Hans Rindisbacher | Pomona College (original) (raw)
Papers by Hans Rindisbacher
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2021
The linguistic history of Europe has been at the centre of a number of recent publications, many ... more The linguistic history of Europe has been at the centre of a number of recent publications, many of which have been inclined to blur the sharp distinction between synchrony and diachrony. As a result, the chronicle of our European languages, which includes tensions, conflicts and mutual influence, has been enlightened by new studies concentrating on language attitudes, variation and change during a period that was crucial for the consolidation of multilingualism and the rise of modern vernaculars. Today this field is increasingly referred to as historical sociolinguistics or the social history of language, as both linguists and historians attempt to apply the tenets and methodology of contemporary sociolinguistics to the interpretation of the social functions of language in the past. Since the early modern period is crucial in the history of Europe with regard to both the interaction between languages and their standardisation, this book starts from the assumption that the experiences of travellers on the Grand Tour can provide rich insights into social stratification in language use during that period. Not only do the travel writings of this mobile group provide a valuable source of information about language contact but they also illuminate how socialisation with the locals led, on the one hand, to conscious borrowings from prestigious foreign peers and, on the other, to linguistic disorientation when travellers were confronted with lower-class speech and rural vernaculars. By taking a sociolinguistic approach to exploring these written resources, it is hoped that the result will contribute to the description of the Grand Tour as a unique case study of population movement, language change and education in early modern Europe.
The European Legacy, 2022
Slavic Review, 2012
Larissa Zakharova is a cultural historian on the faculty at the Ecole des hautes etudes en scienc... more Larissa Zakharova is a cultural historian on the faculty at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris. This monograph based on her 2006 doctoral thesis offers an account of Soviet fashion, its institutions, practices, and discourses during the Khrushchev era, the thaw. The book privileges the socioeconomic, political-structural, and institutional dimensions of the textile and fashion industry over the semiotic-discursive and ideological aspects that Djurdja Bartlett foregrounded in her 2010 book on Soviet fashion, Fashion East: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism. Both books complement each other well. Stretching Karl Marx's terms just a bit: Zakharova provides a slice of the base, Bartlett more of the aesthetic superstructure, and both continue in different ways the tremendous historical grand narrative of Russian textiles and fashions that Christine Ruane laid out in The Empire's New Clothes: A History of the Russian Fashion Industry, 1700-1917 (2009). As an insider's account from a Soviet designer studio, Alia Shchipakina's Fashion in the SSSR (2009), rounds out the unfolding picture of Soviet fashion and consumer culture.
Comparative Critical Studies
American Literary History, 2022
The European Legacy, 2018
The European Legacy, 2018
The European Legacy, 2018
As well as being the simplest catastrophe, the fold is also the most common, the one you are most... more As well as being the simplest catastrophe, the fold is also the most common, the one you are most likely to meet. To introduce the fold, we head to the life drawing class. It may seem unlikely, but the life class is an excellent place to learn catastrophe theory. The purpose of our visit there is twofold. Not only is it a good place to learn the mathematics of curved shape, but in so doing, in unpicking the geometry of the life class, we may learn something more about the act of drawing, about how we perceive the model, and about how we go about representing the body with lines on paper. We may even learn something about the process of perception itself. Let' s start at the very beginning, as they say, with the simplest of all the catastrophes, the fold. It is just a parabola, as sketched to the right. The parabola there has been drawn on its side-it does not matter which way up or which way around you draw it. The point of catastrophe, the turning point, the fold itself, has been highlighted with a dot, and the curves above and below it have been drawn as solid and dotted lines, respectively, to signify that there is usually something different about the two parts of the curve that meet at this special point.
Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 2016
Zusammenfassung Der Artikel weist durch detaillierte Textvergleiche Patrick Süskinds unzweifelhaf... more Zusammenfassung Der Artikel weist durch detaillierte Textvergleiche Patrick Süskinds unzweifelhafte Kenntnis von Gustav Jaegers Werk Entdeckung der Seele nach. Die weitschweifigen olfaktorischen Theorien des deutschen Zoologen liefern Süskind wichtiges Hintergrundwissen für seinen Roman Das Parfum. Die Figur des Aufklärungsgelehrten Taillade-Espinasse, so die Hauptthese des Artikels, ist eine satirisch-karikierende Repräsentation Jaegers. The Marquis de la Taillade-Espinasse alias Prof. Dr. Gustav Jaeger: A Süskindian inspiration Abstract By means of close textual comparison, the article reveals Patrick Süskind's knowledge of Gustav Jaeger's original late-nineteenth century account of olfactory perception, Entdeckung der Seele. This work provides Süskind with inspiration and background knowledge for his 1985 bestseller, Perfume. Specifically, the figure of Taillade-Espinasse, the enlightenment scholar, is a caricature of the German scientist himself. Der Autor bedankt sich herzlich bei Selma Gienger, Adeptin der Jaeger-Forschung, für unschätzbare Hinweise, Materialien und Zugang zu privaten Quellen, ebenso wie für Gastfreundschaft und fortlaufende Ermutigung. Ich verdanke ihr auch die ersten konkreten Textgegenüberstellungen in Jaegers und Süskinds Werken. Selma Gienger ist die Ur-Ur-Enkelin Gustav Jaegers, selbst Homöopathin, und baut ihre klinische Arbeit wesentlich auf dem Wissen Ihres Vorfahren auf. Dass dieser bei Süskind als Taillade-Espinasse karikiert erscheint, wie der vorliegende Text nahelegt, entspricht zweifellos nicht ihrer Wertschätzung seines Werks. Ihr ist dieser Essay daher mit dem Hinweis gewidmet, dass sie trotz Süskinds kreativer Freiheit die wahre Jaegerin bleibt.
Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 2015
“Palermo in the later Islamic period,” which provides readers with an immediate and succinct gras... more “Palermo in the later Islamic period,” which provides readers with an immediate and succinct grasp of the spatial realities of that particular Sicilian Muslim city. I would also like to have seen one or two examples of actual contemporaneous Muslim maps, such as the Tabula Rogeriana or a sample the corpus of al-Khwārizmī, if only to better understand how early Muslims themselves perceived their immediate external environment. Overall, this genuinely attractive book will serve as an excellent exhibition of both the intricacies and tensions of Muslim history and the significance of cartography in the field of historical studies. Inevitably, it will be compared with Ruthven’s widely popular (if flawed and much criticized) Historical Atlas of Islam (2004), the Historical Atlas of Islam by FreemanGrenville and Munro-Hay (2002), or even the slightly dated Cultural Atlas of Islam by Faruqi (1986). However, this need not distract us overly. Every map by Currie is in full lucid colour and the imagery utilizes the most modern cartographic and innovative design techniques available to chronicle the ever evolving internal and external borders of Islam. These are supplemented by Sluglett’s intelligently articulated texts, which clarify and underline the important topics. Above all, this atlas presents readers with crucial insights into the geographical challenges and ambiguities of the world of Islam over the past 14 centuries. Lavishly illustrated, rich in narrative and visual detail, Atlas of Islamic History will become an indispensable reference book for undergraduates studying Asia, the Middle East, Islam and Muslim history.
What’s New in the New Europe? Redefining Culture, Politics, Identity, 2019
What the soldiers say: Swiss Army jargon and its links to civilian life witzerland in the past, b... more What the soldiers say: Swiss Army jargon and its links to civilian life witzerland in the past, before the end of the Cold War at least, liked to think of itself as a nation in terms of a Sonderfall, an exceptional case. This Sonderfall thinking applies to their role in the middle of Europe but outside the EU, to their federal political system of radical bottom-up democracy and far-reaching decentralization of power, their multilingualism, perhaps multiculturalism, and their increasingly rare militia army system-beside many other things such as the peaceful coexistence of Catholicism and Protestantism, the widespread use of dialect in oral and standard language in official media communication, etc., etc. Despite this self-ascribed status, they also liked to think of themselves as a potential model for a diverse Europe of many distinct but peacefully coexisting smaller political units. Given our workshop title, the Swiss case is a kind of counterpoint: It is about an army that has not fought a war in a long time in a country that has not (yet?) been affected by global terrorism. Language in the military, the sociolinguistics of the army and its peculiarities thus offer just such an example of the many areas of cultural and political life, where the Swiss like to think of themselves as different. However, before turning to the socio-linguistic dimension proper of my project and presenting a few concrete examples of Swiss soldiers' language, I need to turn to some socio-linguistic aspects first and provide bit of context that is historical, sociological, political, and broadly cultural.
Slavic Review, 2014
Vynnychenko's biography several of these forms of displacement are present simultaneously, an... more Vynnychenko's biography several of these forms of displacement are present simultaneously, and Soroka highlights their presence in Vynnychenko's writing in diverse and illuminating ways. Soroka's bold strategic step is actually a major contribution to the scholarly debate, and one regrets that the theoretical introduction to his book is tantalizingly brief, comprising only seven pages, although additional theoretical remarks are scattered throughout the remainder of the text and reemerge again with greater clarity in the conclusion. However, close readers will be richly rewarded, as his illuminating journey through the writer's output during the two major periods of displacement in Vynnychenko's life, 1907-14 and 1920-51, emerges as an exemplary work of literary scholarship that is theoretically engaged yet written in a lucid, inviting style. In the course of his analysis, Soroka provides an innovative and illuminating presentation of some of the writer's most important works, from his early realist short stories to the dramas and novels that catapulted him to international attention in the 1910s; his bold experiment in writing a Utopian novel with an adventure plot, The Solar Machine (1928), Ukraine's biggest bestseller of the 1920s; and his struggles to articulate his alternative vision of society's future, manifested in both his later philosophical novels and his nonfiction works. Thanks to Soroka's study, readers now have a reliable and informative map of the writer's complex aesthetic and intellectual evolution.
Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 2011
Monatshefte, 2006
Page 1. Monatshefte, Vol. 98, No. 1, 2006 128 0026-9271/2006/0004/128 © 2006 by The Board of Rege... more Page 1. Monatshefte, Vol. 98, No. 1, 2006 128 0026-9271/2006/0004/128 © 2006 by The Board of Regents of The University of Wisconsin System Book Reviews Deutsch in Texas. Von Marcus Nicolini. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004. 248 Seiten. 24,90. ...
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2021
The linguistic history of Europe has been at the centre of a number of recent publications, many ... more The linguistic history of Europe has been at the centre of a number of recent publications, many of which have been inclined to blur the sharp distinction between synchrony and diachrony. As a result, the chronicle of our European languages, which includes tensions, conflicts and mutual influence, has been enlightened by new studies concentrating on language attitudes, variation and change during a period that was crucial for the consolidation of multilingualism and the rise of modern vernaculars. Today this field is increasingly referred to as historical sociolinguistics or the social history of language, as both linguists and historians attempt to apply the tenets and methodology of contemporary sociolinguistics to the interpretation of the social functions of language in the past. Since the early modern period is crucial in the history of Europe with regard to both the interaction between languages and their standardisation, this book starts from the assumption that the experiences of travellers on the Grand Tour can provide rich insights into social stratification in language use during that period. Not only do the travel writings of this mobile group provide a valuable source of information about language contact but they also illuminate how socialisation with the locals led, on the one hand, to conscious borrowings from prestigious foreign peers and, on the other, to linguistic disorientation when travellers were confronted with lower-class speech and rural vernaculars. By taking a sociolinguistic approach to exploring these written resources, it is hoped that the result will contribute to the description of the Grand Tour as a unique case study of population movement, language change and education in early modern Europe.
The European Legacy, 2022
Slavic Review, 2012
Larissa Zakharova is a cultural historian on the faculty at the Ecole des hautes etudes en scienc... more Larissa Zakharova is a cultural historian on the faculty at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris. This monograph based on her 2006 doctoral thesis offers an account of Soviet fashion, its institutions, practices, and discourses during the Khrushchev era, the thaw. The book privileges the socioeconomic, political-structural, and institutional dimensions of the textile and fashion industry over the semiotic-discursive and ideological aspects that Djurdja Bartlett foregrounded in her 2010 book on Soviet fashion, Fashion East: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism. Both books complement each other well. Stretching Karl Marx's terms just a bit: Zakharova provides a slice of the base, Bartlett more of the aesthetic superstructure, and both continue in different ways the tremendous historical grand narrative of Russian textiles and fashions that Christine Ruane laid out in The Empire's New Clothes: A History of the Russian Fashion Industry, 1700-1917 (2009). As an insider's account from a Soviet designer studio, Alia Shchipakina's Fashion in the SSSR (2009), rounds out the unfolding picture of Soviet fashion and consumer culture.
Comparative Critical Studies
American Literary History, 2022
The European Legacy, 2018
The European Legacy, 2018
The European Legacy, 2018
As well as being the simplest catastrophe, the fold is also the most common, the one you are most... more As well as being the simplest catastrophe, the fold is also the most common, the one you are most likely to meet. To introduce the fold, we head to the life drawing class. It may seem unlikely, but the life class is an excellent place to learn catastrophe theory. The purpose of our visit there is twofold. Not only is it a good place to learn the mathematics of curved shape, but in so doing, in unpicking the geometry of the life class, we may learn something more about the act of drawing, about how we perceive the model, and about how we go about representing the body with lines on paper. We may even learn something about the process of perception itself. Let' s start at the very beginning, as they say, with the simplest of all the catastrophes, the fold. It is just a parabola, as sketched to the right. The parabola there has been drawn on its side-it does not matter which way up or which way around you draw it. The point of catastrophe, the turning point, the fold itself, has been highlighted with a dot, and the curves above and below it have been drawn as solid and dotted lines, respectively, to signify that there is usually something different about the two parts of the curve that meet at this special point.
Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 2016
Zusammenfassung Der Artikel weist durch detaillierte Textvergleiche Patrick Süskinds unzweifelhaf... more Zusammenfassung Der Artikel weist durch detaillierte Textvergleiche Patrick Süskinds unzweifelhafte Kenntnis von Gustav Jaegers Werk Entdeckung der Seele nach. Die weitschweifigen olfaktorischen Theorien des deutschen Zoologen liefern Süskind wichtiges Hintergrundwissen für seinen Roman Das Parfum. Die Figur des Aufklärungsgelehrten Taillade-Espinasse, so die Hauptthese des Artikels, ist eine satirisch-karikierende Repräsentation Jaegers. The Marquis de la Taillade-Espinasse alias Prof. Dr. Gustav Jaeger: A Süskindian inspiration Abstract By means of close textual comparison, the article reveals Patrick Süskind's knowledge of Gustav Jaeger's original late-nineteenth century account of olfactory perception, Entdeckung der Seele. This work provides Süskind with inspiration and background knowledge for his 1985 bestseller, Perfume. Specifically, the figure of Taillade-Espinasse, the enlightenment scholar, is a caricature of the German scientist himself. Der Autor bedankt sich herzlich bei Selma Gienger, Adeptin der Jaeger-Forschung, für unschätzbare Hinweise, Materialien und Zugang zu privaten Quellen, ebenso wie für Gastfreundschaft und fortlaufende Ermutigung. Ich verdanke ihr auch die ersten konkreten Textgegenüberstellungen in Jaegers und Süskinds Werken. Selma Gienger ist die Ur-Ur-Enkelin Gustav Jaegers, selbst Homöopathin, und baut ihre klinische Arbeit wesentlich auf dem Wissen Ihres Vorfahren auf. Dass dieser bei Süskind als Taillade-Espinasse karikiert erscheint, wie der vorliegende Text nahelegt, entspricht zweifellos nicht ihrer Wertschätzung seines Werks. Ihr ist dieser Essay daher mit dem Hinweis gewidmet, dass sie trotz Süskinds kreativer Freiheit die wahre Jaegerin bleibt.
Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 2015
“Palermo in the later Islamic period,” which provides readers with an immediate and succinct gras... more “Palermo in the later Islamic period,” which provides readers with an immediate and succinct grasp of the spatial realities of that particular Sicilian Muslim city. I would also like to have seen one or two examples of actual contemporaneous Muslim maps, such as the Tabula Rogeriana or a sample the corpus of al-Khwārizmī, if only to better understand how early Muslims themselves perceived their immediate external environment. Overall, this genuinely attractive book will serve as an excellent exhibition of both the intricacies and tensions of Muslim history and the significance of cartography in the field of historical studies. Inevitably, it will be compared with Ruthven’s widely popular (if flawed and much criticized) Historical Atlas of Islam (2004), the Historical Atlas of Islam by FreemanGrenville and Munro-Hay (2002), or even the slightly dated Cultural Atlas of Islam by Faruqi (1986). However, this need not distract us overly. Every map by Currie is in full lucid colour and the imagery utilizes the most modern cartographic and innovative design techniques available to chronicle the ever evolving internal and external borders of Islam. These are supplemented by Sluglett’s intelligently articulated texts, which clarify and underline the important topics. Above all, this atlas presents readers with crucial insights into the geographical challenges and ambiguities of the world of Islam over the past 14 centuries. Lavishly illustrated, rich in narrative and visual detail, Atlas of Islamic History will become an indispensable reference book for undergraduates studying Asia, the Middle East, Islam and Muslim history.
What’s New in the New Europe? Redefining Culture, Politics, Identity, 2019
What the soldiers say: Swiss Army jargon and its links to civilian life witzerland in the past, b... more What the soldiers say: Swiss Army jargon and its links to civilian life witzerland in the past, before the end of the Cold War at least, liked to think of itself as a nation in terms of a Sonderfall, an exceptional case. This Sonderfall thinking applies to their role in the middle of Europe but outside the EU, to their federal political system of radical bottom-up democracy and far-reaching decentralization of power, their multilingualism, perhaps multiculturalism, and their increasingly rare militia army system-beside many other things such as the peaceful coexistence of Catholicism and Protestantism, the widespread use of dialect in oral and standard language in official media communication, etc., etc. Despite this self-ascribed status, they also liked to think of themselves as a potential model for a diverse Europe of many distinct but peacefully coexisting smaller political units. Given our workshop title, the Swiss case is a kind of counterpoint: It is about an army that has not fought a war in a long time in a country that has not (yet?) been affected by global terrorism. Language in the military, the sociolinguistics of the army and its peculiarities thus offer just such an example of the many areas of cultural and political life, where the Swiss like to think of themselves as different. However, before turning to the socio-linguistic dimension proper of my project and presenting a few concrete examples of Swiss soldiers' language, I need to turn to some socio-linguistic aspects first and provide bit of context that is historical, sociological, political, and broadly cultural.
Slavic Review, 2014
Vynnychenko's biography several of these forms of displacement are present simultaneously, an... more Vynnychenko's biography several of these forms of displacement are present simultaneously, and Soroka highlights their presence in Vynnychenko's writing in diverse and illuminating ways. Soroka's bold strategic step is actually a major contribution to the scholarly debate, and one regrets that the theoretical introduction to his book is tantalizingly brief, comprising only seven pages, although additional theoretical remarks are scattered throughout the remainder of the text and reemerge again with greater clarity in the conclusion. However, close readers will be richly rewarded, as his illuminating journey through the writer's output during the two major periods of displacement in Vynnychenko's life, 1907-14 and 1920-51, emerges as an exemplary work of literary scholarship that is theoretically engaged yet written in a lucid, inviting style. In the course of his analysis, Soroka provides an innovative and illuminating presentation of some of the writer's most important works, from his early realist short stories to the dramas and novels that catapulted him to international attention in the 1910s; his bold experiment in writing a Utopian novel with an adventure plot, The Solar Machine (1928), Ukraine's biggest bestseller of the 1920s; and his struggles to articulate his alternative vision of society's future, manifested in both his later philosophical novels and his nonfiction works. Thanks to Soroka's study, readers now have a reliable and informative map of the writer's complex aesthetic and intellectual evolution.
Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 2011
Monatshefte, 2006
Page 1. Monatshefte, Vol. 98, No. 1, 2006 128 0026-9271/2006/0004/128 © 2006 by The Board of Rege... more Page 1. Monatshefte, Vol. 98, No. 1, 2006 128 0026-9271/2006/0004/128 © 2006 by The Board of Regents of The University of Wisconsin System Book Reviews Deutsch in Texas. Von Marcus Nicolini. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004. 248 Seiten. 24,90. ...