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Pop-feminist Narratives
This volume explores the recent phenomenon of 'pop-feminism' and pop-feminist writing across North America, Britain, and Germany and examines what feminist politics look like in the twenty-first century.
The Fractured Subject
The Fractured Subject investigates the relationship of the work of Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, centered around the concept of the fractured subject. Through a reading of Benjamin’s work on sovereignty and myth, Betty Schulz establishes the emergence of this fractured subject in the Baroque and links these themes to ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ and two of Freud’s case studies, showing that melancholia and possession emerge as two responses to the baroque loss of a cosmological horizon. Turning to Benjamin’s work on the nineteenth century in the Arcades Project, Schulz delineates the persistence of this fractured subject, showing how Benjamin conceptualises its development over the course of modernity while analyzing the change of memory and experience in modernity. Finally, having introduced the importance of the dream in the Arcades Project and associated work, Schulz examines Benjamin’s dream theory, establishing the ways it draws from Freud, as well as Benjamin’s concept of awakening as a therapeutic, collective, political gesture that points beyond the fractured subject.
Walter Benjamin
Seven decades after his death, German Jewish writer, philosopher, and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) continues to fascinate and influence. Here Uwe Steiner offers a comprehensive and sophisticated introduction to the oeuvre of this intriguing theorist. Acknowledged only by a small circle of intellectuals during his lifetime, Benjamin is now a major figure whose work is essential to an understanding of modernity. Steiner traces the development of Benjamin’s thought chronologically through his writings on philosophy, literature, history, politics, the media, art, photography, cinema, technology, and theology. Walter Benjamin reveals the essential coherence of its subject’s thinking while also analyzing the controversial or puzzling facets of Benjamin’s work. That coherence, Steiner contends, can best be appreciated by placing Benjamin in his proper context as a member of the German philosophical tradition and a participant in contemporary intellectual debates. As Benjamin’s writing attracts more and more readers in the English-speaking world, Walter Benjamin will be a valuable guide to this fascinating body of work.
Posthistoire
Whether its ultimate resting-place is deemed to be Fukuyama’s liberal democracy or Baudrillard’s hyperreality, history, according to a number of pundits, has reached the end of the line. In the inflated debates that have ensued, it is precisely history which has been ignored, for the conception of posthistoire is far from new. Here, Lutz Niethammer, Germany’s leading practitioner of ‘history from below’, explores in fascinating detail the forms the conception has taken in the twentieth century and assembles what amounts to an intellectual history of disillusion and resignation. In his survey of thinkers as diverse as Kojeve, Heidegger and Junger, he finds adherents to the idea of the end of history on the Right and Left. But whether they pinned all their hopes on the nation or the proletariat, in different ways they have all conflated the apparent collapse of a particular historical project with the collapse of history itself.
On Their Own Terms
On Their Own Terms is a study of how post-1990 German literature reconfigures the legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust. In five sections - Historisation, Perpetrators, Hitler-Youth Memories, War Memories and Victim Perspective - a number of key literary works such as Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser, Martin Walser's Ein springender Brunnen, Gunter Grass's Im Krebsgang and W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz are analysed. The literary texts are situated within the wider context of contemporary German debates on the issue, from the exhibition 'Crimes of the German Wehrmacht 1941-1945', to the Walser-Bubis-affair and the ensuing debate about representations of German suffering. One of the central concerns of this book is the literary configuration of German experience and the narrative strategies employed by the writers to validate it against or set it in context with a perspective of victim experience.
The Text and Its Context
This Festschrift for Ronald Speirs, Professor of German at the University of Birmingham, contains twenty-four original essays by scholars from Great Britain, Germany, Austria, and Norway. Between them they encompass the entire modern period from the later eighteenth century onwards, and focus on a wide range of German-speaking environments. Several essays throw new light on authors to whom Professor Speirs himself has devoted particular attention (such as Brecht, Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, and Fontane), whilst others discuss writers such as Lenz, Büchner, Böhlau, C. F. Meyer, Keyserling, Jahnn, and Huch. Above all, however, the contributions address the complexities of writing in ideologically diverse contexts, including the Third Reich and the former German Democratic Republic. This interplay between text and context is the cornerstone which links all the essays, as it has consistently informed Ronald Speirs's own work - which combines a scrupulous attention to textual detail with an acute awareness of the socio-political milieux and philosophical influences that shape creative literature.
Kafka and the Universal
Kafka’s work has been attributed a universal significance and is often regarded as the ultimate witness of the human condition in the twentieth century. Yet his work is also considered paradigmatic for the expression of the singular that cannot be subsumed under any generalization. This paradox engenders questions not only concerning the meaning of the universal as it manifests itself in (and is transformed by) Kafka’s writings but also about the expression of the singular in literary fiction as it challenges the opposition between the universal and the singular. The contributions in this volume approach these questions from a variety of perspectives. They are structured according to the...
Language Learner Narrative
Increasing numbers of people have contact with other cultures and languages. Language Learner Narrative examines representations of this phenomenon in literary texts using an applied linguistic approach. This analysis of written narratives of language learning and cross-cultural encounter complements objective studies in intercultural communication and second language acquisition research. Kant’s use of the term Mündigkeit in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” is used to frame the complex issues of language, identity, meaning and reality presented by the texts. Augmented by Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of linguistic capital, this framing forms a counterpoint to the positioning of these...
Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition
Few modern thinkers have been as convinced of the necessity of recovering the past in order to redeem the present as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Benjamin at once mourned and celebrated what he took to be an inevitable liquidation of traditional culture, and his determination to think both of these attitudes through to their conclusions lends his work its peculiar honesty, along with its paradoxical, antinomial coherence. In a landmark interpretation of the whole of Benjamin's career, John McCole demonstrates a way of understanding Benjamin that both contextualizes and addresses the complexities and ambiguities of his texts. Working with Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the "intellectual field,"...
Ulrike Draesner
Ulrike Draesner is a prize-winning writer of novels, short stories, critical essays and poetry, and one of the foremost authors in Germany today. While a number of volumes have been published in German on her work, the current Companion offers the first volume on Draesner in English, capitalising on the interest in her work in Germany and further afield. Introducing Draesner’s major novels and short stories, poetry collections and essays, as well as giving an overview of existing research focusing on migration, memory, science, gender and bodily experience, chapters by international scholars in this volume also break new ground by focussing on visual culture, poetology, nature, the posthuman and Draesner’s reception of English literature and medieval culture. A comprehensive bibliography, commissioned interview and original writing by Draesner make the volume a valuable research tool for scholars and students. This will become essential reading for all those interested in Draesner, women’s writing, literature and history, and contemporary German prose and poetry.
