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This study of contemporary German poetry represents the first attempt to examine comprehensively and at some length the lyric response to the unification period. It sets out to investigate, by means of close textual analysis, whether the German ‘Wende’ was also a turning-point for poetry, exploring how GDR poets responded both to the revolutionary events of 1989 and subsequently to the new, united Germany. An introductory chapter considers what is distinct about poetry as a genre, especially under censorship or amid historic change, as well as outlining the post-unification ‘Literaturstreit’. The following chapter offers a survey of the poet’s role in the GDR from 1949 until 1989. ...
In his popular book The Germans (1982), Stanford historian Gordon Craig remarked: "When German intellectuals at the end of the eighteenth century talked of living in a Frederican age, they were sometimes referring not to the monarch in Sans Souci, but to his namesake, the Berlin bookseller Friedrich Nicolai." Such was the importance attributed to Nicolai’s role in the intellectual life of his age by his own contemporaries. While long neglected by students of the period, who tended to accept the caricature of him as a philistine who failed to recognize Goethe’s genius, Nicolai has experienced a resurgence of interest among scholars reexploring the German Enlightenment and the literary marketplace of the eighteenth century. This book, drawing upon Nicolai’s large unpublished correspondence, rounds out the picture we have of Nicolai already as author and critic by focusing on his roles as bookseller and publisher and as an Aufkärer in the book trade.
Ethics and Dialogue engages with four of the most complex authors of the twentieth century--Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel'shtam, and Celan--in a hermeneutically and methodologically innovative manner. Construing Levinas's ethical philosophy in conjunction with Bakhtin's philosophy of the act and metalinguistics, as an interpretative framework for making sense of Celan's dialogue with Mandel'shtam, the author develops a highly sophisticated mode of reading poetry--poethics--which takes into account both the ethical significance of poetry and the poetic significance of ethical philosophy. While documenting the viability of Levinas's and Bakhtin's philosophies, Eskin's analyses of Celan's and Mandel'shtam's poetry in the light of its philosophical underpinnings open hitherto unseen vistas on to the workings of twentieth-century poetry in general and on to European modernist and post-World War II poetry in particular.
Uwe Johnson's major novel, Jahrestage, is recognized as one of the most important and ambitious works of post-war German literature. The core to this novel is remembrance, and Jahrestage is a stunning requiem for the victims of twentieth-century German history. D.G. Bond concentrates on the text, analysing the novel and the calendar form of this work, and paying particular attention to the ways in which even the minutest details of Johnson's narrative reveal its historical themes. The author discusses Johnson's poetics, offers readings of his other major works, and considers the most recent trends in Johnson reception. He shows how an uncompromising view of German identity after the crimes of the Third Reich constitutes the very heart of Johnson's work.
This volume presents a new approach to the political engagement of three major West German authors, Uwe Johnson, Günther Grass and Martin Walser. Whereas analysis of intellectuals' participation in the political upheaval of the late 1960s has tended to focus on speeches written in response to contemporary events, this book examines works of fiction for the way in which authors reflected upon their engagement in a more contemplative medium. Examination of these literary reflections reveals a mismatch between writers' confidence as public intellectuals and their private anxiety. Beginning with a survey of intellectual engagement until the late 1960s, the present volume moves onto a theoretica...
Examines the literature produced from the very beginnings of what became the GDR through the 1950s, redressing a tendency of literary scholarship to focus on the later GDR.
Author of Nazi Paris, a Choice Academic Book of the Year, Allan Mitchell has researched a companion volume concerning the acclaimed and controversial German author Ernst Jünger who, if not the greatest German writer of the twentieth century, certainly was the most controversial. His service as a military officer during the occupation of Paris, where his principal duty was to mingle with French intellectuals such as Jean Cocteau and with visiting German celebrities like Martin Heidegger, was at the center of disputes concerning his career. Spending more than three years in the French capital, he regularly recorded in a journal revealing impressions of Parisian life and also managed to establish various meaningful social contacts, with the intriguing Sophie Ravoux for one. By focusing on this episode, the most important of Jünger’s adult life, the author brings to bear a wide reading of journals and correspondence to reveal Jünger’s professional and personal experience in wartime and thereafter. This new perspective on the war years adds significantly to our understanding of France's darkest hour.
"The emergence of a literature in any language is an improbable and complex historical achievement. In fact, many known languages throughout history did not develop writing, let alone a literature. This book, a collectively written early history of different literary traditions across the globe and through time, presents a global, comparative account of literary origins spanning the Mediterranean, Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Seventeen chapters, each written by a scholar with expertise in a particular language and literature, trace the creation of writing and its interaction with oral practices, the rise of print circulation, the passage from sacred to secular writing and reading ...
An overview of the work of Uwe Johnson, concentrating on five of his novels, including Ingrid Babendererde and Two Views. A chapter dedicated to his life describes the themes that concerned Johnson in his scandalized existence in both Germanys, the USA and Great Britain.