Walter Benjamin's work is central to the debate on the crisis of remembrance in modern aesthetics. The study shows how, although Benjamin's poetics of remembrance is couched in terms of the traditional constellation of memory and writing, it increasingly turns against constructive actualizations. The first analysis of the author's entire literary oeuvre from this point of view traces the development of his Apoetics of de-structionA as reflected by intertextuality and the rejection of autobiographic reading. The 'unwritability' of the APassagenA documents a non-conclusive form of commemoration as the only adequate response to the task of representing the silent memory of the mute victims of history.

The volume examines the interrelationships between the history of medicine and literature from the 17th until the 19th centuries. The papers in the volume analyse these interrelationships using the styles of medical and literary texts, which show how the dimensions of knowledge and of representation determine each othera " for example in the case of narrative structures in medical case histories or a diagnostic narrative stance in a novel.

While concepts of Earth have a rich tradition, more recent examples show a distinct quality: Though ideas of wholeness might still be related to mythical, religious, or utopian visions of the past, "Earth" itself has become available as a whole. This raises several questions: How are the notions of one Earth or our Planet imagined and distributed? What is the role of cultural imagination and practices of signification in the imagination of "the Earth"? Which theoretical models can be used or need to be developed to describe processes of imagining Planet Earth? This collection invites a wide range of perspectives from different fields of the Humanities to explore the means of imagining Earth.

Philological practices have served to secure and transmit textual sources for centuries. However - this volume contends -, it is only in the light of the current radical media change labeled "digital turn" that the material and technological prerequisites of the theory and practice of philology become fully visible. The seventeen studies by scholars from the universities of Budapest and Cologne assembled here investigate these recent transformations of our techniques of writing and reading by critically examining core approaches to the history and epistemology of the humanities. Thus, a broad praxeological overview of basic cultural techniques of collective memory is unfolded.

This volume provides an overview of theories of cultural memory that are intensively discussed in cultural studies and humanities disciplines such as history, sociology, literary studies, art history, and media studies. Cultural memory encompasses all rituals, institutions and practices through which communities establish their identity and common origin, which are challenged by the digital turn today. The book presents, on the one hand, basic arguments by the most important memory theorists of the 20th and 21st centuries and, on the other, exemplary descriptions of the most significant forms of cultural memory.