Space - Place - Environment

The case for reopening the debate on space in our time has been succinctly put by Verona Conley in Rethinking Technologies: "Now, in a world where the notion of space has been completely changed through electronic simultaneity, where the computer appears to go faster than the human brain, or where 'virtual reality' replaces 'reality', how do philosophy, critical theory, or artistic practices deal with those shifts?" Total electronic simultaneity, real-time, or absolute instantaneousness, if this were indeed possible, would not only mean the end of time and space but of human life as well. Fortunately, we are still far from having fully achieved this, and the broker who has, through instantaneous e-mail communication, just initiated a profitable capital flow a-round the globe, comes quickly to realize the impact of the continuance of sequential time and extensional space when he leaves his computer and gets into a traffic jam.
Today we no longer derive much comfort from Kant's conviction that time and space are a priori forms of perception and are more inclined to embrace Edward Casey's phenomenological approach and his assumption that the concreteness of place takes precedence over space. One important concomitant of Casey's philosophy of place is that it enhances the relevance of the body, "emplacement" and "embodiment" being mutually constitutive, another is the renewed importance it bestows on the "local and regional". Obviously, the terminological field space, place, environment has to be continuously redefined in accordance with both the changing conventions of viewing and with the socio-political power struggles of every age.

Aus dem Inhalt:

Introduction by Lothar Hönnighausen

Theories and Methods

Winfried Fluck: Imaginary Space; or, Space as Aesthetic Object

Heide Ziegler: 'Place' in the Internet Age or, Borges and I

Hanjo Berressem: Emergent Eco:logics: Cultural and Natural Environments in Recent Theory and Literature

Ulfried Reichardt: Space, Nature, and Landscape in Recent Theory and Poetry

Sabine Sielke: Spatial Aesthetics, Ironic Distances, and Realms of Liminality: Measuring Theories of (Post-) Modernism

James L. Peacock : From Space to Place Environment

Cornelius Browne: (Eco)logic in Utah Landscapes: Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams

Louise Westling: Monstrous Technologies in Silko, Castillo, Ortiz, and Solnit

Richard Grusin: Remediating Nature: National Parks as Mediated Public Space

Space in Fiction, Film, and Drama

Gerhard Hoffmann: Space as Form and Force in the Novel

Christian Berkemeier: Reading the Void: City Codes and Urban Space in Contemporary American Fiction

Pearl A. McHaney: Deconstruction of Public Space in David Mamet's Oleanna

Reingard M. Nischik: "Once Upon a Time in the West": The Changing Function of Landscape in the American Western Film, 1968-2000

Aurélie Guillain: The Construction of the South in The Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Space in Poetry and Art

Frank Kearful: 'Going Around in Circles': Wallace Stevens, Amy Clampitt, and Rita Dove

Diana v. Finck: 'Nothing-in-Between': Silence, Empty Spaces and Separateness as Agents in Postmodern Poetry

Carina Plath: Los Angeles - A Phenomenal City. West Coast Artists in the 1970s

Wolfgang Werth: Trash and Space: The Uncanny Art of Tony Oursler

'Real' and Constructed Space

Christian W. Thomsen: Arthur Erickson as Architectural Link between Canada and USA, between Old and New World Cultural Concepts

Bernd Streich: Protecting Open Space: The Urban Sprawl Discussion in the USA and in Germany

Charles Aiken / Kyle T. Rector: Geography and Socio-Political Space

Edward M. Bergman: Regional Uniqueness or Global Uniformity?