Abstract
This is not a book about destruction. Quite the contrary. The 11 chapters that follow explore the surprising resilience of historical asymmetries, overlapping dimensions, jarring inconsistencies, paradoxes, and misplaced topographies — in other words, the components that have always nurtured history as a form of modern perception. Our encounter with what could perhaps best be described as the ‘trans-real’ histories of Central Europe is guided by an orientation similar to Goethe’s Zarte Empirie, a delicate, or better yet, a tender empiricism. Delicate empiricism recalibrates perception by (among other things) deploying imagination as a form of analysis. Imagination here is not a phantasm, but a frame through which we are invited to enter and inhabit a phenomenon, virtually participating in the process of its ‘transformation, moving through its history to its present and into its future’ (Wahl 2005: 63).
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References
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© 2013 Dariusz Gafijczuk and Derek Sayer
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Gafijczuk, D. (2013). Introduction: Delicate Empiricism. In: Gafijczuk, D., Sayer, D. (eds) The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305862_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305862_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45494-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30586-2
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