Volume 46, Issue 1

It has been argued that Romantic images of childhood have disappeared from late twentieth-century culture, and that the innocent child of nature has made way for the “knowing child.” However, if we go beyond pictorial traditions and include literary Romanticism, a caesura in the cultural construction of childhood becomes questionable. A close reading of Sally Mann's Immediate Family , an album of art photographs that have been proposed as crucial evidence of a break in the aesthetics and poetics of childhood, shows that the continuities between Mann's family photographs and the Romantic paradigm vastly outnumber the discontinuities.

This article investigates and compares the motif of the “primal scene” in the writings of Maurice Blanchot and Hélène Cixous. It explores Blanchot's account of a child's experience of the void of nothingness while looking at the sky, and a comparable scene of threatening strangeness that Cixous writes about after she encounters a dead bird in the lattice-work of her balcony. While both writers are keenly sensitive to the challenges that these scenes present, they differ in their responses to them. For Blanchot, the scene heightens the child's sense of alienation and isolation as he safeguards its secret. Cixous, on the other hand, views the incertitude that the scene elicits as a vital opportunity to reach out to the other.

Goethe's monodrama Proserpina is usually interpreted as a pure lamentation, a young girl's rightful mourning of her own death. Ovid's Metamorphoses , Goethe's main source, contains hopeful aspects not explicitly mentioned in Goethe's play, because it could be taken for granted that the audience knew about the elisions. The play may provoke the audience to contradict a solely negative characterization of death, by presenting not merely as the end but also as part of life. Goethe's oeuvre legitimates this interpretation.

Sophocles' Antigone has been repeatedly translated, reanimated, and refigured during historical moments of massive human losses. In the years 1914–18, Antigone was popular because of the parallels between ancient Thebes and Germany: unlike Oedipus Rex or Oedipus at Colonus , Antigone takes place in the aftermath of a great war, when the dead are piled upon each other just outside the gates of the city-state. Hasenclever's Antigone (1917) shows that it was impossible to bury the dead to commemorate Germany's mass casualties in a therapeutic fashion. The commemoration that takes place on stage is in implicit dialogue with discourses of memorialization during and after World War I, converting the stage into a space of memory.

Certain modern approaches to literature raise the text to the rank of the sacred and the interpreter to the role of a priest. What is usually regarded here as classical is an intermingling of the Antique tradition in Europe and Oriental exoticism, which was popular in various European countries during the nineteenth century. The lamp's classical form in Mörike's “Auf eine Lampe” is unstable. The space where the lamp ‘shines’ is non-European.

Despite the existence of a Foucauldian research tradition in Kafka scholarship, its central tenets (power, subjectivity, and space) have seldom been brought together in readings of Kafka's The Trial . This article proposes to read Kafka's novel as a coherent reflection on the nature of disciplinary power in modern society, whose hero, K., can be regarded as a ‘confessional animal’ engaging in the most elaborate acts of self-examination. This confesssional subjectivity is analyzed in relation to the nature of power visible in the novel and its specific spatial constellations. Each of these is explored at the intersection between the Foucauldian theory of disciplinary power and the notion of a ‘society of global control’ developed more recently, particularly by Gilles Deleuze.

In his comedy Der Schwierige , Hugo von Hofmannsthal imagines a community without chauvinism. The play's main protagonist Count Hans Karl Bühl claims that it is indecent to speak, and even to have experiences, and proposes an attitude of humility that would in effect entail the individual's self-effacement. However, this attack on individuality as a form of insolence does not pave the way for an affirmation of any greater social or mystical whole, since such formations would run the risk of reproducing arrogance at a higher level. Once one has relinquished all claims to superiority as an individual, one cannot re-emerge as a secure member of a harmoniously unified and stable collective. The community to which the individual should surrender himself to shed his arrogance exists in a genuine manner only in the moment when all of its members abandon any presumptions about the love, admiration, and collaborative capacities of others. If its members would speak triumphantly about their connection, this community would cease to be. To sustain its mode of togetherness, its participants must remain separate and silent, discrete and discreet.

Critics still find it hard to explain those Shakespearean moments when the destiny of an individual character appears reflected in the cosmic order. Taking Leibniz as the starting-point for interpreting Julius Caesar enables a philosophical account of the play's “baroque” elements.

An intermedial comparison and an analysis of shared motifs and themes in the works of William Blake and Hermann Hesse shows that Hesse's oft-criticized tendency to resist consensus reality in favor of obscure esotericism ought to be understood as a consistent continuation of Blake's visionary mysticism.

Drawing insight from Hans Frankel and Robert Bly, we may examine how these very similar poems address death, transition, and the cycle of human and natural events through imagism and the skillful use of associative counterparts. Differences between the poems may have their root in disparate cultural attitudes towards death and nature.

Yves Bonnefoy's and Michel Deguy's poetry centers on “Verdichtung” (concision, verging on hermeticism) and “Transparenz” (transparency). The terms reveal that their poetry wants to create a common life-space, promoting language as the instrument of a mutual, reflexive understanding. Poetry is a common good; while modulated by the music of individual languages, it is nourished by the practice of translation – a means of permanent opening to otherness. – The intense poetic dialogue between France and Germany seems to have entered a period of near-indifference. However, German perspectives on Yves Bonnefoy, who is relatively well-known and Michel Deguy, who is largely unknown in Germany, bring out their seminal links with Paul Celan, who likewise thought of poetry as an encounter (“Die Poesie denkt an die Begegnung”).

There is a striking difference between the first appearance of literature of (labor) migration in German and in Dutch culture. In Germany, first-generation labor migrant writing appeared in the early 1980s, whereas writers of migration background (mostly of the second generation) entered Dutch culture only in the mid-1990s. The emergence of migrant writing in the two countries is examined in their specific socio-political contexts and their effect on contemporary German and Dutch literature of migration.

It is commonly believed that One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest is an anti-establishment novel, but McMurphy's motives in defying the establishment, as epitomized by his attitude towards Miss Ratched, may issue from his antagonism to female power. Some instances suggest that McMurphy's gender biased encounters with Nurse Ratched and the inmates, may be considered as part of the capitalist patriarchal ideology he is generally believed to oppose.