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Discourses of Heimat and of migration both negotiate questions of identity, belonging, and integration; moreover, despite the reemergence of right-wing, racist, and exclusionary uses of the term Heimat, there are in fact more recent German-language cultural texts that problematize and challenge a view of Heimat as a community that excludes the Other than there are promulgating it. This volume addresses the parallel proliferation of discourses of Heimat and of migration in contemporary German-language culture and demonstrates that the entanglement of migration and Heimat can be productive: it can help us to reframe what it means to have a home, to lose one, find one, or belong to one.
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 ...
Far from being rhetorical ornaments, metaphors play a central role in public discourse, as they shape the structure of political categorisation and argumentation. Drawing on a very large bilingual corpus, this book, now in paperback, analyses the distribution of 'metaphor scenarios' in more than a decade of public discourse on European integration, elucidating differences in UK and German attitudes and argumentation. The corpus analysis leads to a refinement of cognitive metaphor theory by systematically relating conceptual, semantic and argumentation levels and incorporating the historical dimension of metaphor evolution. Finally, drawing on examples of metaphor negotiation and on a reassessment of Hobbes' concept of metaphor in Leviathan, the book highlights the ethical dimension of metaphor in politics.
This book is about the ambition, in a set of paradigmatic writers of the twentieth century, to simultaneously enlist and break the spell of the real—their fascination with the spectacle of violence and suffering—and the difficulties involved in capturing this kind of excess by aesthetic means. The works at the center of this study—by Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Claude Simon, Peter Weiss, and Heiner Müller—zero in on scenes of agony, destruction, and death with an astonishing degree of precision and detail. The strange and troubling nature of the appeal engendered by these sights is the subject of The Pathos of the Real. Robert Buch shows that the spectacles of suffering conjured ...
The book analyses the conceptual and discursive traditions that underlay the Nazi use of body, illness and parasite metaphors in their genocidal anti-Semitic ideology. Part I gives a detailed analysis of this metaphor field in Hitler’s Mein Kampf and his public statements from the 1920s to 1945, when it served him and the Nazi propaganda machine to announce, justify and defend his main policy decisions to destroy European Jewry. The book also studies the evidence from secret surveillance reports and diaries that demonstrates the impact of the body-parasite metaphor complex on popular opinion in Germany 1933-1945 and in the post-war period. Part II of the book traces the history of this met...
The Yenidze Cigarette Factory of 1909 was constructed as an industrial, architectural object that advertised Dresden as a center for the tobacco trade. Born from a unique client-architect relationship between Hugo Zietz and Martin Hammitzsch, the factory’s importance to modernism has been understated. Smoke and Mirrors uncovers the history of the factory’s planning, design, and construction, and for the first time, apart from the building’s historical narrative, positions this addition to Dresden’s skyline within the formative histories of the modern movement.
Assessing the impact of fin-de-siècle Jewish culture on subsequent developments in literature and culture, this book is the first to consider the historical trajectory of Austrian-Jewish writing across the 20th century. It examines how Vienna, the city that stood at the center of Jewish life in the Austrian Empire and later the Austrian nation, assumed a special significance in the imaginations of Jewish writers as a space and an idea. The author focuses on the special relationship between Austrian-Jewish writers and the city to reveal a century-long pattern of living in tension with the city, experiencing simultaneously acceptance and exclusion, feeling “unheimlich heimisch” (eerily at home) in Vienna.
Returning migrants have been involved in post-socialist transformation processes all across Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Engaged in politics, the economy, science and education, arts and civil society, return migrants have often exerted crucial influence on state and nation-building processes and on social and cultural transformations. However, remigration not only comprises stories of achievements, but equally those of failed integration, marginalization, non-participation and lost potential - these are mostly stories untold. The contributions to this volume shed light on processes of return migration to various Eastern and Southeastern European countries from multidisciplinary perspectives. Particular attention is paid to anthropological approaches that aim to understand the complexities of return migration from individual perspectives.
This book examines the discourse on ‘primitive thinking’ in early twentieth century Germany. It explores texts from the social sciences, writings on art and language and – most centrally – literary works by Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, Gottfried Benn and Robert Müller, focusing on three figurations of alterity prominent in European primitivism: indigenous cultures, children, and the mentally ill.
This volume conceives of identity constructs in a broader semiotic way, specifically within a communicational and comparative perspective. This implies a rethinking of “identity” in terms of the relationship between an individual’s “way of being” and performativity. The contributions here cover a variety of pre-texts, texts and contexts, periods and genres, from Medieval clothing to multicultural discourse, and from modern poetry to postcolonial narratives, among others. Integrating research from Germany, Greece, Iraq and Romania, this collection of fifteen chapters will be of interest to all those involved in the reevaluation of identity – a central term in the social and cultural space.