Volume 39, Issue 1

Sacher-Masoch is unjustly forgotten. Krafft-Ebing reduced his staging to a syndrome, and his writing is thought to be more obscene than that of the Marquis de Sade, though neither is, in the first instance, pornographic. Both of them examine the possibilities of relations and their shaping by power. Is Wanda, the femme fatale of Venus im Pelz , the one in power? Is it not the narrator-victim who creates and co-defines the rules of the game?

Balzac's reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann may be regarded as a paradigm for the formation and configuration of literature and history. The works of Hoffmann played a complex and often overdetermined role in the early stages of Balzac's career as a writer and as author of the Comédie humaine . With respect to Hoffmann, Balzac paradoxically situates himself both as successor and antagonist. Thus, in one of his crucial early writings, the Élixir de longue vie , he challenges the notion of a direct literary heredity. Yet, in the very same narrative, Balzac figures himself as a writer whose self-invention takes place as if designed by Hoffmann, namely as an uncanny and phantasmagoric event. With the Élixir de longue vie Balzac elaborates a self-referential model for configuring literature and history that reaches beyond the framework of easily identifiable literary sources and motifs still informing most historical approaches to the intertextual realtionship of the two writers.

The correspondence between August Strindberg and Friedrich Nietzsche in the years 1887–1889 reveals curious intellectual and aesthetic affinities. Nietzsche's enthusiastic reaction to Strindberg's drama Fadren recognizes that its central conflict is a struggle for power between two intellects rather than gender confrontation. In Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral and Jenseits von Gut und Böse , which can be read as critical comments on Strindberg's drama, Strindberg himself finds his own position as “an opponent of everything.”

L'alluvione ha sommerso il pack dei mobili, delle carte, dei quadri che stipavano un sotteraneo chiuso a doppio lucchetto. Forse hanno ciecamente lottato i marocchini rossi, le sterminate dediche di Du Bos, il timbro di ceralacca con la barba di Ezra, il Valéry di Alain, l'originale dei Canti Orfici – … (Eugenio Montale) In Vagabondaggio from the early collection Il gioco del rovescio , Tabucchi undertakes an oneiric and personal approach to the life and work of the Italian symbolist poet Dino Campana (1885–1932). The text is based on Nietzsche's aphorism “Reisende und ihre Grade” ( Menschliches, Allzumenschliches ), which establishes five categories of voyagers. Tabuchi uses these as stages in the protagonist's quest for personal aesthetics. The aesthetics itself alludes to major motives in Campana's masterpiece, Canti Orfici .

Boccaccio's Decameron, usually considered as a model of narrative art, is also a storehouse of patterns of listening to storytelling. Levels of listening correspond to levels of narration. Only those who listen to others can tell stories of their own. The correct listener (intendente), a central figure in the Decameron, is a mediator that links orality to literacy.

China as an object of literary knowledge has always been of great interest to Westeners. But what do we know about Vietnam except the terrible war in recent history? In order to slightly narrow the gap, we examine the crime novels published in Paris by the sisters Tran-Nhut between 1999 and 2001. The novels are set in the Empire of Tonkin, today's North Vietnam, of the twelfth century, then under the suzerainty of “Celestial” China. The crimes are numerous, cruel as well as inexplicable; the manner of narration is indebted to Chinese as well as Western forms of the genre. For Western readers these stories represent a mixture of exotic fascination and a challenge to understand alterity.

The holistic approach advocated by cultural studies holds out the promise of genuine interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. But to what extent can this promise be redeemed? Are the representatives of different disciplines really talking about the same things when they use each other's vocabulary and questions? What conclusions can the postcolonial theoretician and literary scholar Homi K. Bhabha draw from his engagement with documents and other texts produced in a variety of colonial contexts? The rhetorical figures and gestures in Bhabha's argumentation are central to an understanding of his project. The applicability of Bhabha's ‘strong’ postcolonial concept of reading to an entirely different set of historical and literary documents is tested by way of analyzing a story by Richard Weiner.

Blanchot's L'espace littéraire proposes to interpret the intentional movement that underlies art and literature in the modern period. Both in its attempts at theoretical self-understanding and in its practice, modern art and literature is seen as moved by a questioning of its own nature and existence. This movement is linked by Blanchot to the consolidation, in modern European thought, of a free theoretical, critical and historical rationality, and by the concomitant localization of art within the sphere of the aesthetic. Under these conditions, the movement, characteristic of all the arts, to regain contact with the essence of the artistic or literary activity, tends towards an essentially negative and contestatory relation to the legitimating instances of modernity. Blanchot's interpretation thus points to a methodological problematic particular to modern literary studies, as a field of inquiry which has to preserve its own origin in the project of historical knowledge, and at the same time, enter into the closest contact with a language intent on founding itself in modes of experience in conflict with the terms of this project.

Umberto Eco's concept of the “model-reader” serves as a theoretical starting point to analyze the narrative strategies of two texts with Greece as a tertium comparationis: Ein Gott der Frechheit (1994) by the German novelist Sten Nadolny and Mujercísimas (1995) by the Catalan author Terenci Moix. Both of them regard Greece as a myth as well as a country. Nadolny functionalizes Greek mythology to reveal the perversity of “perfect” worlds, such as the former GDR and the contemporary high-tech-environment, Moix satirizes the Spanish new-richs of the 1990s. Playing with national clichés and stereotypes, these texts create a super-national “model-reader,” whose reception moves from national images to global issues.

Wilhelm Deinert's Silser Brunnenbuch (1999) attempts to (re)create the pastoral, a genre that has been depreciated since Romanticism for its escapism and lack of reference to the real world. The first part of Brunnenbuch posits a firm semiotic link between ontology (symbolized by water) and the language of poetry, thus grounding the pastoral in material reality. The second half seems to undermine this framework but actually strengthens it. Deinert anticipates nominalistic doubts by explicitly integrating them into his work. Referring to texts by Nietzsche and Hermann Hesse and conflating their intertextual implications, he creates an “unassailable ambivalence” for his new pastoral that makes it immune to the charge of escapist fictitiousness. Deinert turns the pastoral into a means for a constructivist recognition of the world.

Alexandra Hildebrandt: “Lebwohl, du heiterer Schein!” Blindheit im Kontext der Romantik Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002, 276 Seiten. ( Nicole Ahlers ) Michael Dallapiazza (Hrsg.): Tristano e Isotta. La fortuna di un mito europeo Trieste: Edizioni Parnaso, 2003, 363 Seiten. ( Albrecht Classen ) Andrew E. Mathis: The King Arthur Myth in Modern American Literature Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, 2002, IX + 158 Seiten. ( Albrecht Classen ) Juden in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters Religiöse Konzepte – Feindbilder – Rechtfertigungen Herausgegeben von Ursula Schulze Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002, 290 Seiten. Jüdische Identitäten in Mitteleuropa Literarische Modelle der Identitätskonstruktion Herausgegeben von Armin A. Wallas unter Mitwirkung von Primus-Heinz Kucher, Edgar Sallager und Johann Strutz Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002, 325 Seiten. ( Michael Dallapiazza ) Pierre V. Zima: La Négation esthétique Le Sujet, le beau et le sublime de Mallarmé et Valéry à Adorno et Lyotard Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002, 365 Seiten. ( Klaus-Dieter Ertler ) Erika Greber: Textile Texte Poetologische Metaphorik und Literaturtheorie Studien zur Tradition des Wortflechtens und der Kombinatorik Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2002, 771 Seiten. ( Aage A. Hansen-Löve ) Bettina Riedman: Ich bin Jude, Österreicher, Deutscher Judentum in Arthur Schnitzlers Tagebüchern und Briefen Tübingen : Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002, 475 Seiten. ( Primus-Heinz Kucher ) Manfred Engelbert, Burkhard Pohl, Udo Schöning (Hrsg.): Märkte, Medien, Vermittler Fallstudien zur interkulturellen Vernetzung von Literatur und Film Göttinger Beiträge zur Nationalität, Internationalität und Intermedialität von Literatur und Film, Bd. 1 Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001, 470 Seiten. ( Fabian Lampart ) Romantic Poetry Ed. Angela Esterhammer A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages / l'Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues Européennes Bd. 17 Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002, 537 Seiten. ( Roger Lüdeke ) Irene Albers: Photographische Momente bei Claude Simon Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002, 239 Seiten. ( Volker Pantenburg ) Odila Triebel: Staatsgespenster Fiktionen des Politischen bei E.T.A. Hoffmann Köln: Böhlau, 2003, 228 Seiten. ( Matthias Schöning )