Abstract/Hauptbeschreibung (Englisch)

The volume explores the function of silence – deliberate or unwilling – in the production of meaning. What does the absence of sound, voice, text convey, and how? What does silence express, evokes, or contribute to the message? Engaging with these research questions the volume offers eighteen contributions from a wide range of perspectives, including philology and philosophy, linguistics and literary studies, religious studies, history and media studies, archaeology, anthropology and architecture. Silence is experienced, among other ways, as a pause or a form of provocation, as tabu or assent, as a rhetorical or deeply cognitive and creative tool, in our lives and in cultures distant from our own in time and space.