The late eighties and early nineties in Germany were not only marked by the fall of the Wall and German unification, but also by the dramatisation of the political issue of asylum, resulting in outbreaks of xenophobic violence. In the context of the asylum debate of the early nineties, a number of punk bands produced songs between 1991 and 1994 which criticise the xenophobic climate created by the asylum debate and undermine an exculpatory official discourse about the violent attacks. The (...) lyrics of these songs will be analysed as instances of counter-discourse emerging from a subcultural sphere that nurtures a critical distance from hegemonic public and political discourse, arguing that Critical Discourse Analysis should pay more attention to defiance of hegemonic discourse. (shrink)

In pornography the connection between sexuality and depersonalisation is obvious. That connection provoked in the 1980s several political movements which advocated a comprehensive prohibition. The threat of pornography to woman in particular and the society as a whole was their concern. Looking at advertisement, music videos and the World Wide Web the dealing with pornography seems even more easy since then. This evolves the question, whether we have to reconsider the arguments about pornography and its connection between sexuality and depersonalisation. (...) Therefore a summary of the philosophical debate will be given . A discussion of the juridical situation especially in Germany rounds this up . Eventually, an argument for a liberalistic view on pornography will be presented. (shrink)

When the University of Halle-Wittenberg founded the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research into the European Enlightenment in 1993, it was following the destiny of its history as a centre of the Early Enlightenment in Germany which affected the whole of Europe and as one of the moving forces behind the Anthropological Turn. Research foci of the Centre have been and are Enlightenment anthropology, Enlightenment in the reference field of early modem esotericism, university history, philanthropism and the Garden Kingdom of Dessau-W rlitz; (...) more recent emphasis has been on the Early Enlightenment as a field of experimentation and the foundation of cultural models for the Modern Age. The results of this research have been published since Autumn 1995 in the Centres' research publications series entitled University of Halle Series on the European Enlightenment. In addition, there have been relevant works produced outside the Centre. Two to four volumes are published annually (monographs, collected volumes, commentaries on sources). (shrink)

The power to integrate of the European Union (EU) is after all interlinked to the ability of approximating the different law systems of the member states. On the other side the EU-Treaty stipulates the respect of the national identities of even those states as a core principle (Art. 6 para. 3). Thus a rational manner of law approximation is needed which is sensitive to the law-cultural particularities of the member states. The article tries to develop a coherence-based approach of legal (...) reasoning, which gets the sensitivity looked for by applying the method of comparative law. While differentiating between a horizontal (EU) and a vertical (member states) coherence the method of comparative law can identify meeting points of EU- and member state law. This will, eventually, be demonstrated at the decision of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in the case of Simone Leitner vs. TUI Germany. (shrink)

Corpus-assisted analyses of public discourse often focus on the lexical level. This article argues in favour of corpus-assisted analyses of discourse, but also in favour of conceptualising salient lexical items in public discourse in a more determined way. It draws partly on non-Anglophone academic traditions in order to promote a conceptualisation of discourse keywords, thereby highlighting how their meaning is determined by their use in discourse contexts. It also argues in favour of emphasising the cognitive and epistemic dimensions of discourse-determined (...) semantic structures. These points will be exemplified by means of a corpus-assisted, as well as a frame-based analysis of the discourse keyword financial crisis in British newspaper articles from 2009. Collocations of financial crisis are assigned to a generic matrix frame for ‘event’ which contains slots that specify possible statements about events. By looking at which slots are more, respectively less filled with collocates of financial crisis, we will trace semantic presence as well as absence, and thereby highlight the pragmatic dimensions of lexical semantics in public discourse. The article also advocates the suitability of discourse keyword analyses for systematic contrastive analyses of public/political discourse and for lexicographical projects that could serve to extend the insights drawn from corpus-guided approaches to discourse analysis. (shrink)