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Viennese modernism is often described in terms of a fin-de-siècle fascination with the psyche. But this stereotype of the movement as essentially cerebral overlooks a rich cultural history of the body. The Naked Truth, an interdisciplinary tour de force, addresses this lacuna, fundamentally recasting the visual, literary, and performative cultures of Viennese modernism through an innovative focus on the corporeal. Alys X. George explores the modernist focus on the flesh by turning our attention to the second Vienna medical school, which revolutionized the field of anatomy in the 1800s. As she traces the results of this materialist influence across a broad range of cultural forms—exhibitio...
This volume focuses on the connection between modern design and architectural practices and the construction of "sacred spaces." Not only language and ritual but space, place, and architecture play a significant role in constructing "special" or "religious" spaces. However, this concept of a constructed "sacred space" remains undertheorized in religious studies and the history of art and architecture in general. This volume therefore revisits the question of a "modern sacred space" from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on religion, space, and architecture during the emergence of the modern period and up until contemporary times. Revisiting the ways in which modern architects and artists have endeavored to create sacred spaces and buildings for the modern world will addresses the underlying questions of how religious ideas--especially those related to esotericism and to alternative religiosities--have transformed the way sacred spaces are conceptualized today.
Twelve scholars present cutting-edge research from the emerging field of Satanism studies. The topics covered range from early literary Satanists like Blake and Shelley, to the Californian Church of Satan of the 1960s, to the radical developments within the Satanic milieu in recent decades. The book will be an invaluable resource for everyone interested in Satanism as a philosophical or religious position of alterity rather than as an imagined other.
'I love the German character more than anything else in the world, and my breast is an archive of German song' So wrote Heinrich Heine in 1824, adding: 'It is likely that my Muse gave her German dress something of a foreign cut from annoyance with the German character'. Here Heine sums up the ambivalent emotions of Jews who felt at home in German culture and yet, even in the age of emancipation, foundGermany less than welcoming. This anthology illustrates the history of Jews in Germany from the eighteenth century, when it was first proposed to give Jews civil rights, to the 1990's and the problems of living after the Holocaust. The texts include short stories, plays, poems, essays, letters a...
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 of essays relate Max Beckmann's work to the tangible circumstances of its production and reception. The essays contextualise aspects of Beckmann's early, middle, and late career by way of detailed reference to contemporary music, film, philosophy, theatre, history, sports and exile.
A 17th-century French haberdasher invented the Black Mass. An 18th-century English Cabinet Minister administered the Eucharist to a baboon. High-ranking Catholic authorities in the 19th century believed that Satan appeared in Masonic lodges in the shape of a crocodile and played the piano there. A well-known scientist from the 20th century established a cult of the Antichrist and exploded in a laboratory experiment. Three Italian girls in 2000 sacrificed a nun to the Devil. A Black Metal band honored Satan in Krakow, Poland, in 2004 by exhibiting on stage 120 decapitated sheep heads. Some of these stories, as absurd as they might sound, were real. Others, which might appear to be equally well reported, are false. But even false stories have generated real societal reactions. For the first time, Massimo Introvigne proposes a general social history of Satanism and anti-Satanism, from the French Court of Louis XIV to the Satanic scares of the late 20th century, satanic themes in Black Metal music, the Church of Satan, and beyond.
In Media, Modernity and Dynamic Plants, Janet Janzen traces the motif of the “dynamic plant” through film and literature in early 20th century German culture. Often discussed solely as symbols or metaphors of the human experience, plants become here the primary focus and their role in literature and film is extended beyond their symbolic function. Plants have been (and still are) seen as closer to static objects than to living, moving beings. Making use of examples from film and literature, Janet Janzen demonstrates a shift in the perception of plants-as-objects to plants-as-living-beings that can be attributed to new technology and also to the return of Romantic and Vitalistic discourses on nature.
Text and Image in Modern European Culture is a collection of essays that are transnational and interdisciplinary in scope. Employing a range of innovative comparative approaches to reassess and undermine traditional boundaries between art forms and national cultures, the contributors shed new light on the relations between literature and the visual arts in Europe after 1850. Following tenets of comparative cultural studies, work presented in this volume explores international creative dialogues between writers and visual artists, ekphrasis in literature, literature and design (fashion, architecture), hybrid texts (visual poetry, surrealist pocket museums, poetic photo-texts), and text and im...
Handsomely equipped with a comprehensive introductory historical essay, editor's notes and selected bibliography, this distinguished anthology is a model of genre research. These previously untranslated stories, published from 1871 onward, offer reading virtually unknown to most American (and many German) readers. Some authors combine scientific and philosophical issues, like Kurd Lasswitz in his witty tale "To the Absolute Zero of Existence: A Story from 2371, " while others, as in Erik Simon's 1983 title story, pose psychological puzzles involving alien phenomena. Though the earlier stories in particular demand painstaking reading, all of them repay it with rewarding insights into German and Austrian culture and the many possible uses and misuses of science.