Comfort in Contemporary Culture: The Challenges of a Concept

Published by transcript Verlag 2020

Comfort in Contemporary Culture

The Challenges of a Concept

Edited by: Dorothee Birke and Stella Butter
Funded by: Universität Koblenz-Landau

Volume 212 in the series Edition Kulturwissenschaft

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839449028

Overview
Contents

About this book

Comfort is a prominent and highly loaded concept, as popular discourses on cosy environments, safe spaces, but also the importance of ›getting out of your comfort zone‹ attest. This volume is the first to investigate ›comfort‹ as a cultural narrative and emotional touchstone in contemporary culture. Taken together, the contributions to the volume offer an overview of different approaches to and conceptualisations of comfort in linguistics, in literary, media, and cultural studies, and art history. They showcase how ›comfort‹ serves as a valuable lens to analyse contemporary artworks and developments, e.g. live theatre broadcasting or political interventions in the US-American media sphere.

Author / Editor information

Dorothee Birke is associate professor of English literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Her main research interests include political drama, digital book culture, and the history of the novel. She has held research fellowships at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies.
Stella Butter is a professor of English and American literature at the University of Koblenz-Landau (Campus Landau). In her research, she is especially interested in representations of home in contemporary Anglophone literature, contingency and literature, and the cultural functions of the British novel in the process of modernisation.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	1
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	5
Introduction Challenging Comfort in Contemporary Literature and Culture Dorothee Birke and Stella Butter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	7
Lexical-Semantic Analysis of ‘Comfort’ A Contrastive Perspective of English, European Portuguese, and Polish Zuzanna Bułat Silva Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	21
On the Temptations of Comfort The Poetics of Slothfulness in Pynchon Burak Sezer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
“A sort of strange beginning out of time” Comfort as an Involuntary Cultural Memory Elisa Carandina Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
Comfort in Contemporary Art Shadow Works Against the Background of Blumenberg’s Notion of ‘Comfort in the Cave’ Angela Breidbach Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
Writing Dis/Comfort A Novelist’s Approach to Ageing Bodies and Un/Comfortable Places Sarah Butler Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	101
Are You Dwelling Comfortably? Heidegger’s Home Comforts in The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt Andrew Liston Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
Subverting Late Capitalist Comfort Affective Connections in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People Juliane Strätz Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	133
The Politics of Comfort in J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year Didymus Tsangue Douanla Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
Gothic Hauntings Post-9/11 Home Spaces and the Dis/Comfort of American History in The Walking Dead Dorothee Marx Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
Embracing Mindful Discomfort Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird Nourit Melcer-Padon Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
“These Seats Are So Comfy” Livecasting and the Notion of Comfortable Theatre Heidi Liedke Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205
Discomforting Silences in Alt-Right America, 2019 Simon Strick Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 254
Keywords: Literature; Media; Film; Culture; Cultural History; Cultural Theory; Literary Studies; Cultural Studies

eBook

Published: October 27, 2020
ISBN: 9783839449028