Volume 43, Issue 2

This article explores aspects of Vaslav Nijinsky's first choreography, which have so far received little sustained critical attention. The celebrated dancer's refusal to stage his own virtuoso skills allows us to investigate his decision to base his choreography largely on the analytical de- and reconstruction of walking. This opening of a “kinetic unconscious”, this move towards what is called here “microscopic virtuosity”, is related to other contemporary theoretical, scientific, and literary explorations: Walter Benjamin's “optical unconscious”, research into human movements and gestures, Paul Valéry's writings on dance, and an account of foot fetishism in Wilhelm Jensen's novella “Gradiva”. We may thus take stock of the wide-ranging aesthetic ramifications of Nijinsky's specific and groundbreaking inclusion of forms of stillness into dance.

The bang (Schlag) on a gate to the court in Kafka's Der Schlag ans Hoftor rings out while fading. The fading (Vergehen) becomes a delict (Vergehen) of a trial (Verhandlung). Thereby, a play on a semantic field is launched, which poetologically unfolds a reading process, about the reading of the reading of a figure written by the text.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou attempts to derive new political impulses from twentieth-century aesthetic radicalism. This would, above all, exonorate the art of the Avant-garde from complicitousness with totalitarian politics in the first half of the century. Starting with a reconstruction of Badiou's point of departure, and a side glance at the interwar years, we subject Badiou's hermeneutics of the century to a critical examination. One can principally agree with Badiou's differentiation between political and aesthetic radicalism, but his interpretation of Brecht's Maßnahme reveals a certain one-sidedness.

The term “Weltliteratur”, generally assumed to have been coined by Goethe in 1827, was actually used for the first time in 1773 by August Ludwig Schlözer. The German Enlightenment historian used the term in a dissertation on Icelandic literature and history, in an age when growing curiosity about the “margins” of Europe and beyond pointed towards a vision of “Weltgeschichte”, a history of universal human development. This early use of the term seems to have been forgotten, although the relevant passage was quoted already in 1920 by the Polish scholar Sigmund von Lempicki.

Biblical poetry is a still neglected genre in literary history. The current approaches are misleading both systematically and historically because they tend to split literary matter and biblical form, and they see biblical poetry as part of a broad secularization process. Four rewritings of Cain's biblical story, all written around 1800, show that literary approaches to the bible tended to produce new forms and innovative genres, such as an “undramatic” drama (Klopstock), a pastoral that implicitly criticises the pastoral worldview (Gessner), a prose poem that systematically blurs the border between poetry and prose (Coleridge), and a drama that combines the radial rebellion of Cain with the reinforcement of the biblical norms (Byron).

It is a truism among historians, sociologists, and anthropologists that, in the West, the advent of modern technologies of travel and communication led to an “overcoming of distance” and even a gradual “annihilation of space and time”. Whereas turn-of-the-century geographers like George R. Parkin and H. J. Mackinder suggest that this is also true for much of the non-Western world, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness dramatizes the Congo region as an “other space” that, although no longer white on the map, resists European attempts at empire-building and economic-technological expansion. Conrad's work shows that the perception of distance depends not only on the actual advances in travel and communication technologies, but also – and perhaps more importantly – on the construction of “imaginative geographies”. Around 1900, Central Africa was both spatially and temporarily distanced; it represented a different state of cultural development – a chronotope not (yet) part of the global network.

Jules Verne's representation of cannibalism in Maori society provides a good and largely correct overview of anthropophagy in New Zealand. He does not confine himself to a reproduction of simple facts but compares and discusses several theories on the origin of cannibalism. We have to reconsider the accusation that the French novelist's statements on Maori cannibalism constitute a racist image. Verne excuses this custom partly because of a supposed lack of food in New Zealand in those times; recent Maori authors present a much bloodier picture of the cannibal practices of their ancestors.

Baudelaire's reflections on his impact on posterity constitute part of his modernity. However, his Journaux intimes indicate that he did not think he could surpass the impact of his predecessor: his “grand livre” entitled Mon cœur mis à nu , with which Baudelaire intended to pass beyond Rousseau's Confessions , disintegrates into fragments, loose notes that aesthetic acts could not sublimate. Precisely this aesthetic failure demands a new evaluation of Baudelaire's relation to his predecessor. In the Paradis artfificiels , the intertextual relationship with the Confessions reveals a quintessential method of modernist writing. Although the title does not refer to the genre of confessional writing, the text itself exhibits it. Through the transparency of metonymical relations to the predecessor, performed as an “exercice de la fraternité”, and by way of pharmakon , Baudelaire develops a playful interaction with tradition and with his own “confessions”.

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg distinguishes itself by virtue of its rich and varied literary landscape, which is in no small measure due to its multi-cultural character: authors can choose between three different languages, among which Luxembourgish is increasingly gaining importance as a literary language alongside German and French. Several examples illustrate the general development of Luxembourgish literature; they show that this hybrid and intercultural literature, which has been traditionally defined in reference to other cultures, can be a literary model in an increasingly nomadic world.

Communication via internet has produced an “internet-lore” or “web folklore”, which is of great interest not only to cultural sociologists but also to those who study folklore and literature. The currently circulating illustrated tale Medved (Bear) serves as an example of the emergence and dissemination of web folklore on the Russian internet. Traditional fairy-tale motifs and media-generated myths mingle here in a multi-layered process of reception, and they meander through forums, websites and blogs on the worldwide web. In the process, they undergo (re)folklorization and a parodic literarization. The hybridity of this massive “grass roots” production of creative texts flits between written, oral and pictorial traditions. It is predestined to become literature's narrative feedstuff.