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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.
In opposition to an essentialist conceptualization, the social construct of the human body in literature can be analyzed and described by means of effective methodologies that are based on Discourse Theory, Theory of Cultural Transmission and Ecology, System Theory, and Media Theory. In this perspective, the body is perceived as a complex arrangement of substantiation, substitution, and omission depending on demands, expectations, and prohibitions of the dominant discourse network. The term Body-Dialectics stands for the attempt to decipher - and for a moment freeze - the web of such discursive arrangements that constitute the fictitious notion of the body in the framework of a specific historic environment, here in the Age of Goethe.
Beginning with the question of the role of the past in the shaping of a contemporary identity, this volumes spans three generations of German and Austrian writers and explores changes and shifts in the aesthetics of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). The purpose of the book is to assess contemporary German literary representations of National Socialism in a wider context of these current debates. The contributors address questions arising from a shift over the last decade, triggered by a generation change-questions of personal and national identity in Germany and Austria, and the aesthetics of memory. One of the central questions that emerges in relation to the Hitler youth generation is that of biography, as examined through Günter Grass' and Martin Walser's conflicting views on the subject of National Socialism. Other themes explored here are the conflict between the post-war generations and the contributions of that conflict to (West)-German mentality, and the growing historical distance and its influence on the aesthetics of representation.
The School of Days establishes Heinrich von Kleist as a strong voice within the pedagogical debates of his times. Through detailed analyses of works by Rousseau, Jean Paul Richter, Kant, and others, it traces Kleist's response to influential pedagogical theories of the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nancy Nobile examines the relationship of theory and practice in education to illuminate the novelistic impulse, and thus the role of fiction, in pedagogical endeavors. Nobile demonstrates how Kleist's texts reveal the irrationality and antagonism often inherent in the ostensibly rational act of shaping human beings. She explores the dynamics of trauma in Kleist's depictions of ed...
This volume presents the work of internationally renowned scholars from Australia, Germany, Italy, South Africa, the UK and the US. The focus on W.G. Sebald’s writing as that of an expatriate author offers a fresh and productive approach to Sebald scholarship. In one way or another, all 28 essays in this innovative, bi-lingual collection take up the notion of Sebald’s experience as an expatriate writer: be it in the analysis of intertextual, transmedial and generic border crossings, on the “exposure to the other” and the experience of alterity, on the question of identity construction and performance, on affinities with other expatriate writers, on the recurring topics of “home”, “exile”, “dislocation” and “migration”, or on the continuing work of “memory” to work through and to preserve the consciousness of a destructive past that has informed the childhood as much as the adult life-world of the author.
New essays by leading scholars on major aspects of the most significant Austrian writer of the postwar generation.
The following scientific work about Heinrich Mann is the translation of my examination "Heinrich Mann: Die Entwicklung im Fr hwerk vom "sozialkritischen" zum "politischen" Roman," published 2007 in Germany and entitled: "Heinrich Mann: Mirror and antagonist of his time." This work describes his early literary his early literary life and shows his attitude towards most of the changes in the society during the turn of the century. At the same time it demonstrates his change to a democrat and the way how he engrosses his thoughts to become a political author. At the beginning of his rise to a literary example for a small group of youngf writers he was a member and observer of the special period...
On the unstable boundaries between "interior" and "exterior," "private" and "public," and always in some way relating to a "beyond," the imagery of interior space in literature reveals itself as an often disruptive code of subjectivity and of modernity. The wide variety of interior spaces elicited in literature -- from the odd room over the womb, secluded parks, and train compartments, to the city as a world under a cloth -- reveal a common defining feature: these interiors can all be analyzed as codes of a paradoxical, both assertive and fragile, subjectivity in its own unique time and history. They function as subtexts that define subjectivity, time, and history as profoundly ambiguous rea...
Das Buch ist dem Andenken des 1999 verstorbenen renommierten Bochumer Sinologen Helmut Martin gewidmet. Namhafte Chinawissenschaftler aus der ganzen Welt spannen in ihren Beitragen einen Bogen, der das umfangreiche ?uvre der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit Helmut Martins widerspiegelt. Nach einer personlich gehaltenen Einfuhrung zu Leben und Werk Helmut Martins konzentriert sich der Themenschwerpunkt des Bandes auf (auto-)biographische Fragestellungen in Literatur, Wissenschaft, Politik und Wirtschaft des traditionellen und des modernen Chinas. Die chinesische und taiwanesische Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts sind hierbei besonders ins Blickfeld geruckt. Aber auch zu linguistischen Fragestellungen und den Themen Ubersetzung, Chinarezeption und -perzeption sind eine Reihe wichtiger Aufsatze enthalten. Im Anhang des Buches findet sich ein Gesamtverzeichnis der Schriften von und uber Helmut Martin.
Durs Grünbein is the most significant poet and essayist in German today. No other modern German poet has written from such an emphatically European and global perspective, and this volume seeks to present the poet and his work to the English-speaking world in all their significance and breadth. Written by a line-up of international scholars and critics, the volume offers highly readable and wide-ranging essays on Grünbein’s substantial œuvre, complemented by specially commissioned material and an interview with the poet. It covers the German and European traditions, and engages with Grünbein’s works in the context of a number of relevant topics, such as ‘memory’, ‘urban life’, ‘mortality’, ‘love’, and ‘presence’; it also probes Grünbein’s sustained dialogue with the natural sciences and the visual arts.