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Abstract
All cultures produce stories; all humans are storytellers. Hence, by implication, narratives must serve a fundamental cultural and existential function in human life. This article suggests the term "cultural embedment" to characterize this function. This article points out that, for narratives to play the role as a tool for cultural embedment, the double structure of narratives always switches back and forth between an object level and a meta level. To capture this reduplication as a contextualized and historical dynamics, Clifford Geertz's term "thick description" is introduced together with Jurij Lotman's conception of culture as an interconnected primary and a secondary modeling system. After a short outline of six important approaches to narratives that have to be taken into account, the article proposes a thick description that characterizes narratives as tools for cultural embedment. A final analytical sketch of Chigozie Obioma's novel An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) briefly demonstrates a non-formalistic approach to narratives as tools for cultural embedment in a dynamic interchange between several levels.

Abstract
One of the most significant connections between power and responsibility occurs in relation to the past. The post-revolutionary political powers of the new nations in the nineteenth century reinterpreted or, less politely formulated, invented their past to fit the process of nation building and only then take responsibility for future development of the nations. And they were not alone: pre-nineteenth century periods and the 20th and 21st centuries abound with examples. In our personal lives, self-empowerment often depends on the capacity to take responsibility for one's past, including all its happy and traumatic moments. In a court room the forensic evidence of past events alone gives the judges the power to decide the fate of the defendant. In neither of the cases power and responsibility can work together without activating individual and collective memory and without finding a language to express responsibility as a manifestation of political, formal and personal power in a process of political legitimization, legal affirmation of justice and personal identity formation. With literary examples from South Africa this article discusses power and responsibility in their relation to a troubled political, legal and personal past.

Abstract
Truth is never self-evident or based on ocular proof alone. It has to be based on an argument and, thus, to be shaped for communication, which makes knowledge with a truth-claim a social phenomenon that can only be obtained through a complex mediation of theoretical preconditions, research technology, interdisciplinary collaboration and significant financial investments. Moreover, it is always disseminated in a politically charged context through complex media platforms, today ranging from journals and monographs to social media. The contemporary debate on truth-claims, and thus on ontology and epistemology, often lacks historical perspective beyond its contemporaneity nurtured by the debates about fake news. Yet, the awareness of the lies and fake knowledge this modern complexity may release was clear already in the emerging modern entanglement of science and culture during the Enlightenment, before electronic media. A reading of the comedy "Erasmus Montanus" (1731) by Ludvig Holberg serves as a case in point.

AbstractLiterature consists of works of language, but it has never been able to function as literature without being part of a cluster of interconnected media. From time immemorial, oratures require performances to work and thus cannot exist without use of bodily signs or use of various tools and instruments. Today, of course, this extended media landscape is vaster and more complex and distributed through more differentiated and numerous agencies than ever before, which also changes the mutual relation among the media involved in the production, dissemination, and use of literature, as well as changing the position of literature in the media landscape. A growing anonymity of the agents for mediation also challenges the articulation of history and memory in today's cultures. The aim of the paper is to contribute to an understanding of the dynamics of the entire cluster of media with literature at its center, rather than making an account of the separate media involved. The canonical Anglo-Irish eighteenth-century writer Jonathan Swift will serve as my primary material.

This accessible introduction to semiotics cuts across different semiotic schools to introduce six basic concepts which present semiotics as a theory and a set of analytical tools: code, sign, discourse, action, text, and culture. Each chapter covers a problem in semiotics and explores the key concepts found in the various theories. The book is illustrated with numerous examples, from traffic systems to urban parks, and includes biographies of key twentieth-century semioticians. It is supported by an extensive glossary