Volume 45, Issue 1

Contrary to common assumptions, medieval poets did not shy away from discussing the various consequences of bad weather on the lives of their protagonists. In fact, a careful examination of a wide range of romances, verse narratives, goliardic epics, and prose tales, among other genres, reveals the true extent to which both Fall and Winter weather, but then also sudden tempests, surprising snow fall, flooding, scorching heat, the unexpected drop of temperature, mighty storms etc. could play a significant role in literary texts and often serve important functions as narrative catalysts both in the Middle Ages and in the early modern age. As this paper illustrates, bad weather, and hence the suffering of the protagonists, often proves to be instrumental in changing the course of events, in disrupting a hero's ordinary life, and in challenging an individual in his/her very existence. In particular love affairs could be severely impacted by bad weather, as some authors specifically explored in their texts that do not necessarily fall within the category of traditional courtly literature. Significantly, bad weather also served exceedingly well as the backdrop for the initiation of storytelling and so enjoyed a considerable metaphorical function.

Anthropological, topological, and problem-oriented approaches together show that the topos of the thirty-year old had a relatively stable history of meaning in German literature and its European contexts. In western culture, the approximate age of thirty marks the threshold between youth and adulthood; the continuity of the mark is anchored in the traditional age typology and the age of Jesus Christ during his active period until his death at thirty-three. The meaning can be related to literature's preoccupation with mortality and the brevity of life.

The search for the author of the Nachtwachen von Bonaventura (1804) among the romantics has diverted attention from the ancient and eighteenth-century connections of the work, among which puppet theatre plays an important role. Puppetry is directly treated in the Fourth, the Eighth, and the Fifteenth Nightwatch. In the Fourth, a dark stranger relates his gloomy love adventures through Commedia dell'arte, performed by mechanically drawn string-marionettes. As befits a menippea, their mistakes and misadventures put “ultimate philosophical positions” to the test, but suggest no solutions. After the catastrophic ending, Hanswurst ruminates on destiny and free will, touching fleetingly on important quests of eighteenth-century philosophy. The Nachtwachen also makes innumerable indirect references to puppetry, most prominently via Don Quixote, Tom Jones and v. Thümmel's Reise in die mittäglichen Provinzen von Frankreich .

Max Dauthendey belonged to those German writers at the turn of last century who were open to new cultural experiences on their journeys around the world. In Dauthendey's case, this pertained especially to Asia. His often reprinted novellas in Die acht Gesichter am Biwasee and Lingam , still part of the German literary canon, have often been considered examples of exotic literature. However, the Biwasee-texts, in particular, show a great knowledge of Japanese history and culture and represent early examples of deep intercultural encounters between European and Japanese mentalities and cultures.

While a ‘good’ style, for Quintilian, is correct, lucid, elegant, and balanced, Gilles Deleuze, in his essay He Stuttered, examined the style of a language in disequilibrium. These two concepts of style may be used to interpret Pieter De Buysser's L'opéra bègue / Stotteropera (2004). The Flemish theatre-maker and playwright challenges the comfort of spectators, forces them to stutter in their interpretation and to dissolve closed identities. Jacques Rancière, who considered the contradictory history of rhetoric and the model of the ‘good orator’, has argued that politics revolves around what is seen and who has the ability to see and the talent to speak. The question is whether L'Opéra bègue / Stotteropera takes part in a certain recasting of the sensible, and, more generally, whether performances that leave the spectator stuttering can be termed ‘political performances’.

Meine Sprache und ich (1968), characterized by its author, Ilse Aichinger, as “narration,” can be read as a reflection on language and existence in an extreme borderline situation. Aichinger undoubtedly refers to the persecution and extermination of the Other in the Holocaust, but instead of discussing this as a historically unique occurrence, she treats its impact on the language and existence of the individual. While the ”I” still attempts to communicate by means of a speech that the text records, its unique personal language begins to detach itself as an Other, refusing all further communication. The epochal achievement of Aichinger's analysis, formulated when the Linguistic Turn was at its peak, is confirmed by a comparison with Jacques Derrida's much later ideas in Monolingualism of the Other (1996).

The theme of disfiguration allows a comprehensive analysis of Sarah Kane's oeuvre. It brings to light the central themes and rapid evolution of Kane's work, a body of work which, in five short plays, liberated itself from the mimetic tradition to deploy a resolutely innovative dramaturgy centered on voice and language. Her first three plays – Blasted, Phaedra's Love and Cleansed – are closely linked, for each of them interrogates the interdependence of love and violence, and each portrays the defeat of a human being as a moral and social entity. Such defeats lead to the interior decomposition of the characters in Kane's last two pieces, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis : they stage the dissociation of a psyche into multiple interior voices.

While Gertrude Stein is often celebrated as a proto-postmodernist whose formal experiments destabilize traditional notions of subjectivity, a reading of her little-discussed Lectures in America reveals that her poetics actually relies on the anxious suppression of the threat of the loss of a sovereign form of subjectivity. Following Rei Terada's distinction between subjects and “self-differential selves,” it can be shown that Stein's theory of the emotions and her account of the emergence of her poetics theorize the theater as the site of an inescapable encounter with the self's difference from itself. By deploying an elaborate rhetoric of the uncanny, the lectures aim at containing the threat of the loss of a strong subjectivity by locating it in the theater alone.

Terézia Mora's Ophelia does not become insane but slowly beings to understand, and holds a monologue in the throne room that is empty. She is caught in an attempt to construct herself as a subject; the outside world, with Hamlet in its center, is a condition of this self-construction but constantly seems to evade her. The process is analyzed here in terms of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis and Jürgen Link's semiotic discourse analysis.

Post-structural literary theory has deconstructed and reconstructed traditional concepts of author, text, and reader in terms of biographism, death of the author, and text/intertext. Milan Kundera's L'immortalité raises questions about these concepts. The real author, Kundera, uses in this novel an apparently omnipotent narrator as the intellectual authority, but the narrator's interpretations of Goethe, Romanticism, and Bettina von Arnim turn out to be simplistic and false anecdotes – which deconstructs the narrator's authority.

Questions like “How do historical and cultural traumas affect film history?” and “How are they represented and why?” have a significant tradition in film studies. However, most approaches have been focusing on matters of content, largely neglecting the filmic form. Exploring the connection between the documentary representation of such traumatic historical events as the Vietnam War and the Abu Ghraib prison torture on the one hand, and the film language of “terror films” of the 1970s and 2000s on the other, it is possible to show that depictions of the historical horrors correspond to the specific contemporary filmic forms of the horror films.