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A unique look at Thomas Mann’s intellectual and political transformation during the crucial years of his exile in the United States In September 1938, Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize–winning author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, fled Nazi Germany for the United States. Heralded as “the greatest living man of letters,” Mann settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where, for nearly three years, he was stunningly productive as a novelist, university lecturer, and public intellectual. In The Mind in Exile, Stanley Corngold portrays in vivid detail this crucial station in Mann’s journey from arch-European conservative to liberal conservative to ardent social democrat. On the knife-ed...
W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) is the most prominent and perhaps the most enigmatic German-language writer of recent decades. His books have had a more profound impact outside the German-speaking world than those of any other. His innovative approach to writing brings to the fore concerns that are central to contemporary culture: the relationship between memory, history, and trauma; the experience of exile and our relation to place; and the role of literature (and photography) in the remembrance of the past. This collection of essays places travel at the center of Sebald's poetics and shows how his appropriation of travel in its myriad historical and cultural forms -- tourism, the pilgrimage, the w...
Proposes that a distinct strain of literary modernism emerged in Europe in response to historical catastrophe.
Rigorism of Truth -- Contents -- I. Moses the Egyptian -- Editor's Notes -- II. Excerpts and Preliminary Studies -- On Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism -- On Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem -- III. Thematically Related Texts from the Nachlass -- Editor's Afterword -- Editorial Note and Acknowledgments -- Translator's Note -- Illustration Credits -- About the Authors
The book presents Winfried Georg Sebald and Ian McEwan as paradigmatic post-imperial writers who enmeshed in the hierarchies of power inherited from their imperial times, strive to disentangle themselves from that burdensome legacy. To achieve this, they undertake a subtle detachment from the analogously implicated subject positions of their protagonists. In Sebald’s works, these positions are closer to the historical victims of the Third Reich who used to suppress their past experiences, whereas in McEwan’s works, they incline toward the systemic ‘beneficiaries’ of the British Empire who used to overlook their present privileges. However, in distinction to their protagonists’ denied involvements, both authors recognize their implication in their protagonists’ pasts and presents. Such a detachment from familiar protagonists requires the consent of unknown and scattered readers with whom they forge a long-distance solidarity, connective association or complicitous alliance. Thus, to exempt themselves from one complicity, they enter another one.
An investigation of the complex image-text relationships between frontispieces and illustrated title pages with the following texts in European books published between 1500 and 1800.
andererseits provides a forum for research, commentary, and creative work on topics related to the German-speaking world and the field of German Studies. Works presented in the publication come from a wide variety of genres including book reviews, poetry, essays, editorials, forum discussions, academic notes, lectures, and traditional peer-reviewed academic articles. In addition, we welcome contributions by journalists, librarians, archivists, and other commentators interested in German Studies broadly conceived. As a specifically transatlantic endeavor, we also highlight select topics in American Studies that impact German Studies. By publishing such a diverse array of material, we hope to demonstrate the extraordinary value of the humanities in general, and German Studies in particular, on a variety of intellectual and cultural levels. This issue features sections about German Studies approaches to media literacy, Stephen Dowden's book »Modernism and Mimesis« and the poetics of ambiguous memory.
Modern European literature has traditionally been seen as a series of attempts to assert successive styles of writing as 'new'. In this groundbreaking study, Ben Hutchinson argues that literary modernity can in fact be understood not as that which is new, but as that which is 'late'. Exploring the ways in which European literature repeatedly defines itself through a sense of senescence or epigonality, Hutchinson shows that the shifting manifestations of lateness since romanticism express modernity's continuing quest for legitimacy. With reference to a wide range of authors--from Mary Shelley, Chateaubriand, and Immermann, via Baudelaire, Henry James, and Nietzsche, to Val ry, Djuna Barnes, and Adorno--he combines close readings of canonical texts with historical and theoretical comparisons of numerous national contexts. Out of this broad comparative sweep emerges a taxonomy of lateness, of the diverse ways in which modern writers can be understood, in the words of Nietzsche, as 'creatures facing backwards'. Ambitious and original, Lateness and Modern European Literature offers a significant new model for understanding literary modernity.
Ghostwriting provides the first comprehensive analysis of the fictional prose narratives of one of contemporary Germany's most recognized authors, the émigré writer W. G. Sebald. Examining Sebald's well-known published texts in the context of largely unknown unpublished works, and informed by documents and information from Sebald's literary estate, this book offers a detailed portrait of his characteristic literary techniques and how they emerged and matured out of the practices and attitudes he represented in his profession as a literary scholar. The title “Ghostwriting” signals the convergence in Sebald's works of a set of diverse historical questions, philosophical views, and litera...
This volume examines Ibero-American as well as Slavic literatures of the 21st century and studies how historical imaginaries in family narratives are functionalized for both individual and collective and (post-)national identities. The analysis proceeds along three conceptual axes. What these narratives have in common is that they construct specific constellations of the historical imagination and of family, whereby 'family' is here conceived not so much as an organic micro-unity, but rather as changing, multiple relations between individual members, godparents, first- and second-degree relatives, non-blood-related family members, present and absent members, adopted children, etc. Furthermor...