Isabel Capeloa Gil Knihy

The series Culture and Conflict aims to promote a dynamic, pluridisciplinary dialogue meant to discuss the multiple ways in which conflict influences, supports or constrains the production of meaning in modernity. It publishes innovative original scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural studies as well as media, visual and film studies. Culture and conflict inevitably go together. The very idea of culture is marked by the notion of difference and creative, i.e., conflictual interaction. Differential markers, such as self and other, inside and outside, high and low, pure and dirty, old and new, support the key themes of the study of culture, e.g., identity and diversity, memory and trauma, translation of cultures and globalization, mediation and exclusion. The new series Culture and Conflict aims to promote a dynamic, pluridisciplinary dialogue meant to discuss the multiple ways in which conflict influences, supports or constrains the production of meaning in modernity. It publishes innovative original scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural studies as well as media, visual and film studies.

Since culture, the media and the arts deal with the perception and the processing of catastrophe, what kind of social knowledge does this process produce and how does it contribute to the sustainable development of societies? The book seeks to understand how societies and cultures deal with disaster and the rhetorical means they resort to in order to represent it. It is situated on the cusp between the response to natural catastrophe, the renewed awareness of human vulnerability in the face of environmental hazard and irresponsible policies and the social role of traditional knowledge and humanistic ideas for the preservation of human communities. It aims to be diverse, in disciplinary allegiance and cultural situation, and relevant, by bringing together articles by well-known scholars and policy makers to jointly discuss the possibilities of reframing hazard for the future, so that one may learn from restored behavior instead of repeating the mistakes of the past.

Plots of War: Modern Narratives of Conflict discusses the dynamics of change and transformation that underlie the troubled project of modernity and shows how deeply it has been shaped by war and violence. The narrative of war, the emplotment of violence in historic and mainly in symbolic terms, is deeply embedded in the construction of individual and collective memories, but it also helps to shape the mediation of future conflicts. What is ultimately at stake here is the complex figuration and mediation of the violence of war in ever more hyper-mediated ways with direct consequences to the production of identities and processes of cultural memory.

I. Capeloa Gil: Introduction – Part I - Water Writing and Modernity – M. Schmeling: Navigatio poetae: L’eau inspiratrice chez les écrivains de la modernité – H. Buescu: Water that Flows Up and Down the River... – M. Schmitz-Emans: Water Writing: Fluid Languages and the Voices of the Sea – I. Lopez: Beachfront Property for the American Navy: Vieques Island in Mayra Montero’s The Captain of Sleepers – B. Wolf: Robinson or the Nomos of the Sea – K. Joslin: Rachel Carson and the Song of the Sea – Part II - Fluid Cultures and Poetics – I. Capeloa Gil: Hydrography, or the Anxiety of the Sea. The Nautical Chart as a Cultural Model – A. Lopes: Liquid Translation: On the Portuguese (Sub)Version of Walter Scott’s The Pirate – O. Madany: The Sea and the Desert in Modern Egyptian Writing – T. Bailey: Listening to the Music of the Ompompanoosuc – T. Ferreira: The Woman and the Sea Beyond: On Sophia de Mello Breyner – A.-M. Aly: Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea as a Maritime Pastiche – J. Ferreira: The Portuguese Fishermen of Provincetown, Massachusetts: An Oral History – Introduction