To Darío Villanueva

In this essay I take a closer look at the international dimension of the arrière-garde. I will deal exclusively with the issue of whether being arrière-garde may play a significant role in the international canonization of a writer. My case study is based on Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928), a Spanish writer with a world – that is to say, an international – literary career who nevertheless has been excluded from the Spanish national canon precisely because of being ‘arrière-gardiste’. Blasco Ibáñez's world literary career and his exclusion from the national canon are assessed from a generational viewpoint. Because of the limitations inherent to the generation method, though, I will also explore a prosopographical approach by investigating a field shared by a collective biography of writers. Notwithstanding the provisional nature of the data, the approach may contribute to a better understanding of both the arrière-garde as an international phenomenon and world literary careers.

The world-renowned physicist Andrei D. Sakharov (1921–1989) was ‘the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb’ and, as such, an architect of the Soviet superpower. He developed into a fierce fighter for human rights, distinguished by the Nobel Peace Prize. In his words, ‘my fate was larger than what would have followed from my personality. I was merely trying to be worthy of my fate.’1 His life and career provide thought-provoking lessons and is worthy of review on the eve of his centennial.

The article discusses uncommemorated sites of violence in the framework of landscape theories. In particular, it asks how the sites of past violence can be understood through the lens of the ‘dynamic’ theory of landscape offered by Tim Ingold in his seminal The Temporality of the Landscape (1993). The ‘dwelling perspective’ he proposes to understand sites as dynamic ‘taskscapes’ allows us to inscribe past violent actions and engagements of local users into today’s meanings of sites of trauma. This conceptualization is further operationalized in relation to George Chamayoux’ philosophical history of manhunts (or more broadly: cynegetic practices, 2012). In the article it has been asked: how can a landscape be ‘pregnant with the past’ – as it is claimed in Ingold’s approach – if the past actions involved tracking, hunting and killing people who tried to escape death in ghettos or camps? How can we ‘read the past’, ‘remember it’ or ‘call back an internal image’ of previous actions developed in the area, if the activity co-constituted an act of genocide? Are we able to read today the past threat of a perpetrator–predator searching for victims, and, if so, with what tools? Can environmental studies help us to understand the uncanny relation to landscapes that connote past manhunts, and violent deaths on killing sites? The author will propose the concept of cynegetic landscapes to approach landscapes of manhunts.

The functions and territories of academies and universities have never been totally independent from the outside world, nor can we revert to earlier stages of the history of these institutions. Therefore, we have to understand and judge them according to their components in order to find the proper responses to various challenges, and we have to make continuous efforts to be as independent and autonomous as possible in the context of cooperation and the building of collective wisdom. The keywords of this article are personal liberty, political freedom, concentration versus separation of powers, efficiency, meritocracy, common good, and political community.

The new research field of synthetic biology is emerging from molecular biology, chemistry, biotechnology, information technology and engineering. This paper describes synthetic biology as a ‘Science of the Artificial’ and identifies structural features of engineering sciences that can be applied to this new kind of biology as opposed to traditional biology. The search for laws already in traditional biology has been difficult. In Synthetic Biology, action and application stand in the foreground and laws increasingly lose ground as a meaningful concept.

A defining feature of new nationalisms, with their right-wing populist rhetoric, is the way they exploit the regime of truth prevalent in liberal democratic societies. Their use of the language of democracy, human rights and identity is sometimes hard to differentiate from the mainstream convention. Despite being majoritarian in the way it seeks democratic legitimacy, new nationalist discourse consistently advances demands framed in terms of minority protection. This is done by presenting the existence of ‘our’ nation as threatened by overwhelming forces of neo-liberal globalisation (embodied in the EU, the West or even in ‘the Washington establishment’). By using the Pussy Riot case as an empirical example, this article argues that there is no way of preventing the language of minority protection from being hijacked by ‘predatory identities’ unless one foregrounds the universal dimension of equality and emancipation, as opposed to rights and entitlements associated with particular identities. The key political question today, as always, is how to navigate between the totalitarian disregard of the local and the parochialist concentration on the particular.

However valuable as a term defining – by a shared language – a grouping of nations, ‘la Francophonie’ proves imprecise and divisive on closer analysis. In the field of literature, ‘Francophone’, despite its etymology (and the consequent absurdity of the phrase ‘Francophone literature’), has paradoxically come to exclude white writers from metropolitan France. At a time when the population of France is becoming increasingly multi-ethnic, any exclusion tainted with racism is particularly inappropriate. The centralizing mentality of France, politically motivated in the seventeenth century and entrenched over the years, is at odds with the ambition of universality except in terms of an assumed superiority through conquest or paternalism. The ‘mission civilisatrice’ has become the more insinuating ‘présence française’. For the literary scholar alert both to postcolonial discourses and to the heretofore marginalized texts of French literature dealing with blacks as well as to the dynamic contribution by black writers to literature in French, a new term is proposed: ‘la Francographie’. To replace the binary polarisation of French and Francophone, which fosters oppositional stances, comes a new model appropriate for our computer age: the net.

This article discusses how Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018, has become a target of right-wing populist discourse, locating her at the centre of the landscape of hate. The features of the affective landscape of hate are discussed from the phenomenological and constructivist perspective. The author argues that the landscape of hate constitutes an important part of right-wing populism based on the narrative of national emergency and the language of war and exclusion (othering).

The fact that dystopian literature has a great potential for envisioning alternative futures is elaborated in this article in relation to the Finnish/British author Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water (2013). Itäranta’s gloomy low-fi novel is read alongside contemporary ecocritical theory with a focus on issues of vernacular cultures and knowledges versus ideas of cosmopolitan planetary citizenship. Reflections are made about the profound nature of the concept of borders: cultural, temporal, informational, geographical, political, in the event of massive catastrophes. The article investigates how Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’ and Ursula Heise’s ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ are played out in a novel, and how the novel in turn poses important questions for ecocritical theory. Thus, the interplay between ecocritical literary theory, on the one hand, and literature, on the other, is highlighted. What can dystopia make visible in contemporary theory?

Most discussions on mediality and intermediality take their point of departure as contemporary digital media, social media included. Hence, earlier periods in cultural history are often regarded as simple forerunners for the highly complex situation in today’s globalized media culture based on digital technologies. It is true that electronic media technology and its social effects now have reached an unprecedented and accelerated technological complexity. However, this perspective tends to ignore the fact that from ancient times up to the late nineteenth century, a wealth of media innovations exercised an impact in their contemporary cultures and societies; innovations that equal the influence of digital media today: the introduction of writing, book printing, the printed press and its technologies, visual reproduction technologies, the telegraph, photography, film, the telephone and other innovations in the media world. The focus of this article is a few specific media innovations and the radical changes they generated over the last few hundred years in literature and art as well as in their cultural and societal contexts. Such innovations are steps in the long process that leads to recent media developments and their influence on experiences, knowledge, ideologies and human self-understanding.

Based on a close study of the Sino-Japanese collaboration in Kunqu Opera The Peony Pavilion (2008), this article proposes a different conception of interculturalism onstage in East Asia in comparison with the prevailing East–West paradigm of intercultural performance and theatre. Some of the interesting questions that are raised and discussed in this paper are: How does the Japanese actor Bando Tamasaburo impersonate a young lady Du Liniang in the Chinese classical play without speaking the Chinese language? In what ways does the Sino-Japanese co-production connect and interweave Kunqu Opera and Kabuki? How has the intercultural performance been mediatized, received as well as perceived in China, Japan and elsewhere? The Sino-Japanese co-production features such important notions of interculturalism as connecting instead of othering, sharing instead of influencing, and complementing instead of exploiting.

The necessity of an interdisciplinary approach to both research and education can today hardly be debated, especially when one thinks of the complexity and dynamics of changes in the human brain and behaviour related to digitalisation and informatisation. Real interdisciplinarity, however, has to be born within the individual, representing a kind of a particular state of mind. To achieve such a goal, reforms of both science and the educational system are needed, broadening the fundamentals of our knowledge. To support and elaborate this thesis, various ideas will be analysed related to one successful example of interdisciplinarity, represented, in the author’s opinion, in the history of development of bioethics.

In Nietzsche, ‘European nihilism’ has at its core valuelessness, meaninglessness and senselessness. This article argues that Nietzsche is not replacing God with the nothing, but rather that he regards ‘European nihilism’ as an ‘in-between state’ that is necessary for getting beyond Christian morality. An important characteristic of a Nietzschean philosopher is his ‘will to responsibility’. One of his responsibilities consists of the creation of the values and the concepts that are needed in order to overcome the intermediate state of nihilism. For prevailing over nihilism in science, Nietzsche suggests drawing on philosophy for the creation of values and drawing on art in order to create beautiful surfaces that are based on these values. He regards science as a cultural system that rests on contingent grounds. Therefore, his work is concerned with the responsible construction of the narratives of science in such a way that they enhance agency and promote a life-affirming future.

The popular acclaim for Alan Sokal's ‘Intellectual Impostures’ suggests a deep-seated suspicion about the value of much theoretical work in the humanities. But if the heroic age of scholarship is past, what are the humanities for? To teach us how to lead better lives?

This paper is intended as an invitation to continue reflecting on and discussing the concepts of learning and teaching, including the concept of educational environment and the conditions for knowledge construction in that environment. The key concept is communication, which I link to different environments, including face-to-face (f2f) environments, net-mediated environments and various mixtures of these types of communication environments. Furthermore, I implicate learning resources in the concept of the educational environment. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to contribute to developing our approach to the nexus between teaching and learning, including the concept of environment and the conditions for knowledge construction. I present a case study, which I analyse using a systems theoretical analytical framework, in order to discuss the relation between learning and the environment, including the idea of the possibility of knowledge transfer and knowledge dissemination. The specific focus is on learning resources in specific programs-on-demand (podcasts) and video-on-demand (vodcasts, from now just podcast) – and the students’ approaches to these learning resources and the environment offered. My point of departure is to contribute to scholarly discussion of learning resources and, in particular, of the use of podcasts and students’ approaches to these learning resources in concrete educational contexts. Finally, I suggest that we take the opportunity to reflect on the challenging task: how can we organize teaching and environments for learning, including the choice of learning resources, in order to provide each student with the possibility of developing the concrete educational qualifications that are required?

Change in European cultural history has, for a long period, been discussed through two interrelated notions, that of science and that of history. This paper traces the various stages of this discussion from Antiquity to the present day from the point of view of history. Two reoccurring and paradigmatic characters of mythological descent, Odysseus and Prometheus, illustrate how history as a realm for human responsibility and future planning has established itself as a specific European construct, with the 18th century as its final breakthrough in practical and ideological terms. A close analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's drawing the Vitruvian Man, in statu nascendi, shows how the individual human being carrying the obligations and the promises of this history, is envisioned. The final remarks underline the importance of scientific knowledge in the concrete shaping of this responsibility and a plea for an increased cooperation across the disciplines.

Presentation summary by Monika Ewa Kaminska

I believe that Europe can do without immigration. We do not need it to solve our problems. It does not help our national income. We should not push for immigration.

While demographers have long been concerned with population increases, recent significant declines in fertility also warrant concern. So far, however, most researchers have focused on the causes of lower fertility rather than its consequences. This study makes a theoretical contribution by proposing a new conceptual framework, which suggests that growing up with fewer siblings is associated with more participation in voluntary associations. Using General Social Survey (GSS) from the US, the relationship between sibship size and participation in voluntary associations is empirically tested. It is found that there is a negative relationship between sibship size and participation in voluntary associations among American adults who have at least four siblings. These findings have implications for researchers who seek a better understanding of the consequences of declining sibship size, not only in the US but also in Europe. Specifically, these results have implications for several countries in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, regions that have experienced ‘the lowest-low fertility’ in the last two decades.

This Focus is the outcome of a Symposium planned in 2004 by Theo D'haen and Karl Fuchs and held in association with the Annual Meeting of the Academia Europaea in September 2005 in Potsdam, 250 years after the Great Earthquake of 1755.

That ‘Great Event’ was not only recorded as a physical disaster, but it had a profound effect on life in Europe not directly concerned with the local devastation. In the Focus you will find recorded the impression it made on Voltaire and the influence it had on the development of Kant's thinking, on Wesley's sermons and even on poetry in distant Holland.

What could not be foreseen was how timely this Focus would be, since 2004–5 was a period of great disasters due to tsunamis in Sumatra and Mumbai, a major earthquake in Kashmir-Pakistan, and the hurricane flooding in New Orleans and other parts of the American Gulf coast.

The accusations of incompetence of local authorities, central government and politicians follow the same pattern as 250 years ago! What is rather different is the perceived role of the Almighty; but, after all, the 1755 episode occurred on All Saints Day, a Sunday when the many who were in church at the time of the eruption, were among the most prominent casualties.

What is quite different is the realization due to the insight of Alfred Wegener, that the earth's crust is not continuous, but split into plates, some twelve in number, that are unstable where their edges are in contact – the areas of earthquakes.