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The Work of World Literature Ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson

The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around ‘world literature’ have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge’s theory of how literature ‘works’, the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of ‘the work of world literature’. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.
2021 | Cultural Inquiry, 19 | 14.50 € (pb) | 31.50 € (hc)

Materialism and Politics Ed. by Bernardo Bianchi, Emilie Filion-Donato, Marlon Miguel, and Ayşe Yuva

Is materialism still relevant to critically think politics? Throughout modernity, the concept of materialism was associated with fatalism and naturalism, when it was not simply dismissed as heresy and atheism. In the nineteenth century, materialism evolved into a central concept of progressive politics, reappearing again in the past decades through renewed Marxist and Spinoza-based approaches, New Materialism, and feminist discourses. This volume inquires these contrasting uses from theoretical and historical perspectives.
2021 | Cultural Inquiry, 20 | 18 € (pb) | 37.5 € (hc)

Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue

Opening to passion as an unsettling, transformative force; extending desire to the text, expanding the self, and dissolving its boundaries; imagining pleasures outside the norm and intensifying them; overcoming loss and reaching beyond death; being loyal to oneself and defying productivity, resolution, and cohesion while embracing paradox, non-linearity, incompletion. These are some of the possibilities of lyric that this book explores by reading Petrarch’s vernacular poetry in dialogue with that of other poets, including Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and Shakespeare. In the Epilogue, the poet Antonella Anedda Angioy engages with Ossip Mandel’štam and Paul Celan’s dialogue with Petrarch and extends it into the present.
2020 | Cultural Inquiry, 18 | 12 € (pb) | 30 € (hc)

Claude Lefort Dante’s Modernity: An Introduction to the Monarchia Ed. by Christiane Frey, Manuele Gragnolati, Christoph F. E. Holzhey, and Arnd Wedemeyer

One of the most prominent political philosophers of the twentieth century reads Dante’s Monarchia, showing the surprising relevance of this radical fourteenth-century treatise that defends the necessity of universal monarchy and its independence from the Church for modern political theory. Judith Revel’s accompanying essay submits Lefort’s encounter with Dante to a transformative mis/reading and ties it to current debates on the question of the common.
2020 | Cultural Inquiry, 16 | 9.50 € (pb)

Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer

Weathering is atmospheric, geological, temporal, transformative. It implies exposure to the elements and processes of wearing down, disintegration, or accrued patina. Weathering can also denote the ways in which subjects and objects resist and pass through storms and adversity. This volume contemplates weathering across many fields and disciplines; its contributions examine various surfaces, environments, scales, temporalities, and vulnerabilities. What does it mean to weather or withstand? Who or what is able to pass through safely? What is lost or gained in the process?
2020 | Cultural Inquiry, 17 | 31 € (pb)

Re-: An Errant Glossary Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer

What’s in a prefix? How to read a prefix as short as ‘re-’? Does ‘re-’ really signify? Can it point into a specific direction? Can it reverse? Can it become the shibboleth of a ‘postcritical’ reboot? At first glance transparent and directional, ‘re-’ complicates the linear and teleological models commonly accepted as structuring the relations between past, present, and future, opening onto errant temporalities.
2019 | Cultural Inquiry, 15 | 12.5 € (pb)

Book Series Cultural Inquiry: Further Open Access Volumes

Some of the volumes in the series Cultural Inquiry that were published with Turia + Kant from 2010–18 are available as open access in the ICI Berlin Repository. See the relation tabs for the links.
2010