Papers by Harald Pittel
Hard Times, Oct 13, 2023
The Covid-19 pandemic, though less prominent in the headlines than in 2020 and 2021, is still wit... more The Covid-19 pandemic, though less prominent in the headlines than in 2020 and 2021, is still with us today and has become part of our cultural memory. This article looks at the loftily titled Decameron Project (2020), an international volume of what may be called ‘lockdown fiction’, commissioned by The New York Times Magazine.
Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, 2023
The novels that make up Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet are often highlighted as epitomes of Brexit ... more The novels that make up Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet are often highlighted as epitomes of Brexit fiction or "BrexLit" (Shaw 2018) and they depict present-day Britain as fractured: "a line you don't cross here, a line you better don't cross there" (Smith 2016, 61). This portrayal amounts to a dark outlook of an atomised and disorientated postpolitical society whose citizens show little interest in real participation and uncritically cling to ill-founded administrative regulations. In my view, the crisis of citizenship as perceived by Smith can also be described as a crisis of communication, a word that is often divorced from its original meaning – to communicate: to make common to many, to impart (Williams 1985, 72) – and reduced to one-way processes. It is in this sense that Gerold Sedlmayr (2019) has argued that "communication breakdown" figures largely in recent British literature, and it deserves attention that this focus typically reflects class conflicts. More specifically, "communication breakdown" according to Sedlmayr is often due to socio-cultural divisions perceived as unbridgeable when working-class experience is alienated from the dominant culture and when the neoliberal state's attempts to maintain hegemony by consent are unsuccessful (Sedlmayr 2019, 35-40; 41). Arguably, one would not expect such a class-sensitive outlook from Smith's novels, which have often been described as middle-class-centred in terms of their characters and implied values. It is contrary to this common perception that this essay discusses Spring as a remarkably complex study of class-based communication breakdown.
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Coils of the Serpent Special Issue: Beyond Crisis: Raymond Williams and the Present Conjuncture, 2021
We are living in a time of crisis. There has been a crucial shift in public awareness since the f... more We are living in a time of crisis. There has been a crucial shift in public awareness since the final decades of the 20th century, when (at least, in the affluent societies of the West) crisis-aversion was predominant. Today, few would disagree that there actually is a kind of crisis, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, precarious migration and the rise of right-wing populism, and the continued repercussions of the 2008 financial crisis. Yet, crisis awareness is inherently political, as it is highly contested where the eye of the storm is to be located, if and how crises connect with other crises, who is to blame and what the ‘right’ responses might be. The deeper causes and interrelations of crises give rise to both qualified investigation and conspiracy theories, while some quarters insist on framing crises as just rare and temporary states of exception, implying that ‘we’ can simply go on with our habitual ways as soon as the ‘crisis’, seen as limited in scope, is over.
Hard Times, 2021
The pre-publication praise Natasha Brown received for her debut novel Assembly (2021) from renown... more The pre-publication praise Natasha Brown received for her debut novel Assembly (2021) from renowned writers like Bernardine Evaristo or Ali Smith is quite remarkable. The author had been virtually unknown to the larger public before winning one of the London Writers Awards in the literary fiction category in 2019. As a young Black British woman of Jamaican descent, Brown meets the criteria defined by Spread the Word, the organisation behind the Awards assisting underrepresented writers to develop and publish their work, with an overall aim of reflecting diversity and enabling inclusivity. Assembly highlights the discriminating intersections of race, gender and class in today’s Britain and tells a story of social ascendancy, of a Black female narrator-protagonist who has overcome her lower-class background and has managed to obtain a top position in a London-based finance company. While this partially invites an autobiographical reading – Brown, who holds a Cambridge degree in mathematics, also made her career in the finance industry – Assembly is a far cry from celebrating the glory of making it to the top and instead exposes this goal as utterly questionable.
Thesis Eleven, 2021
This essay argues that Oscar Wilde noticeably contributed to the emerging discourse about world l... more This essay argues that Oscar Wilde noticeably contributed to the emerging discourse about world literature, even though his views in this regard have to be unearthed from the margins of his works, from his early and unpublished American lectures and ‘between the lines’ of his major critical essays. Wilde’s implicit ideas around world literature can be understood as being closely related to his broader endeavour of redirecting and revaluing the pejorative discourse around ‘decadence’ in art and literature. More specifically, the arch-aesthete preferred to use the word ‘romance’ rather than ‘decadence’ (a term he hardly used at all in his writings), signalling a sensitivity attuned to what he called the ‘love of things impossible’. This reconceptualization of the decadent outlook was to inspire a critical ideal of literature which relied on creatively activating the other as Other, culminating in a vision of intersubjective, transcultural and unlimited literary communication. Wilde’s thought can be more specifically understood as anticipating central tenets of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s evocations of the planetary, thus preparing the way for an alterity-oriented understanding of literary cosmopolitanism.
Brexit and Beyond: Nation and Identity. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 39, edited by Daniela Keller and Ina Habermann, 2021
Ali Smith’s celebrated Seasonal Quartet – Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), and Summer... more Ali Smith’s celebrated Seasonal Quartet – Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), and Summer (2020) – has often been hailed as an epitome of “Brexit fiction.” There has been less focus so far on the fact that the cycle also addresses ageing as a social and cultural issue. This essay argues that Smith’s engagement with old age should be read in close relation with these novels’ larger cultural and political strategies, amounting to a complex intervention in a post-referendum discourse which tends simplistically to present the situation in terms of an antagonism of age groups. More specifically, Smith unfolds a distinctive un-ideological view of ageing, placing it at the heart of an elaborate communicative and political ideal aimed at reinvigorating a sense of open culture and reclaiming history in solidarity. Also insisting that literary traditions can be rewritten, the Seasonal Quartet challenges dominant perceptions of old age and provides a new myth as antidote to Brexit.
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Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power, 2018
Hard Times, 2018
Hard Times 101 (1/2018)
Book Reviews by Harald Pittel
Film Journal, 2021
Departing from recent hit films like Loving (Jeff Nichols, 2016) and Divines (Houda Benyamina, 20... more Departing from recent hit films like Loving (Jeff Nichols, 2016) and Divines (Houda Benyamina, 2016), Mixed Race Cinemas unfolds an alternative film history from the margins, looking at how problematic traditions of representation developed in American and French cinemas are. At the same time, the book highlights the fact that some films were not satisfied with, and hence attempted to revert, racist stereotypes. Mixedness, an identity “in-between cultures and ethnicities and yet often ascribed to one” (27), allows for an extent of mobility between conflicting racial constructions, and the flexibility thus entailed can serve the disparate goals of either affirming or dismantling racial ideology. Understanding that representations of race must be seen in close connection with national narratives and visual cultures, the study’s comparative approach is well aimed, looking at the USA as the dominant global film industry and France as the dominant European film industry. The former is notable for having the longest filmic history of interracial and mixed-race representations, whereas the latter, while only gradually opening up to multicultural themes and reproducing many US American clichés, has generally been more progressive in depicting interracial relations. Tracing these representational histories in context, Asava’s book sets high hopes on the power of cinematic mixedness to realise a ‘Third Space’ in which identities can be fluid and hybrid, and which would reconcile ideals of equality with cultural difference and thus help establish ‘post-race’ societies after all.
Anglistik, 2021
Review contained in
Kohnen, T. , Kohnen, T. , Weidle, R. , Heyl, C. , Freiburg, R. , Haekel, R. ,... more Review contained in
Kohnen, T. , Kohnen, T. , Weidle, R. , Heyl, C. , Freiburg, R. , Haekel, R. , Pittel, H. , Göhrmann, M. , Schulze-Engler, F. , Wells, A. , & Roxburgh, N. "Reviews". Anglistik, no. 32, vol. 2 (2021), pp. 149-77 [166-69].
This publication is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 4.0.
The Raymond Williams Society Blog, Oct 31, 2018
This month on the Raymond Williams Society blog we have a review by Harald Pittel of a new book p... more This month on the Raymond Williams Society blog we have a review by Harald Pittel of a new book published in Germany on Williams. As Harald explains, Über Raymond Williams examines Williams's work across a range of disciplines and, by translating and expanding on an earlier English-language study, positions Williams where he belongs, as a leading intellectual of the European Left.
Conference Presentations by Harald Pittel
The Raymond Williams Society Blog, May 25, 2018
Welcome to the fifth instalment of the monthly Raymond Williams Society blog. This month we have ... more Welcome to the fifth instalment of the monthly Raymond Williams Society blog. This month we have a conference report from Germany. 'Beyond Crisis-Reassessing Raymond Williams' Cultural Materialism' took place at the University of Potsdam earlier this year. It featured speakers from across Europe and demonstrated the broad reach of Williams' thinking in both a contemporary and interdisciplinary context. One of the organisers, Berlin-based Harald Pittel, has kindly supplied us with this report on proceedings.
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Papers by Harald Pittel
Free download at https://elibrary.narr.digital/book/10.24053/9783823394143
Book Reviews by Harald Pittel
Kohnen, T. , Kohnen, T. , Weidle, R. , Heyl, C. , Freiburg, R. , Haekel, R. , Pittel, H. , Göhrmann, M. , Schulze-Engler, F. , Wells, A. , & Roxburgh, N. "Reviews". Anglistik, no. 32, vol. 2 (2021), pp. 149-77 [166-69].
This publication is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 4.0.
Conference Presentations by Harald Pittel
Free download at https://elibrary.narr.digital/book/10.24053/9783823394143
Kohnen, T. , Kohnen, T. , Weidle, R. , Heyl, C. , Freiburg, R. , Haekel, R. , Pittel, H. , Göhrmann, M. , Schulze-Engler, F. , Wells, A. , & Roxburgh, N. "Reviews". Anglistik, no. 32, vol. 2 (2021), pp. 149-77 [166-69].
This publication is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 4.0.