and other images,” critics have frequently over-emphasized their “deliberate sequence, intended to convey information”... more
The juxtaposition of panels plays a key role in graphic narrative. However, if comics are “juxtaposed pictorial and other images,” critics have frequently over-emphasized their “deliberate sequence, intended to convey information” (McCloud). In order to counter this assumption of proto-narrative homogeneity, this paper will proceed from an analysis of Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic narrative Here. The multiple logics jostling for attention in this comic demonstrate that the assumption of causal, spatial, temporal, or thematic ‘closure’ between panels restricts the range of multi-narrative constellations in any assemblage of image, caption, and text.

By varying a single formal device – the presentation of the same corner of a room at different times – Here  jumbles deliberate sequences and disrupts a hard-and-fast relationship between its compounding narrative strands. Rather than dictating a deliberate order, the ‘medial substrate’ of the comic foregrounds the range of simultaneously possible constellations on the level of ‘medial forms’ (Luhmann). On the basis of the many ‘heres’ of Here, the paper will show that this tension between narrative associations and indissolubly juxtaposed images presents a specific mode of heterogeneity: a multi-narrative potential of the medium ‘comic’ that fails to be recuperated into any one overarching story. Instead, comics confront us with an alternation of ‘deliberate sequence’ and heterogenization, of proto-narrative panels and isolated images. The analysis of such juxtapositional arrangements also points to more general means of maintaining the ‘multi’ of multi-narrative  — in comics and other media alike.
This contribution seeks to investigate texts which consider the question ‘what it is like to be a bat’ (Nagel) a representational challenge rather than an unsolvable paradox. Time and again, speculative nature writing has sought to... more
This contribution seeks to investigate texts which consider the question ‘what it is like to be a bat’ (Nagel) a representational challenge rather than an unsolvable paradox. Time and again, speculative nature writing has sought to imaginatively inhabit and render the experience of non-human entities, up to and including the vegetable, fungal, microbial, and the seemingly inert. In doing so, this strand of nature writing not only abandons the bounds of the natural, but also experimentally multiplies timescales and the sentiences registering them.

While some approximation of ‘batness’ may still be approached by dint of mammalian-vertebrate prejudice, the affective investments of speculative nature writing go further. Not least since John Clare faithfully transcribed the thoughts of a piece of land, the genre displays an abiding interest in the temporal experience of the nonhuman. How, after all, is time experienced from the point of view of A Land (Jacquetta Hawkes), its glacial pace resistant to story-shaped recuperation? Or: is it possible to to render the experience of a Living Mountain (Nan Shepherd), once the concept is treated with stubborn literal-mindedness? If we assume, just for a moment, that the Cairngorms actually live: are they sentient? What is their take on time?

In approaching the sentience of nonhuman actors, I aim to take seriously Nature Writing as a form of panpsychism. That is to say, it speculatively attributes degrees of sentience to a plethora of beings. As a result, neither humans nor bats are alone in experiencing time, let alone in experiencing in the first place. Human time is not enough, in this tradition which I aim to trace back to William Hamilton Drummond, John Clare, and its later iterations in the work of Nan Shepherd, J.A. Baker, and Jacquetta Hawkes. These writers share a focus on “the spectral and speculative […] world-without-us.” Accordingly, my paper argues that nature writing approaches this world by inhabiting the minds of peregrine falcons and mountains, elms and viruses – and by tracing their distinct temporalities.
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Der Anarchismus wird im Großbritannien des späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts ambivalent dargestellt. In der Hochliteratur und den Massenmedien, im Theater und im Cartoon wird der „ethische Diskurs über revolutionäre Praxis“... more
Der  Anarchismus wird im Großbritannien des späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts ambivalent dargestellt. In der  Hochliteratur und den Massenmedien, im Theater und im Cartoon wird der „ethische Diskurs über revolutionäre Praxis“ (Graeber) zu einem Fremdbild des Bedrohlichen, Irrationalen und potenziell Terroristischen. Diese Form der ‚politischen Alterität‘ –  massenmedial produziert sowie pseudo-wissenschaftlich belegt durch Degenerationstheorien – schlägt sich in der Figur des „dynamitards“ (Melchiori), des bombenlegenden Anarchisten in der englischen Literatur nieder, der als Symptom einer Krise des British Empire wahrgenommen wird.

Zugleich wird die Abgrenzung  zwischen dem Selbstbild politischer Kultur und dem Fremdbild des anarchistischen Chaos in der zeitgenössischen Literatur zunehmend aufgeweicht: Die Autor/Innen können sich der Faszination des Anarchismus als philosophischer und politischer Strömung nicht entziehen. Im frühen Modernismus wird anarchistisches Denken als Möglichkeit inszeniert, gesellschaftliche, aber auch sprachlich überkommene Konventionen zu überwinden und eine literarisch-politische Erneuerung zu beginnen, die  Ezra Pound programmatisch mit dem Slogan „Make it new!“ einfordert.
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When Razumov attempts to leave Mikulin’s office in Under Western Eyes, he is held back by an innocuous question: “Where to?” In this paper, the unstable political space opened up by the councillor’s “innocent inquiry” will be analyzed by... more
When Razumov attempts to leave Mikulin’s office in Under Western Eyes, he is held back by an innocuous question: “Where to?” In this paper, the unstable political space opened up by the councillor’s “innocent inquiry” will be analyzed by applying Agamben’s theory of the state of exception. Conrad’s political fiction offers a specific literary model of such “spaces devoid of law, in which the very distinction between public and private is deactivated.” These spaces – marked by a paradoxical structure of the law suspending itself in order to render its grasp all the more absolute –will be traced in Under Western Eyes as well as the short stories An Anarchist and The Tale .
Conrad’s political narratives do not merely assert states in which the outcast (the ‘homo sacer’, in Agamben’s terminology) and the sovereign are bound together by a structure of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. Instead, these texts offer narrative performances of such states, embroiling the reader in literary equivalents of the political crisis faced by the protagonists.
The narrative enactment of states of exception will initially be traced in the spatial structure of the stories, which relegates the protagonists to an increasingly featureless literary topography. This semantic impoverishment will, secondly, be shown to threaten the very possibility of events: from a narratological point of view, states of exception are imitated by literary evocations of eventlessness providing structural equivalents of political anomie. Thirdly, the state of exception is co-created by complicit narrators: the more their incapacity to generate coherent narration is stressed, the more their tacit authority is increased.
The paper will argue that states of exception – successfully relegated to an “evil spell” cast by an incomprehensible Russia in the essay “Autocracy and War” – can no longer be contained in Conrad’s political fiction. Asking “where to” emerges as a foundational gesture of authority as such.
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The dynamite-wielding anarchist as a ruthless perpetrator of terrorist attacks becomes a stock figure of popular literature towards the 20th century. This paper aims to explore the ambivalent role of anarchists as arbiters of destructive... more
The dynamite-wielding anarchist as a ruthless perpetrator of terrorist attacks becomes a stock figure of popular literature towards the 20th century. This paper aims to explore the ambivalent role of anarchists as arbiters of destructive modernity in the political fiction of Henry James and Joseph Conrad. While these texts project fears of degeneracy and uncontrollable modernity upon anarchist protagonists, they also functionalize political radicalism in order to define an ambiguous modernist aesthetics.
Although The Princess Casamassima as well as Conrad’s political fiction revolve around the attempt to contain anarchist dissent, they nonetheless exploit the illicit pleasures and aesthetic potential associated with radical positions. The destruction of all “natural ties” as threatened by James’ anarchist protagonist is represented as a socially disruptive endeavor which, however, enables a spectacle of shifting identities and fragmented perception. Culture – prescribed by Matthew Arnold as the proper response to the threat of Anarchy – appears as increasingly unattainable when confronted with the anarchic city as a borderless, inchoate environment. This combination of simultaneous exploration and denunciation of political otherness constitutes a unique position at the margins of modernism, variations of which can be traced in the works of G. K. Chesterton and T. E. Hulme. Rather than focusing on these texts as transitional works in a teleological lineage towards canonical Modernism, the hybrid evocation of fictions of order and anarchic breakdown will be analyzed as a unique strand of modernist political literature.
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Research Interests:
Terrorists explain themselves. Whether they describe their actions as ‘terror’ or not, perpetrators of political violence tend to publish manifestos, produce justifications, and explain their rationale. In his wide-ranging monograph... more
Terrorists explain themselves. Whether they describe their actions as ‘terror’ or not, perpetrators of political violence tend to publish manifestos, produce justifications, and explain their rationale. In his wide-ranging monograph Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11, Peter C. Herman proceeds from a deceptively simple question: if terrorism produces language, why is its perception dominated by the notion that it cannot be understood, articulated, let alone addressed? If the act of terror is intended as a form of communication – ‘propaganda by the deed’ (35) as it was briefly known in the late 19th century – the message is lost in transmission. Once the smoke has cleared, terrorism appears inexpressible, beyond reason or understanding. ‘Terrorism speaks. Terrorism is unspeakable’ (34) – this is the central paradox which Herman unearths in fictional accounts of political violence from 1623 to the present.
The existence of this book’s research topic is not a given. After all, comics-specific sequences of framed images are liable to be seen in proto-narrative terms. Conversely, abstraction in the visual arts elicits the opposite effect: we... more
The existence of this book’s research topic is not a given. After all, comics-specific sequences of framed images are liable to be seen in proto-narrative terms. Conversely, abstraction in the visual arts elicits the opposite effect: we would be hard-pressed to bring narrative scripts and frames to Kazimir Malevich’s iconic Black Square. What happens, however, if a black square is placed in a panel grid, supplied with a speech bubble, or turned into a character in a sequence?
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Das e-Journal CLOSURE wird im Herbst 2023 in seiner zehnten Ausgabe erneut allen Facetten der Comicforschung ein Forum bieten. Von Kultur-, Bild-und Medienwissenschaften bis zu Sozial-oder Naturwissenschaften und darüber hinaus: CLOSURE... more
Das e-Journal CLOSURE wird im Herbst 2023 in seiner zehnten Ausgabe erneut allen Facetten der Comicforschung ein Forum bieten. Von Kultur-, Bild-und Medienwissenschaften bis zu Sozial-oder Naturwissenschaften und darüber hinaus: CLOSURE setzt auf Aufsätze und Rezensionen, die den ›state of the comic‹ verhandeln. Ob Detailanalyse, Comic-Theorie oder innovative Neuansätze-für den offenen Themenbereich begrüßen wir möglichst vielseitige Beiträge aus dem interdisziplinären Forschungsfeld ›Comic‹. Schwerpunkt: »Ocean Comics« Der Themenschwerpunkt der 10. Ausgabe von CLOSURE beschäftigt sich mit dem Meer und seiner vielfältigen Darstellung und Bedeutung im Medium Comic. Das Meer funktionier in der Literatur und der bildenden Kunst immer wieder als Ort der Sehnsucht, aber auch als Bühne großer Abenteuer. Klassische Geschichten von Forscher_innen und Entdecker_innen, von Captain Ahab und seiner Jagd auf Moby-Dick, zu Captain Nemos Reise 20.000 Meilen unter das Meer sind mittlerweile als Comicadaptionen erschienen, aber auch neue Comics verschiedenster Genres nutzen das Meer als Handlungsschauplatz, Metapher, Chronotopos, oder erforschen die ästhetischen, ökonomischen, politischen, historischen oder ökologischen Dimensionen der Ozeane. Als Ursprungsort des Lebens fasziniert das Meer ebenso wie als Quelle von Gefahr und Vernichtung, als Erholungsgebiet genau wie als Schauplatz historischer und gegenwärtiger Schrecken von Flucht und Vertreibung. Die Tiefsee als Region verborgenen Wissens und unbekannter, monströser Schrecken hat Comiczeichner_innen ebenso inspiriert wie die Zerstörung dieser Ökosysteme durch Klimawandel, Umweltverschmutzung und Ausbeutung mit ihren schwerwiegenden Folgen.
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International Conference Call for Papers
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Open Section In the fall of 2021, CLOSURE will once again offer a forum for all facets of comics studies. From literary, cultural, media, social and image research to the sciences and beyond: the seventh edition of CLOSURE continues our... more
Open Section

In the fall of 2021, CLOSURE will once again offer a forum for all facets of comics studies. From literary, cultural, media, social and image research to the sciences and beyond: the seventh edition of CLOSURE continues our ongoing search for the best and most innovative articles and reviews representing the state of the art in comics research. We welcome detailed close readings as much as comics theory and pioneering approaches to the medium — our open section comprises a diverse range of interdisciplinary studies of all things ›comic‹.

Thematic Section: »Non-Narrative Comics«

What connects two panels, placed side by side? The default answer, more often than not, is ›narrative‹. Scott McCloud, for one, calls for an unravelling of the »Mysteries surrounding the invisible art of comics storytelling.« In issue #8 of Closure, we want to contest this narrative reduction – and uncover a non-narrative art of comics beyond storytelling. We seek articles that investigate how comics subtract narrative, withhold closure, stall storytelling – and theorize the unfamiliar constellations that emerge as a result. »Must Narrative Be Renounced?« (Groensteen) We invite contributors who experimentally answer ›yes‹ to this question and who outline the logical, formal, affective, designed connections that emerge in place of narrative.
Call for Participants: CLOSURE Interdisciplinary Autumn Online School (CIAOS) »Graphic Knowledge: Comics, Research, Communication« (University of Kiel, Germany, 12-14 October 2020) What can comics know? At the CLOSURE Interdisciplinary... more
Call for Participants: CLOSURE Interdisciplinary Autumn Online School (CIAOS) »Graphic Knowledge: Comics, Research, Communication« (University of Kiel, Germany, 12-14 October 2020)

What can comics know? At the CLOSURE Interdisciplinary Autumn Online School (CIAOS), we would like to explore forms of knowledge encoded in text and image, in panels and sequences, and in cartoons and symbols.

Together with the participants, we will explore how the complex medium of comics represents and negotiates individual and collective knowledge, semiotics and social relationships, and performs and re-informs knowledge.
This is a translation of Rudolf Rocker's 'Prinzipienerklärung des Syndikalismus' (1919), an influential document in the history of anarchist syndicalism. It is part of a larger effort to make accessible neglected strands of anarchist... more
This is a translation of Rudolf Rocker's 'Prinzipienerklärung des Syndikalismus' (1919), an influential document in the history of anarchist syndicalism. It is part of a larger effort to make accessible neglected strands of anarchist thought to an English-speaking readership. I am grateful for any suggestions of anarchist ephemera or neglected authors that might fit the bill.
100 years with Kropotkin: time and again, his concepts – social economy, communist reorganization, mutual aid – prove their worth for analysis and transformative action alike. Amidst the current ecological and economic crisis, Piotr... more
100 years with Kropotkin: time and again, his concepts – social economy, communist reorganization, mutual aid – prove their worth for analysis and transformative action alike. Amidst the current ecological and economic crisis, Piotr Kropotkin’s immense body of work allows us to think across geography and the sciences, culture and politics, economy and ecology. However, as the neoliberal state mobilizes its full authoritarian potential to protect capitalist accumulation in a warming world, his anarchist horizon can appear distant. As we face compounding crises on an unprecedented scale, we are without Kropotkin. This means that Kropotkin cannot serve as an infallible guide to revolutionary thought and action. Instead of merely celebrating his legacy or using his work as a blueprint, this conference aims to suggest ways of adapting his varied thought to other times and places, refracting it through different approaches, and asking what it has to tell us about the crises of today.

By thinking with and without Kropotkin, this conference takes him at his word. After all, as a thinker of adaptive change in nature and revolutionary change in social life, he called for systems to be “continually developed and readjusted in accordance with the ever growing requirements of a free life” (1903). We invite scholars from all disciplines to engage with such development and readjustment. Inquiries into the applicability and adaptability of his thought in a variety of fields will be appreciated. Throughout, we aim to understand Kropotkin’s approaches as a repository of possibilities, an adaptable body of work that we invite participants to apply, revise, and reconsider.