Böcker av Jens Martin Gurr

By historicizing and contextualizing them through readings of carefully selected literary texts, literary studies can contribute to understanding and rationalizing key debates waged in many pluralist societies today - whether on different conceptions of liberty, identity politics, historical commemoration, challenges of globalization or responses to climate change. Understanding Public Debates presents case studies including Milton's Paradise Lost and P.B. Shelley's 1820 Reform essay, Philip Roth's The Human Stain, the song-writing of Neil Young, Edward Young's 1720s "Sea Odes", recent climate fiction as well as non-literary conflict narratives. Rather than mining texts for arguments for or against certain positions, this book is interested in how texts stage these debates by means of multiple perspectives, narrative situations, or ambiguities. By suggesting how educators might use literary texts as conversation starters for more rational debates, the volume also contributes to Public Literary Studies. Three important fields are here brought together: (1) the study of societal debates and conflicts and the ways in which they challenge pluralist societies, (2) explorations of the societal functions of literature and of non-literary narratives, (3) discussions of the role and functions of literary studies. The book ends with ten crisp theses on how literary studies can contribute to understanding and rationalizing such conflictive debates.

Metropolitan research requires multidisciplinary perspectives in order to do justice to the complexities of metropolitan regions. This volume provides a scholarly and accessible overview of key methods and approaches in metropolitan research from a uniquely broad range of disciplines including architectural history, art history, heritage conservation, literary and cultural studies, spatial planning and planning theory, geoinformatics, urban sociology, economic geography, operations research, technology studies, transport planning, aquatic ecosystems research and urban epidemiology. It is this scope of disciplinary - and increasingly also interdisciplinary - approaches that allows metropolitan research to address recent societal challenges of urban life, such as mobility, health, diversity or sustainability.