Schamma Schahadat

Increasingly pressing global political and societal challenges are always also rewarding subjects of creative engagement, and sometimes artists devise anticipative approaches to real-world problems. Harte Zeiten-- Ciezkie Czasy is a cooperative venture launched by K nstlerbund Baden-W rttemberg; Port25-- Raum f r Gegenwartskunst, Mannheim; and Galeria Miejska bwa, Bydgoszcz, Poland. It showcases works by altogether ten Polish and ten German contemporary artists. Putting the principle that art knows no boundaries into practice, the publication, with statements from Wolfgang Ullrich, Joanna Kiliszek, Schamma Schahadat, and others as well as documentation of the symposium held in September 2021, inspires forward-looking reflections on the conditions in which cultures thrive and similarities and differences between the two countries and beyond.

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, formerly socialist countries have gone through manifold transformations, whilst remnants of socialism remain ubiquitous. The volume explores various spaces of the postsocialist landscape, presenting a mixture of real and imaginary spaces, of memory and nostalgia, of aesthetic and political symbolism, of the global East and the global South, of academic and essayistic writing. It casts a glance at the heterogeneous relics of socialism and their transformation in very different parts of the world. From the description of (post-)socialist interiors, façades, neighborhoods, parks, monuments, and objects towards the imaginary spaces of literature, the contributors describe the concreteness and intimacy of some of the places that span across and even beyond of what is left of the »second world« today.

The volume combines historical and systematic aspects of world literature under consideration of recent approaches in literary studies, cultural studies, and media science. It discusses global knowledge and material, medial, and aesthetic dimensions, illustrating their variable historical and cultural criteria according to world regions. The interdisciplinary role of world literature is discussed in the context of the digital humanities.

Die intertextuelle Analyse deckt neue Text- und Sinnschichten in den Dramen des Symbolisten Aleksandr Blok auf und macht zugleich die enge Verschrankung von Intertextualitat und Epochenpoetik deutlich. Die symbolisierte Asthetik spiegelt sich sowohl im Umgang mit den fremden Texten als auch in ihrer Auswahl: Bloks Intertextualitat ist eine spezifisch symbolistische, und die Pratexte entstammen dem symbolistischen Lekture-Kanon. Das Igorlied und die Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts (Puskin, Dostoevskij und Solov'ev) sind in den Dramen ebenso prasent wie die Texte russischer und franzosischer Zeitgenossen."