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The revised and enlarged edition of the first comprehensive English-language study of the work of Heiner Muller, widely regarded as Bertolt Brecht's spiritual heir and as one of the most important German playwrights of the twentieth century. "Kalb's quest to try and penetrate some of the surfaces of what he calls this 'glacially infuriating writer' is engrossing, and he negotiates his own ambivalences and reservations about Muller as theatre-maker and man with both honesty and adroitness...As a piece of scholarship [this] is a breathtaking tour de force." -Mary Luckhurst, New Theatre Quarterly
All societies are, by their very nature, dramatic. They present themselves, especially for those who want to look back in time, as a fascinating and confusing whole of theatrical events and constructions. Sometimes the theatre itself succeeds in capturing that fascination and confusion. This book describes the dramatic society in the form of case studies that link politics, history and culture. The Dramatic Society uses selected plays to examine specific moments in history. Its range of subjects are extremely diverse, including Medea as an icon of terrorism, a choreography based upon Shakespeare’s As You Like It, horror movies about the German unification, a truth commission dealing with "...
In nineteenth-century Europe the ruling elites viewed the theater as a form of communication which had enormous importance. The theater provided the most significant form of mass entertainment and was the only arena aside from the church in which regular mass gatherings were possible. Therefore, drama censorship occupied a great deal of the ruling class's time and energy, with a particularly focus on proposed scripts that potentially threatened the existing political, legal, and social order. This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of nineteenth-century political theater censorship at a time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the European population was becoming increasingly politically active.
This study of Joseph Conrad's influential work "Heart of Darkness" presents for the first time the German-language reception of this reference text in the debate on postcolonialism. The spectrum ranges from Conrad's contemporaries (like Kafka) to many canonical authors of the 20th century (including Thomas Mann, Ernst Jünger, Christa Wolf) to the most recent names in literature (i.e. Christian Kracht und Lukas Bärfuss). Beyond the readings of their works, the study contributes to the study of cultural transfers as well as to Conrad philology, and it expands the theory of intertextuality with parameters that capture the complex factor of power in postcolonial relations.
Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oxford, 2002.
Read an interview with Norbert Bachleitner. In this 200th volume of Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft the editors Norbert Bachleitner, Achim H. Hölter and John A. McCarthy ‘take stock’ of the discipline. It focuses on recurrent questions in the field of Comparative Literature: What is literature? What is meant by ‘comparative’? Or by ‘world’? What constitute ‘transgressions’ or ‘refractions’? What, ultimately, does being at home in the world imply? When we combine the answers to these individual questions, we might ultimately reach an intriguing proposition: Comparative Literature contributes to a sense of being at home in a world that is heterogeneous and fractured, rather than affirming a monolithic canon marked by territory and homogeneity. The volume unites essays on world literature, literature in the context of the history of ideas, comparative women and gender studies, aesthetics and textual analysis, and literary translation and tradition.
Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative: Sounding the Disaster investigates the active role of music in film and fiction portraying climate crisis. From contemporary science fiction and environmental film to “Anthropocene opera,” the most arresting eco-narratives draw less on background music than on the power of sound to move fictional action and those who receive it. Beginning with a reflection on a Mozart recording on the 1970s’ Voyager Golden Record, this book explores links between music and violence in Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2017 novel The Book of Joan, songless speech in the opera Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, interrupted lyricism in the eco-documentary Expedition to the End of the World, and dread-inducing hurricane music in the Brecht-Weill opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. In all of these works, music allows for a state of critical vulnerability in its hearers, communicating planetary crisis in an embodied way.
"Alexander Kluge is best known as a founding member of the New German Cinema. His work, however, spans a diverse range of fields and, over the last fifty years, he has been active as a filmmaker, writer and television producer." This work features scholarly essays, plus articles, stories, and interviews involving Kluge. -- from back cover.
From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht's writings.Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstück in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis. From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht's writings.Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brech
“Science” and “Religion” have been two major elements in the building of modern nation-states. While contemporary historiography of science has studied the interactions between nation building and the construction of modern scientific and technological institutions, “science-and-religion” is still largely based on a supposed universal historiography in which global notions of “science” and of “religion” are seldom challenged. This book explores the interface between science, religion and nationalism at a local level, paying attention to the roles religious institutions, specific confessional traditions, or an undefined notion of “religion” played in the construction o...