Christoph Strosetzki Book order

What is the value of conversation measured by? Are there more valuable and inferior types of conversation? What role do the contents, the people, and the circumstances play? Do times and epochs shape their own conversations? Conversation norms from handbooks as well as conversations reproduced in texts or reconstructed from texts shed light on these questions. The contributions in this volume are grouped around conceptual questions, specific contexts such as the salon and the table conversation, bring studies on individual literary texts and cover the European cultural history from Plato to the 20th century.

Information Text: In the early modern period, numerous texts deal with professions by presenting the knowledge required in each case, individual fields of activity, purpose, origin and prestige. The course of argumentation is humanistic, insofar as it mostly starts from the human being. The ancient idea of the primacy of mental work over manual work is formative here. The importance of Spain results from the fact that the Spanish king Charles V was both emperor and ruler of the colonies in America, i. e. he ruled a world empire by the standards of the time. After discussing some central categories, overall representations of knowledge, professions, and prominent professional representatives are presented. Here, the hierarchization and its relativization by satire is revealing. The mechanical arts and the artes liberales are then presented on the basis of individual professions selected as characteristic examples, each with its own specific knowledge. The higher faculties of medicine, theology and jurisprudence with their representatives form the conclusion.

The 17 contributions in this volume pursue a positioning of the philologies, which - based on the 'Volksgeist' (popular spirit) of the 19th century and the cultural studies of the 20th century - must reposition themselves in the 21st century. The contributions address questions such as: What changes are occurring with increasing globalization? Are national literatures increasingly being absorbed into the so-called „world literature“? The authors come from the fields of Romance studies, German studies and English studies. They deal with topics of literary historiography, canonization, comparative literature, and also questions of the future.