Wednesday, July 12, 2017
Carnegie Room (University of Glasgow)
My presentation will be based on the German corpus of the Lemel project. I will examine all items relating to European history or the history of two or more countries in Europe. The articles will be selected for a period of one month, from October - November 2016, published in the online portals of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The focus of the analysis are the discursive assumptions of the relationship between past and present. In a narratological approach (Hühn, 2009) I will work out the narrateme and the narratives (Genette, 1972) used by journalists, which constitute the communicative and cultural memory (Jan Assmann, 2013; Aleida Assmann, 2007; Maurice Halbwachs, 1950) transmitted to the media storage and a widespread medial distribution. Is there such a phenomena like a cultural sustainability of European identity (Claus Leggewie, 2011; Jürgen Osterhammel, 2009) and what is such presumed sustainable identity formation causing? What light is shed on social and political transformation? The presentation will explain how the current state of crisis in Europe, its future issues and forecasts, is negatiated against the background of a prolonged historical period (longue durée, cf. Fernand Braudel, 1949) of Europe. The question will be raised up whether online media could provide throughout the representation of Europe an awareness of sustainability of European historical events (and thus the ability to distinction of current crisis phenomenon which possibly are only ephemeral). I aim to explore how this is put in relation to social and political transformations.
