Volume 48, Issue 1

The poems of T. S. Eliot, Paul Celan, and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann treated in this article engage language difference in order to highlight poetry’s distinctive modernity. This involves them, and modern poetry in general, in a politics of culture which we can analyze on two levels: in terms of formal qualities, especially meter, and in terms of the programs and strategies the poems develop for themselves and for culture. The need to regard lyrical form as an enactment of cultural-political strategies becomes obvious in poetry’s use of language difference, not only between distinct langues in the sense of Saussure but more generally between any different standardizations of language. Lyric poetry builds on language difference, and since all language differences are culturally significant, lyric poetry is a genre of genuine cultural politics.

This literary critique of Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” combines three approaches. First, it follows the Italian Germanists Ladislao Mittner and Giuliano Baioni who showed the importance of Edmund Burke’s treatise “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” (1757) for Goethe’s poetry. Second, it explores Walter Benjamin’s essay and some thoughts of Hermann Cohen. They show the significance story “Die Wunderlichen Nachbarskinder” for the novel as a whole, the philosophical sense banning images, and the relation between the halacha and aggadah in literature. Finally, this essay studies the differences between the spoken and the written word in Goethe’s novel, as well as in Jewish traditions and media theories.

Keeping the methodological challenges of comparative literature in mind, the present analysis of Cao Xueqin’s Hong Lou Meng and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre explores the structural parallels of the texts. The interplay between the realist outline of the main stories and the metanarratives is evaluated in the light of the theory of myth. Instead of attempting to answer the dilemmas of human existence by naïvely deferring them to a mythological sphere, both texts remain remarkably ironic about the myths they employ. However, while in the Lehrjahre this literary self-consciousness helps to underline the value of the everyday world, Hong Lou Meng remains in wonder of an incomprehensible world.

The starting point of the essay is the observation that a number of important German translations of Chinese poetry have been accomplished by poets who were neither able to speak nor read Chinese. The question that arises from this is: what could be considered to be the actual significance of these translations? Albert Ehrenstein’s translation of Bo Juyi’s poems (in Germany also known as Pe-lo-thien) might provide an answer to this question. This essay focuses on his idea of political motivated ‚conceptual translation’ and attempts to demonstrate the transition from indirect allusion to the political appeal.

Gish Jen’s Typical American and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker are two essentially urban novels that focus on issues of (ethnic) identity construction and performativity in metropolitan New York, at the end of the twentieth century. Belonging to two distinct immigrant communities (Chinese and Korean), their protagonists are Americans in the making, whose personal evolutions and involutions are shaped by the social and cultural dilemmas of transition and (mal)adjustment. The present article scrutinizes the fictional interplay of public and private (hi)stories and discourses, and analyzes the ways in which stereotypical definitions and representations of otherness, investigations and exploitations of memory, and manipulations of individual and communal belief are called upon to illustrate the intricate mechanisms of contemporary United States. Citizenship, ethnicity, education, language, power relations, discrimination, consumerism and, last but not least, politics, are important elements that this comparative approach questions. By studying the two novels together, the article argues that the two writers capture different, yet equally relevant hypostases of the (Asian) immigrant’s self-questioning and self-inscription into the American nation, whose updated versions of the “Dream” have been dominated by the material rather than the spiritual concerns.

Medea kills. But why? For her murders, mythological sources provide plenty of explanations: She kills as an abandoned wife, as a vengeful princess, as an insane melancholic person, or as a hurt woman. Yet, these attempts to locate her motivation in a social, political, psychological, or even biological sphere don’t do Medea justice at all. Instead of locating her motivation in one of these categories, I will develop Medea as a transgressive figuration of the in-between, that is: a figuration that cannot be located in one category or the other and I will consider the murders of Euripides’ Medea as a catalyst that is capable of setting this figuration in motion. Whenever Medea kills, she can indeed be located in a category. Yet, as soon as each murder makes the process of localization possible, the figuration of Medea has already moved into another in-between.

Discussions of the animal have repeatedly examined both our epistemological desire and our epistemological insufficiency towards the non-human animal. In different ways Spinoza, Derrida, Nagel and Berger have shown that once the anthropomorphic layer of assumption has been peeled back, there appears the abyss of incomprehension between humans and the non-human animals. Yet the ‘abyssal difference’ does not address the scale or the scope of existing knowledge; it only points to the elusive and ultimate epistemological certainty, obscuring important distinctions between degrees and kinds of interspecies communication. This paper will consider the ground that is too often overlooked in arguments that appeal to the anthropomorphic fallacy. While we cannot share another species’ experience, we can, to some extent understand it through processes of inductive inference – that is anthropomorphism – and through studying it, broaden and deepen the ontological significance of both humans and animals. By looking at the process of humanizing the non-human as a basic cognitive method, this paper will argue that anthropomorphic reasoning can not only bridge the ‘abyss’ in crucial ways but have a powerful impact on animal ethics. Then it will link anthropomorphic reasoning to the process of othering – dehumanizing the human – and make salient the processes that inform the discursive and political practices of speciesistic and cultural hierarchization. Finally, it will examine representations of anthropomorphism, dehumanization and the construction of otherness in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005), a novel which is based on the Morichjhani massacre of 1978–79, when animal rights came into conflict with human rights.

Written in 1978–79 and published shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, Christa Wolf’s novella What remains records the interior monologue of a day in the life of a cautiously dissident writer under surveillance by the secret police. A latter-day Cassandra here asks herself what remains of the Communist project amidst its ongoing extinction. Subjected at the time to an ideologically motivated media campaign in West Germany, this report from a no man’s land – a No place. Nowhere  – between East and West remains as valid under global capitalism as it was under Soviet communism. What remains is its search for political, existential and literary alternatives. Its botched reception ironically confirms W. H. Auden’s remark that we don’t read major literature: it “reads us”.

Having survived an age in which legitimizing political narratives have smothered personal histories, Romanian writers are now increasingly interested in personal memoirs. The identity myths of post-war writing surface in the life stories published after 1989, emerging in a context that favors “the return of the repressed.” The mythology of “resistance via culture” is conditioned by an (auto)biographical ideology. It is latent in the personal writings of the “East-Ethic revisionists” and manifest in publications that advocate political dissidence via the aesthetic. The resultant myth-laden histories perform a therapeutic function in the authors’ profound inner identity reconstruction and a restorative function concerning their public image.