Die Gattung des Dramas ist in elementarer Weise auf den Effekt der emotionalen Affizierung des Publikums angelegt. Wie häufig in Prologen, Vorspielen und anderen programmatischen Metatexten explizit angekündigt, sollen sich den Zuschauerinnen und Zuschauern die Haare sträuben, ihre Tränen sollen fließen oder andere Gefühlsäußerungen hervorgerufen werden. Dieses postulierte Affizierungspotential des Dramas beruht im Wesentlichen auf dem Umstand, dass es Leidenszustände mittels der heftigen Gemütsbewegungen der dramatischen Personen vergegenwärtigt. Mit anderen Worten ist die dramatische Affektdarstellung Grundvoraussetzung für die erwünschte affektive Erregung der Rezipientinnen und Rezipienten. Das gilt in besonderem Maße für die ‚pathetischen' tragischen Gattungen, die im Fokus dieses Beitrages stehen sollen: Sie definieren sich durch die Inszenierung schweren Leidgeschehens, das sich auf die seelische Erschütterung der Rezipientinnen und Rezipienten richtet. Gegenstand und Wirkung der Tragödie sind demnach pathosgebunden.

Book chapter discussing the impact of Michel Foucault's theory of discourse on the emerging field of postcolonial studies. Using the example of Edward Said's "Orientalism," the chapter begins by arguing that the Foucaultian theory of discourse is more often invoked than explained. I go on to trace the genealogy of "discourse" from Foucault's project of an archaeology of the human sciences in the 1960s to his inaugural lecture of 1970, demonstrating that the author employed the concept in different, sometimes conflicting ways: whereas he initially understood discourses to be autonomous and self-regulatory (an understanding that is incompatible with Said's insistence on the institutional basis of Orientalist discourse), Foucault later listed various internal as well as external procedures of "discourse control." It is not enough, therefore, to refer to "Michel Foucault's notion of a discourse" (as Said does in his study). For Foucault, "discourse" was a concept in progress, and as such, it has remained unfinished and in need of reexamination and elaboration.

This chapter investigates the figure of the facially tattooed white sailor in colonial literature from the time of the Spanish conquista to the nineteenth century, arguing that facial tattoos were regarded as breaking a taboo: a conspicious sign of alienation from Western society and its norms, they clearly identified those who bore them as “cultural defectors” who were literally marked by non-Western cultures. The taboo of facial tattooing can be traced to the very beginnings of modern colonialism. Early accounts of the conquest of Mexico relate the exceptional case of Gonzalo Guerrero, a shipwrecked sailor who became the military commander of a Mayan chief in Yucatán. When Cortés reached the region and ordered the Spaniard to join his troops, Guerrero refused, reportedly explaining that his countrymen would not tolerate his “carved” – that is, tattooed – face. After the discovery of Polynesian all-over tattooing in the context of the Pacific encounter, the figure of the facially tattooed Westerner became more prominent. Although the practice of tattooing spread among sailors in the nineteenth century, it was usually confined to the arms, so that the taboo of facial tattooing remained in place. Facially tattooed sailors who returned home – such as the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Cabri – were reduced to the status of freaks, which is why Herman Melville’s "Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life" (1846) presents facial tattooing as the ultimate threat to one’s social identity: in this fictional text, having one’s face tattooed is equivalent to losing one’s face. Thus, the Marquesan practice of all-over tattooing indicates the limits of the process of cross-cultural exchange that has otherwise characterized the history of tattooing since Cook’s first voyage of discovery.

In his 1982 essay on "Traveling Theory," Edward Said argues that the transfer of ideas in the humanities and the social sciences is influenced by both "conditions of acceptance" and "resistances." The journey of theories, he explains, is never unimpeded. Following this observation, the present study wishes to explore further the factors determining the itinerary of theories. It puts forward the thesis that the interdisciplinary reception of theory is a selective – and historically variable – process, depending on the receiving discipline’s dominant paradigm, which directs the researchers' attention to those aspects of the received theory that can best be adapted to their present purpose. In the process, individual concepts are isolated from their original context and reintegrated into a new theoretical and disciplinary environment. My example of this is the divergent use of Michel Foucault and Edward Said in the contexts of the respective linguistic and spatial turns, firstly as pioneers of discourse analysis and secondly as precursors of spatial thinking. As the current interest in Foucault and Said as explorers of "imaginative geographies" shows, each turn emphasizes other concepts of a travelling theory, leading to highly productive – though always partial – (mis)readings.

The years following the introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839 saw the emergence of two alternative discourses on photography: on the one hand, "photorealism," which equated daguerreotypy with a faithful mimesis of the visible and emphasized its unprecedented capacity for representing surface detail; on the other hand, the lesser-known "photo-fantastic." While the latter did not deny the new medium's great mimetic potential, it redefined that potential as the power of making visible the unseen. One of the most interesting examples is Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1851 romance "The House of the Seven Gables." Connecting daguerreotypy with mesmerism – another form of arcane knowledge recently imported to the US from France – Hawthorne fictionalizes photographic representation as a modern form of magic, able to reveal hidden aspects of reality. The daguerreotypes described in the novel give insight into the secret character of the person photographed, showing the charismatic Judge Pyncheon to be the modern-day equivalent of his ruthless seventeenth-century ancestor Colonel Pyncheon, and thus eventually provide a means to exorcize the ghosts of the past.

This book chapter provides a contextual analysis of the first wave of terrorist fiction in British literature, focusing in particular on Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Dynamiter" (1885) and E. Douglass Fawcett's "Hartmann the Anarchist" (1893). Considering both books against the background of contemporary forms of terrorism, the chapter argues that the so-called "dynamite novels" of the late nineteenth century adapted the conventions of Gothic terror to the new phenomenon of “terrorist terror” by complementing or substituting them with new motifs: the late-Victorian metropolis of London, anarchist conspiracies, dynamite explosions, and the contradictory images of inept would-be-terrorists who accidentally blow themselves to pieces and futuristic scenarios of a London laid waste by modern weaponry.

My main hypothesis is that such novels give insight into the “cultural imaginary” of terrorism, which may be defined as the period-specific repertoire of images and stories pertaining to terrorism in both its actual and its potential forms. Intermingling the available historical knowledge with fantastic speculation, this imaginary is shaped not only by the respective period’s public discourse on terrorism (the often hyperbolic pronouncements of politicians, the media, as well as the terrorist groups themselves) but also by the literary traditions that lend themselves to the narrativization of terror.

When witnesses on the scene of the 11 September 2001 attacks in Manhattan stated that the event had seemed “like a movie,” Roland Emmerich’s 1996 blockbuster "Independence Day" was among the most frequently mentioned films. The perceived analogy between the incidents of 9/11 and the alien invasion genre not only concerned the affected targets – American landmark buildings – but also the perpetrators, whose radical alterity was strongly emphasized in official discourse. The cinematic analogy soon extended to the domain of real politics: traces of science fiction may be detected in the very concept of the “alien terrorist” itself. Against this background, it is striking that one of the first high-budget Hollywood productions that was explicitly marketed as a 9/11-related film chose the alien invasion genre to reflect the anxieties of present-day America: Steven Spielberg’s "War of the Worlds" (2005) uses the figure of the sub-human invader as an allegorical substitute for real-life threats and foes, thereby shifting the focus away from both the actual perpetrators and the complex political prehistory of the attacks. When seen within the framework of alien invasion, the attacks remain as incomprehensible as their “alien” perpetrators.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, various literary texts presented scenarios of “reverse imperialism,” envisioning England as the target of foreign incursion and domination by foes as diverse as the German army, an undead Transylvanian count, or extraterrestrial beings. As fantastic as they may appear, these invasion narratives bring to light uncertainties, doubts, and anxieties that were usually suppressed by imperial discourse. In doing so, they indicate that the narrativization of Empire was more discontinuous, ambivalent, and polyphonic than a widespread post-Saidian conception of “discourse” (as a monolithic force encompassing all Western literature, regardless of genre or other factors) would seem to suggest. The novels investigated here counter the dominant narrative of the Briton as conqueror with scenarios of invasion from without and/or subversion from within, thus illustrating how strongly imperial discourse is shaped by literary genres and their characteristic structures.

Although terrorism is widely understood to be the politically motivated creation of fear by means of violence in a target group, the nature of that fear is seldom explained or even considered. The present article attempts to close that gap by proposing a definition of terror as the apprehension of (more) violence to come. Because every terrorist act is perceived to be part of a potential series, terror is oriented towards the future and involves the imaginary anticipation of prospective events. On the basis of this definition, I will examine the problematical role of counterterrorist discourse. As the statements of public officials and security experts in the run-up to, and during, the “War on Terror” demonstrate, the peculiar dynamic of terror is, seemingly paradoxically, reinforced by counterterrorist rhetoric. With its insistence on the escalatory nature of terrorist violence and its repeated prediction of even worse attacks, counterterrorism contributes to the evocation of terror in the sense proposed here.

This essay discusses the relationship between popular literature and what various scholars have termed the "terrorism myth." Using the example of British writer Patrick Neate's 2005 novel "City of Tiny Lights," I emphasize the meta- and counter-discursive potentials of fiction. My thesis is that "City of Tiny Lights" may be characterized as a critical intervention into the then current public discourse on terrorism, and that this intervention occurs at four levels: first, the novel's characters explicitly discuss counter-terrorist rhetoric, questioning the appropriateness and meaningfulness of key concepts such as "war on terror"; second, the novel's plot is deliberately designed to undercut common notions of the terrorist as a religious fundamentalist, portraying the perpetrators as either narcissistic megalomaniacs or misguided youths whose motivation is to be sought in their individual life histories and circumstances rather than in universal terrorist ideologies; third, the novel uses a postcolonial detective
to expose the epistemological limitations of counter-terrorism, which (so Neate's characters claim) is unable to think beyond established pattems; and fourth, the narrator-protagonist comments on the political instrumentalization
of fear.

It is a truism among historians, sociologists, and anthropologists that, in the West, the advent of modern technologies of travel and communication led to an “overcoming of distance” and even a gradual “annihilation of space and time”. Whereas turn-of-the-century geographers like George R. Parkin and H. J. Mackinder suggest that this is also true for much of the non-Western world, Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness" dramatizes the Congo region as an “other space” that, although no longer white on the map, resists European attempts at empire-building and economic-technological expansion. Conrad’s work shows that the perception of distance depends not only on the actual
advances in travel and communication technologies, but also – and perhaps more importantly – on the construction of “imaginative geographies”. Around 1900, Central Africa was both spatially and temporarily distanced; it represented a different state of cultural development – a chronotope not (yet) part of the global network.

Afterword to the new German edition of Mikhail Bakhtin's "Chronotope" essay which revisits this classic text in the light of the recently proclaimed "spatial turn" in the humanities; in our discussion of Bakhtin's study, we distinguish six different uses/applications of the "chronotope" concept and explain its connections to the thought of Kant, Einstein, Ukhtomsky, and Cassirer

Provides a short survey of the recently proclaimed "spatial turn" in the humanities (emphasizing the contributions of literary theorists to this alleged transdisciplinary shift) and then discusses Bakhtin and Lotman as two pioneers of "spatial thinking" whose concepts of the chronotope, the semantic field, the boundary, and the semiosphere indicate that there is a much older, still relevant tradition of thought about the cultural meaning(s) of space

This historically informed reading of "The Secret Agent" wishes to complement previous contextual analyses. Thanks mainly to the historical detective work of Norman Sherry, there is wide agreement among critics today that while "The Secret Agent" tells a fictitious story, Conrad closely studied newspaper articles and other printed material on the Greenwich Bomb Outrage of 1894, and that he additionally received oral information from friends familiar with the socialist and anarchist scenes. In "Conrad's Western World," Sherry did Conrad scholars the great service of citing extensively from contemporary press reports as well as reproducing, in unabridged form, an obscure pamphlet by the anarchist newspaper publisher David Nicoll claiming that the whole incident had been a police plot. While ample attention has been given to the parallels and differences between "The Secret Agent" and the conspiracy theory propounded by Nicoll, however, the historical circumstances that gave rise to that theory are usually not dealt with in great depth. As the present article demonstrates, "The Secret Agent" is a response to the emergence of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch as much as it is a response to the Greenwich Bomb Outrage and its surrounding media discourse. This is indicated by the fact that the only written source mentioned in Conrad's "Author’s Preface" to the 1920 edition of "The Secret Agent" is a memoir by Sir Robert Anderson. A Home Office advisor on political crime during the Fenian dynamite campaign, Anderson had been the handler of the British government’s most valuable spy in the Fenian ranks, Henri Le Caron, from 1867 to 1889. Conrad's interest in such undercover police practices is clearly reflected in his novel, which depicts the explosion at Greenwich Park not as a simple act of political violence perpetrated by a single group, but as the result of an interaction of various factors. Individual fanaticism and scrupulousness (embodied by the bomb-making Professor) is just one of these factors. The others are state-sponsored espionage and incitement to violence in the name of counterterrorism as well as a system of secret policing in which an endemic lack of transparency first allows the bombing to happen and then hampers the investigation. My article considesr each of these three factors in a separate chapter, considering Conrad’s characters and plot alongside their historical counterparts.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration established a security discourse based on the paradigm of "uncertain threats," characterizing the "war on terror" as a war against the "unknown." From the point of view of this new security discourse, counterterrorism should not confine itself to the accumulation of data concerning the goals, strategies, and means of terrorist networks. It also depends on ingenuity on the part of security analysts in the imagination of possible present and future events. Besides analyzing facts, counterterrorism has to work speculatively through possibilities, to think in the subjunctive. Consequently, members of the Hollywood entertainment industry were invited by the Pentagon in October 2001 "to brainstorm about possible terrorist targets and schemes in America and to offer solutions to those threats." The present article argues that the consideration of fiction as potential fact is symptomatic of the discursive response to terror, which oscillates between the real (actual incidents of political violence) and the imaginary (anticipated further attacks), both drawing on and contributing to what I propose to conceptualize as the cultural imaginary of terrorism. Although this dynamic became particularly salient after 9/11, it has a much longer history, going back to the first emergence of sub-state violence against public targets at the close of the nineteenth century, when several literary writers devised spectacular scenarios of attacks from the air or with biological weapons. What distinguishes these late-Victorian fictions from post-9/11 counterterrorist discourse, however, is that the latter has made the imaginary an integral feature of homeland defense and thus a basis for political practice.

In this essay, Lord Kitchener's calypso song "London Is the Place for Me" (1948) serves as an exemplary case study for an investigation into how migrant literature relates to cultural change. My hypothesis is that London texts by authors from British colonies or former colonies allow us to approach the cultural consequences of immigration not as an accomplished fact, but as an ongoing process; they give us a glimpse of cultural change in the making. I argue, moreover, that migrant literature about London does more than passively reflect social conditions: it actively engages in the transformation of culture. At the level of plot, it does so by using its fictional characters and situations to create (and experiment with) forms of cultural change; and at the level of form, it does so by performing cultural change by means of language, imagery, narrative strategies. My reading of "London Is the Place for Me” draws on Michel de Certeau's understanding of "practice" (particularly the practice of "using" cities) as a form of creative "appropriation." Contrary to most previous uses of de Certeau's work in the field of postcolonial studies, I apply his concept of "practice" not only to the characters in the text, but also to the texts themselves, arguing that both turn the "Concept-city" of London into a "metaphorical city." As the characters "appropriate" parts of the city, they reflect their authors' own creative uses and metaphorizations of London.