Kulturwissenschaft im Zeichen der Moderne

What kind of identity would be appropriate to a form of cultural studies turning wholeheartedly and explicitly to new aesthetic, media-oriented and culture-sociological phenomena and developments without at the same time forfeiting its traditional concerns and the degree of reflective sophistication it has achieved? At the methodological level there have been two main barriers militating against this: (1) the serious breach in the relationship between hermeneutic theory and modernism, and (2) the limitations of traditional category-formation exposed by the complexity of modernistic genre concepts. The aim of the present study is to localize and, if possible, reduce the problems connected with this.