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Literary mimesis is an age-old concept which has been variously interpreted and at times highly contested, and which has recently been brought back to the forefront of scholarly interest. The debate around mimesis has been reactivated by approaches that re-evaluate its meaning both in the ancient texts in which it first appeared, and in the contemporary discussions of the power of literary representation. This volume presents a selection of central contributions to both the theoretical debate on mimesis and to its up-to-date critical practice. This volume approaches mimesis by emphasising the principles of knowledge, understanding and imagination that have been associated with mimesis since ...
(M)Other Tongues: Literary Reflexions on a Difficult Distinction examines a key problem of literary criticism: the differentiation between languages is at the same time necessary and impossible. It is indispensable in order to read a text, yet literary texts are precisely those that question this distinction, articulating the link between languages and cultures, as well as the inherent strangeness of even one’s own mother tongue. (M)Other Tongues explores texts from the 16th century to the 21st century, focusing on different aspects of one main feature of literary texts: formally, as well as semantically, they transcend the rules and conventions of the language they speak. Crossing cultura...
Uncovers the literary traditions of melancholy that inform major works of postwar and contemporary German literature dealing with the Holocaust and the Nazi period.
As German-language literature turned in the mid-nineteenth century to the depiction of the profane, sensual world, a corresponding anxiety emerged about the terms of that depiction—with consequences not only for realist poetics but also for the conception of the material world itself. At the Limit of the Obscene examines the roots and repercussions of this anxiety in German realist and postrealist literature. Through analyses of works by Adalbert Stifter, Gustav Freytag, Theodor Fontane, Arno Holz, Gottfried Benn, and Franz Kafka, Erica Weitzman shows how German realism’s conflicted representations of the material world lead to an idea of the obscene as an excess of sensual appearance beyond human meaning: the obverse of the anthropocentric worldview that German realism both propagates and pushes to its crisis. At the Limit of the Obscene thus brings to light the troubled and troubling ontology underlying German realism, at the same time demonstrating how its works continue to shape our ideas about representability, alterity, and the relationship of human beings to the non-human well into the present day.
Revised Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Portugal, for the degree of Doctor of German Language and Literature, 2007.
This book argues that increasingly transnational reading contexts of the twenty-first century place new pressures on fundamental questions about how we read literary fiction. Prompted by the stylistic strategies of three European émigré writers of the twentieth century — Conrad, Weiss and Sebald — it demonstrates the need to pose more differentiated questions about specific effects that occur when literary narratives meet a readership with a heterogeneous historical imaginary. In conversation with reception theory, trauma theory and transnational and postcolonial studies, the study shows how historical pressures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries require comparative literature...
In the 1960s and 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), or West Germany, newspaper readers and television viewers were appalled by terrible images of fires burning half a world away. The Vietnam War was a decisive catalyst for the era’s wider protest movements and gave rise to an ardent anti-war discourse. This discourse privileged writing in many forms. Within it, poetry and poetic writing were key; and because coverage of the conflict in Vietnam often focused on spectacular, destructive conflagrations ignited by hi-tech machines of war, their dominant trope was fire. Hundreds of poems and related writings about Vietnam circulated in the FRG, yet they are almost entirely forgotte...
One century after Gustav Landauer’s death, in a time marked by a deep doubt concerning modern politics, the volume proposes a fascinating overview of the articulation between skepsis and antipolitics in his multifaceted unconventional anarchism.
This fascinating collection explores the life of renowned psychoanalyst Michael Balint in his native Budapest. With a Balint revival in mind, Michael Balint and his World: The Budapest Years brings together the work of psychoanalysts, social thinkers, historians, literary scholars, artists and medical doctors who draw on Balint’s work in a variety of ways. The book focuses on Balint’s early years in Budapest, where he worked with Sándor Ferenczi and a circle of colleagues, capturing the transformations of psychoanalytic thinking as it happens in a network of living relationships. Tracing creative disagreements as well as collaborations, and setting these exchanges in the climate of scie...
When History Returns brings together psychoanalytic theories of learning with the antinomies of social strife. From a psychoanalytic perspective, history returns through transitional scenes of inheriting a past one could not make, experiencing a present affected by what came before, and facing a future one can neither know nor predict. Taking such scenes as the subject of education, Deborah P. Britzman provides new approaches and vocabulary for conceptualizing experience and understanding, as expressed in psychoanalysis, literature, film, clinical case studies, and warm pedagogy. Britzman argues that novel quests for humane responsibility take hold in the fallout of understanding, in the feel of history, in imaginative dialogues and missed encounters, and in searches for friendship, belonging, and affiliation. Each chapter charts these quests in contemporary education, carrying readers into the heart of learning and the emotional situations that urge the transitions of difficult knowledge into care for thinking and the questions that follow.