Jürgen Link

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Jürgen Link (born August 14, 1940 ) is a German literary scholar ( German and Romanist ) and former professor of literary studies and discourse research at the Universities of Bochum and Dortmund. Link is one of the most renowned discourse theorists in Germany; his theory of normalism is received and applied worldwide in various disciplines (literature, language, social and media studies).

Life

Jürgen Link studied German and Romance languages ​​and literature at the Universities of Göttingen , Caen and Munich . Link was Professor of German Literature at the Ruhr University in Bochum from 1980 to 1992 . From 1992 to 1993 he was visiting professor at the famous Paris VIII University in the Paris district of Saint-Denis. He then accepted a professorship for German literary studies and discourse theory at the Institute for Linguistics and Literature Studies at the TU Dortmund , where he taught until his retirement in 2005.

Link is the editor of the media-critical and discourse studies journal KultuRRevolution , which has been published since 1982 and is one of the most renowned linguistic and social science journals for discourse research and discourse theory in Germany. In 1999 Link took part in the campaign against Germany's participation in the Kosovo war . In 2010 Link joined forces with Hartmut Dreier and Siegfried and Margarete Jäger with a public appeal against the war in Afghanistan since 2001 . In 2015, Link campaigned with his initiative appell-hellas.de with over 2000 other scientists and friends of Greece for fair German media coverage of the Greek crisis.

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Representatives Link is a semiotic working historical discourse analysis . The central starting point for Link's own further development of this into a discourse theory of normalism is Michel Foucault's concept of discourse ; according to this, discourses are regarded as arrangements of linguistic structures (statements) that are linked to social practice and organize social action for subjects in different spheres of power. The works Links deal particularly intensively with the regulatory function of the production of normality, the interdiscourse and collective symbolism in the media and society.

A large part of the theoretical work Links is taken up and further developed in the various schools of discourse theory. For example, there is a productive collaboration with the Duisburg Institute for Linguistic and Social Research and its director Siegfried Jäger .

Normalism

Link's theory of normalism - as he explains it in his book Attempt on Normalism - understands the discourse of normality as a typically modern dispositive that has been consolidated at all levels of society, especially since 1968. Normality plays a central role in many special discourses (e.g. about the relationship between “normal” and “abnormal” in psychiatry or special education) as well as in elementary discourse , i.e. in everyday use of terms such as normal or abnormal. These terms are used in everyday life as a subjective evaluation or descriptive expression of an assumed general understanding without being precisely defined or described. In interdiscursive generated context in which social cross-section concepts of normality, these discourses come together.

Normality is to be distinguished from normativity , which prescriptively sets values, norms and paradigms. The notion of normality, on the other hand, is based on the fact that statistics , average analyzes and estimates, etc. only constitute the “normal” in retrospect from an overall view of the relevant field.

Normalism is further divided into protonormalism and flexible normalism . While protonormalism is based on normativity in many ways and endeavors to narrow the field of normality (the area of ​​what is considered normal), flexible normalism dominates nowadays, which sets normal limits more flexibly and for the inclusion of a variety of phenomena in the Area of ​​the normal tends.

An example from psychiatry or psychology : “Protonormalism claims to know through the intuition that homosexuality or dominant temperament is abnormal. The flexible normalism first of all data a field and thereby establishes, for example, that between 5% and 10% of the population behave homosexually, and that this proportion is consequently normal. "

Link explicitly refers to Émile Durkheim's remarks on normality and the anomie that deviates from it . As examples, he cites Durkheim's theses on “normal crime” and “normal suicide rate”, which should be considered normal if they are reasonably stable, but become anomic if dynamic increases are recorded.

Publications

  • The structure of the symbol in the language of journalism. On the relationship between literary and pragmatic symbols (1978).
  • Elementary literature and generative discourse analysis (1983).
  • Basic literary terms. Munich 1990.
  • Edited with Siegfried Jäger: The fourth power. Racism and the Media . Duisburg 1993.
  • Hölderlin - Rousseau retour inventif ( French ). Translated by Isabelle Kalinowski. Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes (PUV) Université Paris VIII, 1995.
  • Attempt on normalism. How normality is produced in Göttingen 2006. 3rd, supplemented, revised and redesigned edition. ISBN 978-3-525-26525-3 . 2009
  • From Karl Kraus to Rainald Goetz: Two stages of media criticism - two stages of normalism? (1997) In: The benefits and disadvantages of historical comparisons. The Bonn-Weimar case. Edited by Friedrich Balke and Benno Wagner. Frankfurt / M., New York, pp. 235-255.
  • From the hole to the social network and back again: On the discourse function and discourse history of a dominant collective symbol of the “social market economy” (1997). In: Science makes politics. Interventions in current social discourses. Edited by Gabriele Cleve, Ina Ruth, Ernst Schulte-Holtey and Frank Wichert. Münster, pp. 194-207.
  • The Fear of the Bead in Falling Through the Sieve: On the Part of Normalism in Coping with Contingency in the Modern Age (1998). In: Actually, everything could be different. Edited by Peter Zimmermann and Natalie Binczek . Cologne, pp. 92-105.
  • How the bead falls and the car rolls. On the part of normalism in the identity problem in the modern age (1999). In: Herbert Willems / Alois Hahn (Ed.): Identity and Modernity. Frankfurt / Main, pp. 164-179.
  • Jürgen Link, Rolf Parr, Matthias Thiele: What is normal? A bibliography of the documents and research literature since 1945 . Oberhausen: Athena 1999.
  • Margarete Jäger, Jürgen Link (Ed.) (2006): Power - Religion - Politics. On the renaissance of religious practices and mentalities . Muenster. ISBN 3-89771-740-9 .
  • Attempt on normalism. How normality is produced Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-26525-5 .
  • To be alarmed does not count. In search of the Red Ruhr Army. A reminder. Asso Verlag, Oberhausen 2008, ISBN 3-938834-29-3 .
  • Normal crises? Normalism and the crisis of the present . Konstanz University Press, Konstanz 2013, ISBN 978-3-86253-036-6 .
  • Part of culture in the sinking of Greece: from Holderlin's German scolding to Schäuble's Greek scolding . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-8260-5871-4 .
  • Normalism and Antagonism in Postmodernism. Crisis, New Normal, Populism . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-525-37072-8 .
  • Holderlin's line of flight Greece . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2020, ISBN 978-3-525-35210-6 .

Secondary literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Emeritus professors. In: germanistik.tu-dortmund.de. Retrieved April 24, 2018 .
  2. ↑ cf. Wrana, Daniel et al. (Ed.): DiskursNetz - dictionary of interdisciplinary discourse research. Berlin: Suhrkamp 2014.
  3. ↑ Jürgen Link: About me. In: bangemachen.com. Retrieved September 10, 2018 .
  4. ↑ a b About the editors. In: zeitschrift-kulturrevolution.de. Retrieved November 26, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Appeal - For fair reporting on democratic decisions in Greece. In: appell-hellas.de. Retrieved January 8, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Jürgen Link: On the share of flexible normalism in the media production of consensus . In: Unity Discourses . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-531-16409-0 , p. 20-32 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-531-91425-1_2 .
  7. ↑ Experiment on normalism, p. 92.
  8. ↑ Review
personal data
SURNAME Link, Jürgen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German literary scholar and political scientist
DATE OF BIRTH August 14, 1940