The figure of the barbarian has captivated the Western imagination from Greek antiquity to the present. Since the 1990s, the rhetoric of civilization versus barbarism has taken center stage in Western political rhetoric and the media. But how can the longevity and popularity of this opposition be accounted for? Why has it become such a deeply ingrained habit of thought that is still being so effectively mobilized in Western discourses?
The twenty essays in this volume revisit well-known and obscure chapters in barbarism's genealogy from new perspectives and through contemporary theoretical idioms. With studies spanning from Greek antiquity to the present, they show how barbarism has functioned as the negative outside separating a civilized interior from a barbarian exterior; as the middle term in-between savagery and civilization in evolutionary models; as a repressed aspect of the civilized psyche; as concomitant with civilization; as a term that confuses fixed notions of space and time; or as an affirmative notion in philosophy and art, signifying radical change and regeneration.
Proposing an original interdisciplinary approach to barbarism, this volume includes both overviews of the concept's travels as well as specific case studies of its workings in art, literature, philosophy, film, ethnography, design, and popular culture in various periods, geopolitical contexts, and intellectual traditions. Through this kaleidoscopic view of the concept, it recasts the history of ideas not only as a task for historians, but also literary scholars, art historians, and cultural analysts.
Author(s): Maria Boletsi, Christian Moser (eds.)
Series: Thamyris / Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race, 29
Publisher: Brill / Rodopi
Year: 2015
Language: English
Pages: 392
City: Leiden
Acknowledgments 9
Introduction / Christian Moser and Maria Boletsi 11
I. Setting the Terms: Conceptual and Cultural Histories of Barbarism 29
Barbarians: From the Ancient to the New World / François Hartog 31
Towards a Cultural History of Barbarism from the Eighteenth Century to the Present / Markus Winkler 45
II. Barbarian Configurations in Classic, Medieval, and Early Modern Settings 63
Laughing (at the) Barbarians: On Barbarism and Humor in Homer and Herodotus / Daniel Wendt 65
On the Evil Side of Creation: Barbarians in Middle Dutch Texts / Clara Strijbosch 85
Naked Indians, Trousered Gauls: Montaigne on Barbarism / Paul J. Smith 105
III. Barbarism and/in Enlightenment Thought, Aesthetics, and Literature 123
The Conceptual History of Barbarism: What Can We Learn from Koselleck and Pocock? / Peter Vogt 125
Sublime Barbarism?: Affinities between the Barbarian and the Sublime in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics / Reinhard M. Möller 139
Staging the Barbarian: The Case of Voltaire’s "Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le prophète" / Madeleine Kasten 155
IV. Barbarism and the Constitution of Society: Literary Challenges to Evolutionary Models 165
Liminal Barbarism: Renegotiations of an Ancient Concept in (Post-)Enlightenment Social Theory and Literature / Christian Moser 167
"The Seat of the Young, Loving Feelings, thus Delusionally, Barbarically –": Barbarism and the Revolutionary State in Heinrich von Kleist's "Penthesilea" / Steven Howe 183
Trusting Barbarians?: Franz Grillparzer's "The Golden Fleece" and the Challenge to the Mythography of Empire / Tim Albrecht 203
V. Barbarism and/in Modernity 221
"Des künic Etzelen man": The Huns and their King in Fritz Lang's Classic Silent Film "Die Nibelungen" and in the "Nibelungenlied" / Elke Brüggen and Franz-Josef Holznagel 223
Barbarians and Their Cult: On Walter Benjamin’s Concept of New Barbarism / 255
Barbarians Betwixt and Between: Figurations of the Barbarian in Elfriede Jelinek's "The Children of the Dead" / Anna-Maria Valerius 267
VI. Barbarism in Contemporary Art and Popular Culture 283
The Limes Mexicanicus or the "Barbarians at the Gate": The Depiction of "Southern Invaders" in American Film of the Twenty-First Century / Heidi Denzel de Tirado 285
Writing Designed Anxieties on Barbarism, Ornament, Taste, and Bio-Design / Marjan Groot 309
Organizing "Cultuur? Barbaar!": Some Problems of Creating Concepts Through Art / Gerlov van Engelenhoven and Looi van Kessel 329
VII. The Politics of Barbarism 343
"Ultimi Barbarorum": Eloquence and Subjectivity in Twenty-First-Century Social Movements / Nikos Patelis 345
Waiting for the Barbarians after 9/11: Functions of a Topos in Liminal Times / Maria Boletsi 355
The Politics of Barbarism / Terry Eagleton 377
The Contributors 385
Index 389
