lars dittmer (13 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Druck auf Anfrage Neuware - Printed after ordering - Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Philosophisches Institut), course: Proseminar: Poetics, Politics and and Power in Contemporary American and Postcolonial Literature, language: English, abstract: Chacko told the twins that though they hated to admit it, they were all Anglophiles. They were a family of Anglophiles.(Roy 1996: 52)In establishing the two-egg twins Rahel and Esthapen (Estha) as main characters in her 1996 masterpiece 'The God of Small Things', Arundhati Roy has set up postcolonial prototypes in the area of conflict between British and Indian identity and culture. The body of the story focuses on the childhood of the twins, playing in the late 1960s; they are born to an upper middle class family in Kerala, South-Western India, and grow up fatherless. Their family to a large extent cultivates a British attitude - mainly due to grandfather Pappachi alias John Ipe, an Entomologist and former government official under the British colonial administration, his sister Baby Kochamma, and his son Chacko, who used to be an Oxford Rhodes Scholar. Until his death in the first part of the book, John Ipe drives a big Plymouth, he wears stiff English suits and it is inconceivable to him that any Englishman could misbehave; Chacko assumes the air of a British intellectual, he almost exclusively speaks English and often indulges in citing from English and American classics. The family has a high reputation in their home town Ayemenem, most members of the family profit from their Anglophile air in one way or other. The rest of the family more or less adapts to their way of life or finds a way to deal with the situation.The plot of the novel is balanced along cultural and social areas of friction within the Indian society, such as caste, class, religion, culture, clout, customs and traditions. It is one of the main tasks for the characters in the novel to find their place in this complex social structure. Though the twins are educated in English, their situation is particularly difficult and they receive some degree of alienation also from within the family. Of course, the twins mostly do not articulate these sorts of feelings and assessments explicitly; it has to be considered that they are children of the age of seven - but they are given a much more subtle means of communication by the author: language. Not the content of their sentences, but the way they apply the English language in various situations. It conveys a lot about how they assess their position and how they engage themselves in certain situations the novel fronts.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Sozialwissenschaften), course: Europa in der Krise ¿ welche Krise, language: English, abstract: Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least five hundred years ¿ to create a disunited Europe. .It was necessary for us to break up the EEC, . Now that we're in, we were able to make a pig's breakfast out of it. (The Complete Yes Minister, qtd. In Otte 1)The essence that this sarcastic quotation transports, brushing away all party politics, great leaders and platform commitments, suggests that Euro-scepticism has always been in Great Britain's political culture and it is here to stay. Intrinsic motifs and reasons for the British Euroscepticism will be dealt with in part I of this paper and indeed, they constitute strong evidence that the rejection of Europe ¿ not only of the EU as a political instrument ¿ is firmly entrenched in major parts of the UK's society. To assume however that this sentiment has been equally present in all the political phases and parties in post WWII Great Britain is scientifically unsustainable. It becomes obvious especially if one considers the pro-European mood in the devolved Scottish Parliament and the parties represented in it, eg. The Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats (Watts/Pilkington 222, 243). Also on UK level the political approach towards the EU and its institutions has changed with the political personal in charge, intergovernmental relations and constellations; it is true especially in regard of the UK that the lines of approval and rejection of the EU are not congruent with party loyalities.t is therefore the task of this paper to distil ideological determinants and mind-sets and the crucial phases in British policies towards the European Union after World War II. Focus in part one lies on Britishness and its surrounding ideological patterns; part two at its core examines the last three governments of the United Kingdom, that is the administrations of Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair. It will be one of the statements of this work that both of the subsequent governments in many respects can be seen in the tradition of the first mentioned, although it was then indicated in another way and hoped by many pro-Europeans that this would not be the case. Furthermore one aim will be to isolate a tendency that enables the percipients of this academic work to venture an outlook on the future relations between Europe and the UK, which is especially vital in regard of the sustainability of the Union:Books on Demand GmbH, Überseering 33, 22297 Hamburg 32 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,0, University of Potsdam (Philosophisches Institut), course: Proseminar, language: English, abstract: ¿.and for three years it was the most talked-about, written-about and shocked-about venue in the universe. Everyone wanted to go to Studio 54 (Jones/ Kantonen 1999: 246)¿.¿A lot of people thought that at the door was a better show than inside.people would try anything to get in (¿Shane¿ in Studio 54)¿.When Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager in the late April 1976 started their nightclub Studio 54, a legend came to life. On the floors of this unique party shangri-la, celebrities like Andy Warhol, Liza Minelli, Bianca and Mick Jagger, Brooke Shields and Truman Capote mingled with business people, politicians, soap opera starlets, drag queens and chosen few from the ¿grey people¿, as nightlife guru Rubell called the normal people. Never before, a discothèque had caused such a public stir. Paparazzi jostled beyond the velvet ropes to illustrate their gossip columns with pictures of the socialites ¿ it was the ¿first time ever that celebrity photos would appear on the front page of the tabloids for no other reasons than they were there (Jones/ Kantonen 1999: 249)¿.But by far not everybody came to know the true promise of the club ¿ door policy at Studio 54 was probably one of the toughest in the history of nightlife. Rubell himself was eager to make sure that of the many different groups that made up the audience of 54, none should dominate the other, a type of ¿social engineering he called ¿tossing the salad¿¿ (Shapiro 2005: 201). He himself supported his doorman Marc Benecke selecting the people who could pass the velvet ropes, whilst scores of people shouted Rubell¿s name begging him to be admitted into the club. On one hand, there were certain criteria, but on the other hand, there was enough leeway for arbitrariness, indeed, it was a highly undemocratic procedure that precisely reflected its place, its period and social circumstances.Disco in the 'uncanny 1970s' not only served to escape reality but also epitomised an increasing drive towards individualism that replaced the ideas of participation and community of the sixties. The doors at 54 were instruments to form a new world with new social ladders and in their radicalism marked a peak in this development.Books on Demand GmbH, Überseering 33, 22297 Hamburg 24 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam, course: HS: From Poe to Akunin: Highlights of the international Mystery Story in literature and film, language: English, abstract: This paper is building up on postmodern patterns of fragmentation, loneliness and disorientation. The Quest is a central storytelling technique - in times where traditional ways of living and social constellations fade and the grand narratives have lost their guiding functions, people have to 'mind-map' their own routes through a fagmentary world. The paper establishes the quest form in the 1966 book by Pynchon and draws lines of tradition to Jarmusch's 2005 Browken Flowers.Books on Demand GmbH, Überseering 33, 22297 Hamburg 28 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Seminar: Der Fremde. Bausteine zu einer kineastischen Anthropolgie, language: English, abstract: online gaming has become a standard feature of most games that are put on the market. As a result, online communities and new ¿social relations¿ - the phrase is put in quotation marks with a clear intent here - are established on a permanent basis in these realmswith after-effects that seem to be barely controllable by the societies. The people who participate in such games, mostly boys and men between 13 and 25, are confronted with a completely new type of social pressure ¿ online obligations. They are grouped in online ¿guilds¿ that meet and play at certain times of the day, there are special events in which they are expected to join, and if they are not investing a certain span of time daily into their online-characters ¿ which need to be advanced ¿ they are outdone by other guilds or members of their own groups. Indeed they are spending days of their lives in these realms, which allows for the statement that these places have become anthropospheres, spaces that are filled with human life and everything it entails. The potential to lose contact with real life (rl as it is called among players) is massive.Early the culture industry has been fascinated with living in alternative or simulated realities and its ¿perpetual oscillation between utopia and dystopiä (Durham 5). Many visions, as I shall point out in this term paper, presage today's developments to an astonishing degree ¿ sure enough the ones I deal with are rather dystopian. Notably, the most prominent in recent years has been the 1999 film ¿Matrix¿ by the Wachowski brothers, which has been extended to a trilogy. Also science has come up with certain models that can be employed to conceptualize these spaces ¿ I will outline some of these and try to put them in the context that serves my problem. It is, in my view, necessary to view today's colonisation of and living in these spaces that I have outlined above and will further detail in the course of this paper, in front of a background of media production of the period since WWII. The idea that informs this undertaking is, that there have been numerous accounts who predict what is being made accessible to computer users at the moment ¿ Cyberspace is no longer a room that can be inhabited in the future, but it is right now open to everyone; the Cyborg has come into existence.Books on Demand GmbH, Überseering 33, 22297 Hamburg 32 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Druck auf Anfrage Neuware - Printed after ordering - Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,0, University of Potsdam (Philosophisches Institut), course: Proseminar, language: English, abstract: '.and for three years it was the most talked-about, written-about and shocked-about venue in the universe. Everyone wanted to go to Studio 54 (Jones/ Kantonen 1999: 246)'.'A lot of people thought that at the door was a better show than inside.people would try anything to get in ('Shane' in Studio 54)'.When Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager in the late April 1976 started their nightclub Studio 54, a legend came to life. On the floors of this unique party shangri-la, celebrities like Andy Warhol, Liza Minelli, Bianca and Mick Jagger, Brooke Shields and Truman Capote mingled with business people, politicians, soap opera starlets, drag queens and chosen few from the 'grey people', as nightlife guru Rubell called the normal people. Never before, a discothèque had caused such a public stir. Paparazzi jostled beyond the velvet ropes to illustrate their gossip columns with pictures of the socialites - it was the 'first time ever that celebrity photos would appear on the front page of the tabloids for no other reasons than they were there (Jones/ Kantonen 1999: 249)'. But by far not everybody came to know the true promise of the club - door policy at Studio 54 was probably one of the toughest in the history of nightlife. Rubell himself was eager to make sure that of the many different groups that made up the audience of 54, none should dominate the other, a type of 'social engineering he called 'tossing the salad'' (Shapiro 2005: 201). He himself supported his doorman Marc Benecke selecting the people who could pass the velvet ropes, whilst scores of people shouted Rubell's name begging him to be admitted into the club. On one hand, there were certain criteria, but on the other hand, there was enough leeway for arbitrariness, indeed, it was a highly undemocratic procedure that precisely reflected its place, its period and social circumstances. Disco in the 'uncanny 1970s' not only served to escape reality but also epitomised an increasing drive towards individualism that replaced the ideas of participation and community of the sixties. The doors at 54 were instruments to form a new world with new social ladders and in their radicalism marked a peak in this development.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Druck auf Anfrage Neuware - Printed after ordering - Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,7, University of Potsdam (Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät), course: Proseminar Politik und Gesellschaft in den USA, language: English, abstract: 'There is nothing so American as our national parks. The scenery and wildlife are native. The fundamental idea behind the parks is native. The parks stand as an outward symbol of this great human principle'. These sentences are not extracted from the platform of the American Green Party - they are from a quote of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States, a Republican. In his thinking, 'conservation was closely tied to American Values' (Sussman/ Daynes/ West 2001: 169). During his governing period, environmental care was directly incorporated in governmental action - various agencies and bureaucracies were established to deal with this topic. Today, the United States reject major international environmental treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol, requiring participants to reduce green house gases below the 1990 level by 2012. The Bush administration has presented plans to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a swathe of land in northeast Alaska, populated by migratory birds, wolves and caribou. The House of Representatives had already approved these plans, the Senate rejected them. In voting George W. Bush their 43rd President, a majority of the American people made their cross for a candidate with a green record tending to zero. But not only does environmental policy seem to have left the political agenda on a larger scale, observers more and more get the impression that the American people seem to care lesser for environmental aspects than ten or twenty years ago - only considering, among many other factors, the increasing number of polluting light trucks and SUVs on American roads. So can we conclude that, considering the fact that the parties fight for the support of the American mainstream, both Democrats and Republicans have banned environmental politics from their platforms This paper is to figure out to what extent the field of environmental policy still is a factor in the American political landscape and what ideological and sociological factors are at play in this process and in the party-internal treatment of the topic.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Druck auf Anfrage Neuware - Printed after ordering - Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam, course: HS: From Poe to Akunin: Highlights of the international Mystery Story in literature and film, language: English, abstract: This paper is building up on postmodern patterns of fragmentation, loneliness and disorientation. The Quest is a central storytelling technique - in times where traditional ways of living and social constellations fade and the grand narratives have lost their guiding functions, people have to 'mind-map' their own routes through a fagmentary world. The paper establishes the quest form in the 1966 book by Pynchon and draws lines of tradition to Jarmusch's 2005 Browken Flowers.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Druck auf Anfrage Neuware - Printed after ordering - Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Seminar: Der Fremde. Bausteine zu einer kineastischen Anthropolgie, language: English, abstract: online gaming has become a standard feature of most games that are put on the market. As a result, online communities and new 'social relations' - the phrase is put in quotation marks with a clear intent here - are established on a permanent basis in these realmswith after-effects that seem to be barely controllable by the societies. The people who participate in such games, mostly boys and men between 13 and 25, are confronted with a completely new type of social pressure - online obligations. They are grouped in online 'guilds' that meet and play at certain times of the day, there are special events in which they are expected to join, and if they are not investing a certain span of time daily into their online-characters - which need to be advanced - they are outdone by other guilds or members of their own groups. Indeed they are spending days of their lives in these realms, which allows for the statement that these places have become anthropospheres, spaces that are filled with human life and everything it entails. The potential to lose contact with real life (rl as it is called among players) is massive.Early the culture industry has been fascinated with living in alternative or simulated realities and its 'perpetual oscillation between utopia and dystopia' (Durham 5). Many visions, as I shall point out in this term paper, presage today's developments to an astonishing degree - sure enough the ones I deal with are rather dystopian. Notably, the most prominent in recent years has been the 1999 film 'Matrix' by the Wachowski brothers, which has been extended to a trilogy. Also science has come up with certain models that can be employed to conceptualize these spaces - I will outline some of these and try to put them in the context that serves my problem. It is, in my view, necessary to view today's colonisation of and living in these spaces that I have outlined above and will further detail in the course of this paper, in front of a background of media production of the period since WWII. The idea that informs this undertaking is, that there have been numerous accounts who predict what is being made accessible to computer users at the moment - Cyberspace is no longer a room that can be inhabited in the future, but it is right now open to everyone; the Cyborg has come into existence.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Druck auf Anfrage Neuware - Printed after ordering - Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Sozialwissenschaften), course: Europa in der Krise - welche Krise, language: English, abstract: Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least five hundred years - to create a disunited Europe. .It was necessary for us to break up the EEC, . Now that we're in, we were able to make a pig's breakfast out of it. (The Complete Yes Minister, qtd. In Otte 1)The essence that this sarcastic quotation transports, brushing away all party politics, great leaders and platform commitments, suggests that Euro-scepticism has always been in Great Britain's political culture and it is here to stay. Intrinsic motifs and reasons for the British Euroscepticism will be dealt with in part I of this paper and indeed, they constitute strong evidence that the rejection of Europe - not only of the EU as a political instrument - is firmly entrenched in major parts of the UK's society. To assume however that this sentiment has been equally present in all the political phases and parties in post WWII Great Britain is scientifically unsustainable. It becomes obvious especially if one considers the pro-European mood in the devolved Scottish Parliament and the parties represented in it, eg. The Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats (Watts/Pilkington 222, 243). Also on UK level the political approach towards the EU and its institutions has changed with the political personal in charge, intergovernmental relations and constellations; it is true especially in regard of the UK that the lines of approval and rejection of the EU are not congruent with party loyalities. t is therefore the task of this paper to distil ideological determinants and mind-sets and the crucial phases in British policies towards the European Union after World War II. Focus in part one lies on Britishness and its surrounding ideological patterns; part two at its core examines the last three governments of the United Kingdom, that is the administrations of Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair. It will be one of the statements of this work that both of the subsequent governments in many respects can be seen in the tradition of the first mentioned, although it was then indicated in another way and hoped by many pro-Europeans that this would not be the case. Furthermore one aim will be to isolate a tendency that enables the percipients of this academic work to venture an outlook on the future relations between Europe and the UK, which is especially vital in regard of the sustainability of the Union:

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Druck auf Anfrage Neuware - Printed after ordering - Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: USA, grade: 1,0, University of Potsdam (Wirtschafts- und sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät), course: Interessenverbände in den USA, language: English, abstract: Preservation in all its facets in the United States stretches back over more than hundred years and over large parts of this period has enjoyed considerable support by public and politics. However, two decades after World War II, 'as the nation shifted from an industrial to a postindustrial (or postmaterialist) society' (Vig and Kraft: 9), national environmental groups have redefined their societal position. Organisations that had started as sometimes lose associations of anglers, hikers or birdwatchers, like the Sierra Club or the National Audobon Society, now formulated political stances taking into account a globalising world; after sometimes narrow-minded 'Not in my backyard' projects and local initiatives of all kinds now consciousness for global issues like rain forest deforestation and climate warming arose. Preservation became environmentalism. (.)Also the scholar Rik Scarce reports skyrocketing membership figures in the environmental organisations during the Reagan years, a fact that will be highlighted later in this paper (22). It now could seem reasonable to argue that these new conditions were ideal for the movement - a clear enemy, topics that were neglected by the government and a seemingly consistent support from the public - but is that so easy This term paper wants to find out if patterns of relationships between environmental groups and presidents in the United States exist. The points I will elaborate on in the body of my paper will include membership of the groups, foundation of new groups, radicalisation of the movement and public and financial support. I am basing my research on several assumptions - if a Presidency X fulfils the requirements Y, Z will happen to environmental groups. In the first part I will introduce some of the major organisations and their profiles, also some of the radical associations will be addressed. Also the presidencies and their environmental achievements will be part of my study, however only stretching back until the 1970s. Not all of the presidents will be scrutinised the same way; my focus will be especially on those administrations, whose elections marked clear turning points as to the environmental policies, politics and polities of the United States.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2009 in the subject Film Science, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: My thesis 'New Evil. The Joker in The Dark Knight as a Post-September 11-Villain' establishes a picture of Gotham City that is more 'realistic' than in previous Batman films. The population of this city is realised in three parts: the mob consists of African Americans and other 'Ethnic'-Americans, the JetSet is almost completely light-skinned. In between one finds Gothams police, mixed Ethnic/black and white, but also known to be corrupt. Indeed, the film follows subtle anti-state-sentiments in making the three highest officers in Gotham 'Ethnic'-Americans: Garcia, Loeb and Surrillo. Only a disfunctional state makes the nightly operations of a vigilante like Batman - a person, who decides for himself what is good and what is bad - necessary.The predecessors of the Joker are the great villains of film- and culture history, starting with Shakespeares Iago up to slashers like Freddy Krueger. The Joker clearly does not fit into the three-part pattern in the first part of my paper. His malice is sourced by four different strands: references to Satan references to femininity references to disability and references to a terrorism clearly related to the one of Al-Qaeda and its supporter groups. In establishing a villain along these lines, the producers of the film address a mainstream which is in their view reactionary, latently racist and anti-emancipatory. Though the film makes exceptional statements (eg. Morgan Freeman), evil in their eyes is either black, disabled or feminin. In its displayed reaction to the new threat of the Joker - Batman sets up a surveillance systems that monitors all citizens of Gotham - the film can be interpreted as a defense of the Bush policies after 9/11.BoD - Books on Demand, In de Tarpen 42, 22848 Norderstedt 104 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Druck auf Anfrage Neuware - Printed after ordering - Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2009 in the subject Film Science, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: My thesis 'New Evil. The Joker in The Dark Knight as a Post-September 11-Villain' establishes a picture of Gotham City that is more 'realistic' than in previous Batman films. The population of this city is realised in three parts: the mob consists of African Americans and other 'Ethnic'-Americans, the JetSet is almost completely light-skinned. In between one finds Gothams police, mixed Ethnic/black and white, but also known to be corrupt. Indeed, the film follows subtle anti-state-sentiments in making the three highest officers in Gotham 'Ethnic'-Americans: Garcia, Loeb and Surrillo. Only a disfunctional state makes the nightly operations of a vigilante like Batman - a person, who decides for himself what is good and what is bad - necessary.The predecessors of the Joker are the great villains of film- and culture history, starting with Shakespeares Iago up to slashers like Freddy Krueger. The Joker clearly does not fit into the three-part pattern in the first part of my paper. His malice is sourced by four different strands: references to Satan references to femininity references to disability and references to a terrorism clearly related to the one of Al-Qaeda and its supporter groups. In establishing a villain along these lines, the producers of the film address a mainstream which is in their view reactionary, latently racist and anti-emancipatory. Though the film makes exceptional statements (eg. Morgan Freeman), evil in their eyes is either black, disabled or feminin. In its displayed reaction to the new threat of the Joker - Batman sets up a surveillance systems that monitors all citizens of Gotham - the film can be interpreted as a defense of the Bush policies after 9/11.