Band 53, Heft 1

As a methodical exercise, Stifter’s Narrenburg from the Studien is subjected to new comparative approaches. Initial complications between testament (“Fideicommiß”) and the eponymous castle are revealed as a memorial dispositive of two distinct, but intertwined media: writing and the spatial complex of built “Rothenstein”. Another form of difference emerges from intermedial enquiry. First, the focus on temporal ir/reversibility reconsiders what has been regarded as the historicist background of the narrative, thus providing a more dynamic reading of dealing with the past. Secondly, singular and compound architectures need to be distinguished in order to evaluate the ambivalent aesthetics of the “Narrenburg”. Finally, the angle of solitary vs. ensemble is transferred onto the opening scenes of Kafka’s novel Das Schloß . This intertextual comparison does not rely on similar motifs or symbolic meaning; rather, designing space depends on building specific relations, even in literary texts. Along with the theoretical upgrade of productive intermediality the interdisciplinary value of architectural concepts beyond mere topographical perspectives becomes apparent.

Two bold descriptions of bullfighting in German literature – a section of Kurt Tucholsky’s Ein Pyrenäenbuch and the final episode of Thomas Mann’s Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull – can be read in the context of French authors who (about the 1920 s and 1930s) were fascinated by the corrida and the idea of abject sacredness and transgres­sion. The comparison of striking motives (e. g., the art of the matador, the suffer­ing of the horses) reveals how literary texts reflect the ritual character of bullfighting, represent its disgusting aspects, and deal with the taurobolic “scandalon” of death and eros. Whereas Tucholsky encounters a trivial spectacle and nevertheless feels the attrac­tion of violence, Thomas Mann’s narrator is confronted with mythic thought (Mithras) and Dionysiac excess.

In the following paper, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express are considered, and compared, as exemplars of what Andrea Goulet has labelled “Global French,” which is to say that both texts convey non-English, and especially French, language use through their own original English. Both texts will be shown to be born in, stage, and depart from primal linguistic scenes: the Babelian confusion of Poe’s multiple foreign witnesses will be embodied in the impediments that keep them from the scene of the crime; in Christie’s case, the multilingual investigation on board the Orient Express will stand in place of stilted and curtailed conversation held, in the Global French of Christie’s English, on the platform of another train. As sites of original translation and communicative excess and failure, these classic texts are about language first and crime second; indeed, the murder on Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express embodies taking place but, ultimately, does not take place at all.

From an intermedial point of view, this paper deals with a hitherto neglected aspect of Elias Canetti’s The Voices of Marrakesh (1968). As I will show, Canetti’s travel log, written after a trip to Morocco in 1954, is closely related to contemporary films, starting with Gavin Lambert’s Another Sky , a movie shot during Canetti’s stay. On the basis of three examples, my paper argues that such films can contribute to a new and better understanding of the specificities of the author’s view of the Moroccan city.

Jane Tompkins has argued that a deeply conflicted relationship exists between men and language in the Western. Deploying too much language emasculates Western heroes, men who privilege action over talk. For support, Tompkins turns to a number of moments in Shane , the 1953 film adaptation of the 1949 novel of the same title by Jack Schaefer. Tompkins argues that the film constructs a model of masculinity that wholly rejects language, a move that is destructive and exploitative to self and others. However, a close reexamination of the novel reveals a model of masculinity that is more positive and flexible towards language and gender than Tompkins’s views on the Western suggest. A close rereading of the novel shows that men in Westerns do not always use talk and silence to subjugate women and others, and that the valuing of language over action does not always end in violence or exploitation. Furthermore, the film adaptation of the novel will be examined, a work that occupies a more cherished place in American culture than the novel, a situation that is the reverse of traditional cultural hierarchies in which the literary source material is privileged over the film adaptation. Ultimately, the novel and film are engaging in different ways, yet Schaefer’s novel, rather than being relegated to middle school literature classrooms, rewards serious critical and scholarly attention, particularly in the context of the film adaptation and critical discourse on the representation of masculinity in the Western.

When critics declare that Edward P. Jones’s The Known World represents moral turpitude, capitalist proclivities, slavery, and whittling of white supremacy, their assertions are in order. But they often miss accounting for how The Known World , which bears some indices of the neo-slave narrative owing to its appropriation of the incidents of slavery in a novelistic platform, complicates its sub-tradition. This work investigates the text’s two-fold complication. First, Jones complicates the neo-slave narrative form by depicting slavery from a little known perspective of intra-racial slavery amongst black people. Then, he casts a white character, and not a black one, in the mold of a classical tragic hero. Mimetic desire, René Girard’s concept for an individual’s imitation of a prior model’s behavior, is drawn on to bare characters’ actions that accentuate both strands of complication. As the basis of all human action that includes rivalry, violence, and scapegoating, mimetic desire unravels the ‘mystery’ surrounding the sort of slavery overwhelmingly acknowledged by critics as untraditional in The Known World and the tragedy, also unique to the neo-slave narrative form, it gives rise to.

The paper examines the way Vermes’s bestseller and its cinematic adaptation, Look Who’s Back , are structured in analogy to Lacan’s notion of the fundamental fantasy, i. e., the framework within which subjects organize their desire in relation to the Other or to the Other’s desire. Employing mainly Adam Kotsko’s terms of awkwardness and sociopathy, I argue that the characters in the novel and the film and the implied and actual audiences constitute Hitler, the narrator and protagonist, as a fantasmatic awkward-sociopath big Other. Hitler is portrayed both as a ludicrous representation of an unsettling and awkward social order, that cannot implement clear and definite norms, and as a cynical sociopath who is incapable not only of overcoming this order but also of fixing it by making it ‘whole’ and consistent again. Discussing major differences between the novel and the film, I examine the ways audiences may fall and avoid falling into the trap of the novel’s and the film’s fantasy. This interpretation contributes simultaneously to the assessment of Hitler’s specific portrayal in Look Who’s Back and the critical exploration of his emblematic representation in our contemporary culture as well as its reasons and effects.