Volume 38, Issue 1

This study attempts to assess the literary representation of the City of Jerusalem (Al-Quds) in modern Palestinian literature, after the Palestinian Nakbeh (Catastrophe) in 1948. It sets the tone, the direction, and the political and cultural background for considering the dominant history of the Palestinian fears of the actual and the potential losing of the place. How does this gripping feeling of loss condition, to a large extent, the image formation of the City? The Palestinian sense of loss is indicative of the Palestinian writers' attachment to the East sector of the City, since the urban West Jerusalem has almost no presence in their creative consciousness. The study discusses why and how the Old City of Jerusalem has become the emblematic locus of the Palestinian literary representation, and why, by the same virtue, the country or the rural setting functions as the most appropriate and defining reflector of Jerusalem's reality-based image. Within the historical, national, and religious context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Jerusalem of Christ is of dramatic magnificence for the image of Jerusalem in modern Palestinian literature.

An examination of the connections between the Messianism in the cultural politics of the intellectuals in the Weimar Republic and contemporary post-modern cultural critique. Both distinctly neo-Romantic positions emphasize illuminating and redemptive energies in the fragmentary and ironic displacements that sustain an ever elusive Meaning. This concern emerges from the growing awareness of intellectuals that their postwar cultural position is increasingly marginalized through the sciences and technocracy. During the Weimar period, the shock of this experience was fresher and more distinct. Claiming to speak authoritatively about an increasingly complex social, political and cultural reality that largely eluded them, Weimar intellectuals turned under the influence of Georg Lukács' ‘History and Class Consciousness’ to highly idiosyncratic variations on Hegelian Marxism – a problematic solution that Siegfried Kracauer analysed critically in his correspondence with Bloch.

Cordelia Edvardsons autobiographical novel ‘Burned Child seeks the Fire’ belongs to Holocaust literature, but it is also an intricate dialogue with her mother, the poet Elisabeth Langgässer, who developed mythopoetic structures, themes and motifs to recreate Christian literature in the twentieth century. Langgässer's mythopoetic world, designed to rescue modern existence from secular nihilism, accompanied her daughter to Auschwitz. Cordelia Edvardson, however, trying to escape the annihilations of the Third Reich, had to find also an Ariadne thread to find her way out of illusory mythopoetic realm her mother had built for herself and for her daughter. Edvardson tied the thread to her Jewish companions in suffering and built a prosaic world out of the real things she encountered in Auschwitz. Solidarity with the Jewish people, with ‘am Israel’, became in the end her new fundament for life.

Three European authors confront the still traumatic impact of nazi and fascist destruction by creating new forms of narration: Natalia Ginzburg's ‘Lessico Famigliare’ (1963) recalls her family's reassuring phrases and stories that helped constructing identity against the destructive “fury” of fascism. Georges Perec's ‘W ou le souvenir d'enfance’ (1974) alternates autobiographical notes with episodes of a fantasized adventure tale that turns into an allegorical description of a concentration camp. Christa Wolf's ‘Kindheitsmuster’ (1976) experiments with ways of using personal pronouns in order to avoid the impossible I and to come to terms with the feeling of guilt, shame, and split identity. A comparison of the specific narrative technics shows that all three works “re-configure” time in Paul Ricoeur's sense by creating meaning and thus confronting the destructive force of history.

Günther Anders's interpretation of Paul Celan's poetry is ambivalent, and could easily be misunderstood as an attack against it. Inspired by the possible inversion of the Danaian gift interpreted as an allegory, the article suggests to read Anders' approach as an attack against Celan's admirers. By provoking them to defend Celan's ‘Todesfuge’, Anders indicates that an exclusively affirmative culture is suspect of a fatal blindness for “the other”.

In his life-long contention with Catholicism, James Joyce made extensive use of its seminal texts; paramount are the ‘Ejercicios Espirituales’ (1548) by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order. Their importance for ‘A Portrait’ has long since been pointed out, but no close attention has been paid to the faithfully Ignatian arrangement of Stephen Dedalus's over-fervent conversion. His experience is, moreover, doubly refracted through hints at Joyce's earlier parody of the Jesuit spiritual exercises in Tom Kernan's lukewarm conversion in “Grace.” In ‘Ulysses’ the deconstruction of the Catholic Church as secularized and money-grabbing is carried out partly by means of echoing Ignatian rituals. While Stephen in ‘A Portrait’ replaces Catholicism with his own artistic credo, in ‘Ulysses’ his half-serious use of the Ignatian ‘composition of place’ hints at a way out beyond the ‘nets of religion’ into a self-determined artistic life — paradoxically through Catholic methods of mental discipline.

Theological and philosophical approaches to Kierkegaard claim that his aesthetic writings merely sought to mediate a Christian theology. His pseudonyms and the fictional status of his works are usually seen as serving social, didactic, and religious purposes, which denies them aesthetic autonomy. But Kierkegaard is spinning a narrative web in which he himself becomes entangled, losing control over it. To read Kierkegaard we need to acquire the artistic sense of webbing spiders: we need a digressive hermeneutics that does not solidify the text too hastily but allows us to follow its rich literary traces.

A comparative analysis of Carlos Fuentes's ‘Los años con Laura Díaz’ (1999) and Michel Houellebecq's ‘Lanzarote’ (2000), both of which feature the island of Lanzarote. Having lost his Jewish mistress, Rachel, in World War II, the Spanish republican Jorge Maura in Fuentes's novel decides to live as a penitent exile on the inhospitable island of Lanzarote. The desolate landscape of Lanzarote symbolizes Jorge's spiritual sterility, the death of Rachel, and the barbarism of national socialism, but as an island of many vulcanos it also represents the possibility of a new beginning, and expresses a hope for regeneration. In contrast, Michel Houellebecq sends his protagonist to Lanzarote in search of erotic experiences. The search of pleasure on Lanzarote becomes a modern and ironic adaptation of the search for the Grail. Contrary to Jorge, who is tempted by a mystical search to deliver himself, Houellebecq's main characters are entirely corrupted by a captitalist mentality.

Around 1900 European civilization passed through a “crisis of darkness.” The representation of real expeditions into the “dark” Tropics became an investigation of the contradictions and inconsistencies in the modern cultural image of man. Narrative recreations of these expeditions in literature highlight those aspects in the history of the imaginary that were repressed in the colonial and eurocentric perspective of these expeditions. In literature this precarious relationship is used and acted out: the tropics/tropes (which coincide in the German “Tropen”) figure in a double sense the experimental status of literary meaning making: in literature, established categories of narration and metaphor are broken down and set free to enable a new way of poetic speech.

Using the concepts of manipulation and simulation as diagnostic terms for modernity, this article offers a cross-reading of Dostoevsky's ‘Demons’ (‘Besy’ 1872) and William Gaddis's novels ‘The Recognitions’ (1955) and ‘JR’ (1975). It stages a dialogue in terms of a change in perspectives instead of showing a case of literary influence. The dialogue concerns filling and (re-)presenting a gap that can only be called “demonic.” In the case of Dostoevsky, the gap is due to the opaqueness of human beings and the hysterical subjectivity it generates, which can no longer be healed by communication. In Gaddis, entropic communication engenders and enhances an opaqueness of the real world, as it were a hysterical objectivity of simulacra. Both authors search for adequate and radical modes of representation for what is unpresentable in their modernity.

Reconstruction of a surprising concatenation of translations and re-translations. John Bowring's poem “During a Thunder-Storm” (1821) leads to his anthology ‘Specimens of the Russian Poets’ (1821) and from there to Bowring's Russian model, Ivan Dmitriev's poem “Reflections Occasioned by a Thunder” (1805). An examination of this poem's content, form and style reveals that it was in turn based on Goethe's poem “Grenzen der Menschheit” (ca. 1805). This newly discovered relay of translations serves as an illustration of Goethe's own concept of “Weltliteratur” (World Literature).

Giulia Cantarutti (Hrsg.): Scrittori a Berlino nel novecento Bologna: Pàtron Editore, 2000, 216 Seiten. ( Elena Agazzi ) Thomas Bodenmüller: Literaturtransfer in der Frühen Neuzeit Francisco López de Úbedas “La pícara Justina” und ihre italienische und englische Bearbeitung von Barezzo Barezzi und Captain John Stevens Communicatio, Bd. 25 Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001, 412 Seiten. ( Felice Balletta ) Linda Simonis: Die Kunst des Geheimen Esoterische Kommunikation und ästhetische Darstellung im 18. Jahrhundert Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte, Bd. 185 Heidelberg: Winter, 2002, 456 Seiten. ( Christoph Deupmann ) Robert Dion, Frances Fortier, Élisabeth Haghebaert (Hrsg.): Enjeux des genres dans les écritures contemporaines Québec: Nota bene, 2001, 365 Seiten. ( Klaus-Dieter Ertler ) Eva Lezzi, Zerstörte Kindheit Literarische Autobiographien zur Shoah Literatur und Leben, Bd. 57 Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2001, 382 Seiten. ( Carola Hilmes ) Stephen Greenblatt: Hamlet in Purgatory Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001, 322 Seiten. ( Ulrich Kinzel ) Carola Hilmes: Das inventarische und das inventorische Ich Grenzfälle des Autobiographischen Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2000, 446 Seiten. ( Eva Lezzi ) Erika Fischer-Lichte (Hrsg.): Theatralität und die Krisen der Repräsentation . Germanistische Symposien. Berichtsbände, Bd. XXII Stuttgart, Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2001, VII + 620 Seiten. ( Dirk Niefanger ) Österreichische Literatur im Exil seit 1933 www.literaturepochen.at/exil Projektleitung: Primus-Heinz Kucher, Karl Müller Salzburg 2002. ( Tobias Schneider ) Aglaia Blioumi: Interkulturalität als Dynamik Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2001, 276 Seiten. ( Elke Sturm-Trigonakis )