spectrum Literaturwissenschaft / spectrum Literature
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Edited by:
Moritz Baßler
Today’s spectrum of research in literary studies is characterized by a sense of openness to the methods of comparative literature and cultural studies, along with a wide range of interdisciplinary crossover. The spectrum Literaturwissenschaft series is intended to be a forum for this pluralistic new model of literary studies. It presents papers that are informed by methodologically innovative, frequently comparative approaches, and whose findings are of importance well beyond the narrow boundaries of national philological horizons.
Author / Editor information
Wissenschaftlicher Beirat/Editorial Board
Peter-André Alt, Aleida Assmann,
Marcus Deufert, Terence James Reed,
Simone Winko, Bernhard Zimmermann
Reviews
"[...] mit einem gelungenen Relaunch wiederbelebt. [...] So zeigt das ansprechende Äußere der einzelnen Bände den Funken komparatistischen Denkens in den Regenbogenfarben eines Spektralnebels, aus dem der Titel der Reihe hervorleuchtet: spectrum Literaturwissenschaft."
Peter Goßens in: Komparatistik, 2007
»An Zweisprachigkeit in der Dichtung glaube ich nicht«. Wie kommt der multilinguale Autor Paul Celan zu solch einer Aussage und wie verhält sie sich zu seinem mehrsprachigen Werk? Während Celans Lyrik von verschiedenen Nationalsprachen, Dialekten und Fachsprachen geprägt ist, äußert sich der Autor in poetologischen Reflexionen immer wieder skeptisch gegenüber literarischer Polyglossie. Dabei bedient sich Celan eines Vokabulars der Farben, das Vorstellungen von Ein- und Mehrsprachigkeit auf erhellende Weise ins Bild setzt. Die Arbeit beleuchtet dieses Sprach- und Farbdenken in seiner Verflochtenheit mit den politischen Farbensprachen der 1950er und 60er Jahre und entwickelt farbtheoretisch inspirierte Ansätze zur Erforschung multilingualer Texte. Im Zentrum steht Celans Idee einer ›graueren Sprache‹, die als mehrsprachige Sprache neu gelesen wird. Diese Relektüre des berühmten poetologischen Konzepts setzt innovative Impulse für die Celan-Forschung und situiert Celans ›grauere Sprache‹ im Kontext zeitgenössischer Debatten um Sprachgemeinschaft, Universalismus und bunte Vielfalt in der frühen Bundesrepublik.
This study examines literary and artistic treatments of the wreck of the Medusa. The historically verified nautical catastrophe of 1816 has repeatedly inspired critical reflections on civilization and society within the context of the practice of cannibalism. Alongside the painting by Géricault, this volume discusses relevant aspects of literary works by Peter Weiss and Franzobel.
Michel de Montaignes Essais (1580–1595) haben schon früh eine breite und komplexe internationale Wirkung entfaltet. Diese Rezeption, die in der Gegenwart eine globale Dimension erreicht hat, ist bisher nur partiell erforscht worden. Die Beiträge des Sammelbandes untersuchen bislang wenig beachtete Phasen dieser Rezeption und legen dabei einen Schwerpunkt auf den deutschsprachigen Raum, Italien, Spanien und hispanoamerikanische Länder. Teils fragen die Aufsätze nach längerfristigen Konjunkturen der Montaigne-Rezeption und nach ihren Bedingungen, teils analysieren sie einzelne Übersetzungen und Transferprozesse mit Blick auf ihre kulturellen Kontexte. Weitere Leitfragen gelten den Deutungen, die Montaignes Essais im Laufe der Jahrhunderte erfahren haben, sowie den vielfältigen Formen, die diese Aneignungen und Lektüren der Essais in Literatur, Philosophie und Wissenschaft angenommen haben. Der Band schließt damit Lücken in der Forschung zur Montaigne-Rezeption und gibt dieser Forschung neue Impulse in Gestalt weiterführender systematischer Fragen. Er ist darüber hinaus aber auch relevant für Forschungen zum Kulturtransfer, zur Rezeptionsgeschichte der frühneuzeitlichen Literatur und zur Weltliteratur.
Der Band untersucht Figuren der Endlichkeit in der europäischen Romantik. Ausgangspunkt ist die Beobachtung, dass Figuren des Letzten – letzte Menschen (J.-B Grainville: Le dernier homme (1805); M. Shelley: The Last Man (1826)), letzte Dinge (I. Kant: Das Ende aller Dinge (1794) – in der Romantik ein spezifisches Endlichkeitsbewusstsein artikulieren. Die einsetzende romantische Reflexion der Endlichkeit, die sich synchron mit den zeitgenössischen Diskursen über die Begrenztheit von Ressourcen ausbildet, stellt dabei den Beginn einer genuin modernen Erfahrung dar. Die Verzeitlichung wird um 1800, so die Grundthese, vor allem verhandelt und reflektiert an poetologischen und philosophischen Figuren der Endlichkeit, des Letzten und des Verbrauchbaren. Indem der Band etwa das Fragment, die Ruine oder die „Denkmäler der alten Zeiten" (F. Schiller) als Figurationen einer Reflexion der Endlichkeit in den Blick nimmt, schärft und ergänzt er klassische Elemente der Epochenkonstruktion der Romantik, welche bislang vorwiegend mit Begriffen wie Entgrenzung, Potenzierung und Unendlichkeit oder mit einem Fokus auf Gegenwart, Jetztzeit und Augenblick in Verbindung gebracht wird.
Die Studie untersucht erstmals historisch umfassend die Bedeutung literarischer Mehrsprachigkeit in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts. In Werkanalysen von Franz Kafka, Dada, Mascha Kaléko, Paul Celan, W.G. Sebald, Yoko Tawada u.a. werden historisch-kulturelle, literarästhetische und mediale Dimensionen textinterner Mehrsprachigkeit herausgearbeitet. Methodisch-theoretisch wird dargelegt, dass die literarische Gestaltung von Mehrsprachigkeit keine Mimesis soziokultureller Sprachsituationen und –biografien ist, sondern ein eigenständiges poetisches Verfahren. Verbunden damit ist nicht nur eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit den kulturellen Normen der Einsprachigkeit und der Nationalliteratur, sondern darüber hinaus eine ausgeprägt poetologische Ebene, auf der Fragen der Bedeutungsgenerierung und der ästhetischen Materialität des Zeichens verhandelt werden.
Die Studie vereint so eine Literaturgeschichte mehrsprachiger Texte mit einem neuen theoretischen Zugang für die literarische Mehrsprachigkeitsforschung, der durchgängig die mit Sprachwechseln stets verknüpften ästhetischen, poetologischen und sprachkritischen Anteile sichtbar macht.
The study of Chinese poetry has provided numerous German poets with opportunities to explore aesthetic approaches and to sound out social and political positions. This volume analyzes how German-speaking poetry translators in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries entered into dialogue with Chinese poetry – and used their position of distance to explore new paths within their own poetry.
Following various death throes and reconceptualisations, contemporary comparative literature has become confusing. In view of this situation, this book aims to reassure itself of the fundamental concepts of comparative literature and to critically examine definitions of the subject as they have been presented in important programme texts. In the first part of the book, central comparative concepts such as border and foreignness as well as the comparative activity of comparison are clarified. The second part is historically oriented and concentrates on text-related studies of relevant programme texts that have decisively shaped the concept of comparative literature in the 20th century. Individual chapters are devoted to H. M. Posnett, F. Baldensperger, P. v. Tieghem, R. Wellek, H. Remak, R. Etiemble, G. Steiner, C. Bernheimer and the Damrosch/Spivak controversy. In terms of research history, the book thus contributes building blocks to a comprehensive history of comparative literature, which is still lacking. In terms of university didactics, the book is also suitable for use in seminars due to its concentration on a manageable number of texts.
The study opens up the translation culture of the expressionist generation, which has been neglected by research, in a systematic way for the first time. It ties in with the interest in literary translation that has since strengthened in German studies, and represents a plea for greater attention to translational processes in modernist studies.
Wie ist die ambivalente Beziehung der queeren Literaturtradition zum Katholizismus zu verstehen? Diese Frage beschäftigt die vorliegende Forschungsarbeit, die sich als Ziel setzte, die ambivalente Beziehung der queeren Literaturästhetik zur katholischen Religion zu erforschen. Dafür geht diese Dissertation vom Frühwerk Fernando Vallejos und Josef Winklers aus, um drei Hauptstrategien der bejahenden und verneinenden Religionskritik zu skizzieren.
Der Band geht davon aus, dass sich die Literatur und ihre Wissenschaft transdisziplinär gestalten und von Denkfiguren, Metaphern oder Modellen anderer Disziplinen speisen und umgekehrt zu einem zentralen Ort innovativer Begriffsbildung werden. Werden solche Prozesse literaturwissenschaftlicher Beschreibungsvokabulare selbst zum Gegenstand der Betrachtung, dann fallen verstärkt Rupturen, mitunter auch Kontroversen im Gebrauch der vielfach aus den Bereichen von Organizität und Technizität transferierten Metaphoriken ins Auge: Organisches und Technisches überlagern sich, interferieren, tauschen die Plätze. Eben diesen Phänomenen der Grenzüberschreitung in der metaphorischen Übertragung von Verbindungen des Organischen und Technischen – die im Angesicht neuester Technologien und Biopolitiken mehr den „Normalfall", denn eine Ausnahme bilden – geht der Band aus einer historiographischen Perspektive vom Mittelalter bis heute nach. „Organitechnoscience" stellt sich somit als Laborbegriff vor, literarische wie literaturtheoretische Operationen technischer und organischer Interferenzen nicht nur post, sondern auch ante digitisation nachzuzeichnen und auf ihre wissenspolitischen Dimensionen hin zu befragen.
Medical, sociological, and journalistic discourse currently views depression as the dominant psychological disease in modern societies. This volume examines narrative texts of the early twentieth century and contemporary literature from a literary studies perspective to investigate the motifs and literary devices of the depressive, depressive characters, and relevant stagings by authors.
This volume suggests an entanglement and practice history for literary modernism that no longer follows a great narrative of autonomous aesthetics, for many avant-garde projects developed against the backdrop of a heteronomous entity thought to be superior – as primitivism, as religious mysticism, as a critique of or faith in science, as political partisanship, or as a historico-philosophical mission.
Als Verkörperung des amerikanischen Traums scheint der Selfmademan untrennbar mit dem Selbst- und Fremdverständnis Amerikas verbunden zu sein. Seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts avanciert die Figur auch in der deutschen Literatur zu einem vielgestaltigen Beschreibungsmedium der Moderne. Literaturgeschichtliche Signifikanz entfaltet der Selfmademan vor allem dadurch, dass er als Träger einer neuen Subgattung, dem Aufstiegsroman, ein Gegenmodell zum Bildungsroman profiliert. Dieses Modell vernetzt Erzählbestände aus der zeitgenössischen Ratgeber- und Biographieliteratur, der Evolutions- und Unternehmertheorie. Verhandelt werden Bilder der Kraftmobilisierung, Zukunftsoffenheit und Maskulinität, der ,Amerikanisierung‘ und Ökonomisierung.
Die Studie beleuchtet das historische Redefeld um den Selfmademan und seine literarischen Manifestationen, wobei insbesondere Romane und Erzählungen des Realismus, Naturalismus und der Zeit um 1900 in den Blick genommen werden. Rekonstruiert wird so die Imaginations- und Verfahrensgeschichte eines Figurentypus, der im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert modernediagnostische Beschreibungen anleitet, interdiskursive Resonanzeffekte auslöst und mit dem Aufstiegsroman eine facettenreiche Subgattung begründet.
What happens to urban life during war? Even though cities have never been left untouched by war, since 1914, the violence of war has been characterized by the dissolution of the boundaries of the front, creating a continuum between the "home front," the events of war, and the post-war period. This volume asks how culture is produced under such conditions by taking a pan-European perspective to examine the period 1914–1945.
How does literature deal with the fact that catastrophes occur "just because"? Literature has been occupying itself with the contingency of catastrophic events for centuries. This book examines texts about "once-in-a-century catastrophes" and shows how literature illustrates the problem of contingency in relation to experiences of catastrophe, reports on established patterns of sensemaking, and ultimately develops its own ideas of sensemaking.
Influential texts such as Loen’s Honest Man at Court, Haller’s Usong, and Wieland’s The Golden Mirror form a clearly defined genre that serves to transmit political knowledge through narrative. The study reconstructs the emergence of the genre, from the productive transformation of its French forerunners to the functional changes that occurred around 1800, combining questions of narrative technique and the political purpose of storytelling.
From 1925 onward, New Objectivity quickly spread from painting and literature to diverse art disciplines in Germany and, as Nieuwe Zakelijkheid, also to the Netherlands. In order to elicit and explain the commonalities and specifics of each national reception, this anthology brings research perspectives from German and Dutch studies into direct dialog for the first time, thus generating new impetus for both disciplines.
It is often claimed in contemporary public debate that we live in a “post-factual age.” This interdisciplinary volume employs the theories and methods of narrative research to investigate the relationship between the “post-factual” and narrative. It seeks to make sense of the core concepts in the debate, such as post-factual, post-truth, reality and truth, events, tales, stories, and narratives.
“Thing” and “image” are two key terms in the theoretical, literary, and philosophical texts of the Romantic era. This volume examines the historical and systematic connections between the two terms in European literature from the perspectives of philology, comparative literature, and aesthetics.
This volume adapts a semiotic text-context model for the analysis of the contemporary circus, a topic that has gone largely unexplored. It is the first study to document and interpret the genre based on theories of textual scholarship.
This interpretation sheds light on the ethics revolving around character construction by examining the constraints thwarting any attempt to complete a biographical account or convey a protagonist that led his or her life. Neither Musil nor Sterne posit a narrative agenda that could reach a last chapter or lead to a groundwork determining their ethics. A closer look into their tight-knit prose reveals that both rely on the narrating, on a skill that must be incessantly cultivated through a digressive or essayistic style.
Equipped with a vast theoretical repertoire, this approach makes a strong case for a new constellation in comparative literature.
This study examines literary fantasies of boundary dissolution as a development constitutive of modernism. The concept of transgressive subjectivity denotes an extreme form of aesthetic subjectivity resulting from writing about oneself. Drawing on Foucault, this approach enables an interpretation of literature as a space of possibility that generates radical alternatives to modern subjectivity.
Most theories of philological research rely on a seemingly obvious premise: one imagines written signs as graphical patterns associated with meanings; one sees the human mind as the abode of thoughts and intentions. The study shows how this concept systematically misdirects academic thinking and proposes a fundamental conceptual redefinition.
The relationship between literature and music, whether in song, opera, or in a formal perspective, is intermedial. The study of this (often adaptive) relationship demands interdisciplinary competency and the subject of specific methods that this book describes and reflects upon in examples from the 18th century to the present day. Along with classical methods of hermeneutics, it presents the methods of empirical aesthetics.
This volume counters the oft-noted semantic imprecision of the term “classicism” in scientific and ordinary discourse with a functional definition of the concept. The essays on literature, music, and fashion in different national and cultural contexts describe classicism as a valid norm across time; they bring classicism into focus as a cultural praxis that is experienced and observable in intermedial and intercultural processes.
The book undertakes extensive close readings of three exemplary literary texts: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther and Zola’s The Rougon-Macquarts. These readings provide the basis for reconstructing three distinct formations, negotiating the relationship between literature and weather in the 17th, the 18th and the 19th centuries.
The study is a pioneering contribution to the recent debates of literature’s indebtedness to the environment. It initiates a rewriting of literary history that is weather-sensitive; the question of literature’s agency, its power to affect, cannot be raised without understanding the way the weather works in a certain cultural formation.
European cultural and literary history has long demonstrated a passion for myth. Among other things, myth is a sign of otherness, as demonstrated by this study, which explores numerous theories of myth and literary texts. The study identifies a common thread that runs through diverse conceptions of myth while suggesting a surprising explanation for the seemingly ineluctable persistence of myth and the mythical.
The study employs a transdisciplinary and methodologically innovative approach to show that for Schwitters, the transgression of existing literary categories went hand-in-hand with the establishment of alternative patterns of order that furnish the structure for his literary and artistic works. This new perspective reveals the ongoing relevance of Schwitters’ work as an aesthetic space and medium of reflection in a (post)-modern media culture.
The volume examines transformations in literary communication processes from the 18th to the early 21st century. It considers various media and international constellations of literary communication along with questions of critique, valuation, and emotionalization. In addition to literary and cultural scholars, the contributors include columnists and hypertext creators.
The volume focuses on the nature of the event in literature. It describes the diverse strategies by which writers create a sense of eventfulness within and through their texts. The concept of "event" makes it possible to develop a new description of modalities that considers contemporary perspectives on literary self-presentation as a way of improving our understanding of the logic of modern literature.
Dante’s Divine Comedy triggered multiple processes of reception. This book reflects on their diversity, offering explanatory readings of single cantos and themes, insights into literary adaptations and reformulations, as well as essays devoted to aesthetic transformational processes contained the work. The contributors include art historians and literary scholars from different specialties.
For the first time, based on a critical examination of Ernst Jandl’s published writings and unpublished legacy, this book offers a comprehensive sense of his literary works with a focus on the circumstances of their creation and their poetological principles. The study thereby initiates a new understanding of Jandl, and by revealing his international influence, makes a contribution to transatlantic German studies.
Adolf Muschg, Kuno Raeber, and Alain Robbe-Grillet were inspired by meta-images – that is, paintings that were allegorical depictions of objects, painting, or the art viewer. Despite their many differences, these authors are united in their meta-reflective attitude toward perceptual habits and the art system, leading them to construct meta-novels that transcend familiar patterns of reference.
“Transvisual” is a succinct term that describes a core theme dominating all of Carl Einstein’s work across different creative periods and textual genres. In placing his critiques of vision and language in the context of contemporary discourse, it becomes apparent that with his poetics of the transvisual, Einstein took on an important and unique position in the complex discursive network of modernity.
This comparative study reconstructs for the first time the reception of French symbolists in German poetry from 1890 to 1923 and illustrates their key role in the modernization of German poetic language.
In 1995, fifty years after the end of the war and five years after Germany’s reunification, a remarkable number of literary works were published and later canonized. In retrospect, they are exemplary of the key trends in a new kind of contemporary literature. This volume explores the proposition that from a literary perspective, it is 1995 (rather than 1989/90) that represent the true “year of change” for German language literature.
Research on human sexuality enjoyed a boom around 1900. Beyond the boundaries of science, a widespread social debate arose about the new discoveries and their potential social, moral, and political implications. This anthology examines the interactions between science, society, and art and offers historical-critical readings for a broad range of representations of sexual pathology.
Around 1800, Schiller and Hölderlin were among the authors who separated literature from philosophy and assigned literature a special status due to its quality of presentation. This study reconstructs their argumentation and uses example literary texts to inquire about its implications for the presentation of individual themes and the formal structure of texts, as well as regarding its applicability to individual genres.
During the Biedermeier Period, the fine arts continuously expanded their scope, enabling new encounters with their “sister arts.” This volume assembles a broad range of studies on the intermediality of art and literature between Beethoven and Heine, Goethe and Richard Wagner – questioning the preconditions for an intermedial discourse and seeking deiatary links between specific forms of semantization in the individual arts.
Since the “return of the author,” questions of literary and scientific authorship have been garnering more attention. This volume clearly presents the research literature in this field, and describes theories and practices of authorship through historical and systematic case studies from the perspectives of hermeneutics, poststructuralism, narratology, fiction theory, genre studies, and staging strategies.
This volume explores the image of Galileo Galilei’s as a scientist of the early modern age along with cultural perceptions of his discoveries and writings. It examines the interconnections between scientific theories and practices and their textual and visual representations.
This study addresses the phenomenon of writing, and more specifically, the process of literary and scientific writing, as seen at the intersection of literary scholarship, empirical writing research, the cognitive sciences, and the history of science. It analyzes many previously unknown manuscripts and sources from three canonical authors of the eighteenth century.
Homer, Sappho, Horace, Catullus, and other authors of antiquity have enjoyed a rebirth in German-speaking lyric poetry since the 1990s. Examining the work of four particularly notable poets – Durs Grünbein, Thomas Kling, Barbara Köhler, and Raoul Schrott – this book illuminates how classical antiquity is presented anew in contemporary lyric poetry, and sheds light on the ideas that are connected to this rediscovery of the Greek and Roman past.
Epochs are constituted by their differentiated repertoires of knowledge and concepts, and also by distinctive metaphors. Metaphors shape the sensibility of an era and define its core ideas and style of thinking. This volume compiles essays from linguistics, literary studies, and philosophy in order to understand the genesis, structure, and function of metaphors typical of an epoch.
This collection aims to contribute to current discussion on the relationship between literature and knowledge, and attempts to develop a historical epistemology of literature. The aim is not to determine the essential epistemological conditions of literature as such or those of a universalistic author-subject, but instead, to think about the historicity of literary knowledge starting from the objectivity of its forms.
Peter Weiss’ project of an “aesthetics of resistance” positions the work of art against its ideological uses, following theories of the avant-garde. This study broadens the discussions around the “aesthetics of resistance” by reading the novel “Fluchtpunkt” as an essential early stage of a theory of aesthetics that combines a poetics of memory with an advanced theory of modernist aesthetics.
This book explores the connections between economy and hospitality in 18th century German and English dramatic texts. It uses this particular focus to explain the economic structures of public and private life of the period, and, at the same time, shows how these processes clearly impact tragic and comedic poetics and related genres such as melodrama and farce.
This edited volume presents theoretical concepts of space from disciplines such as philosophy, literary studies, cultural studies and social sciences by applying them to one literary text: Franz Kafka's “Der Bau”. Theoretical basics of current spatial theories are introduced and compared, and their usefulness in relation to literary texts is reflected upon critically. This volume functions as a companion to current debates on the cultural production of space, while at the same time delivering profound contributions to research on Kafka's works.
The idea of contagious transmission, either by material particles or by infectious ideas, has played a powerful role in the development of the Western World since antiquity. Yet it acquired quite a precise signature during the process of scientific and cultural differentiation in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This volume explores the significance and cultural functions of contagionism in this period, from notions of infectious homosexuality and the concept of social contagion to the political implications of bacteriological fieldwork. The history of the concept ‘microbe’ in aesthetic modernism is adressed as well as bacteriological metaphors in American literary historiography.
Within this broad framework, contagionism as a literary narrative is approached in more focussed contributions: from its emotional impact in literary modernism to the idea of physical or psychic contagion in authors such as H.G. Wells, Kurt Lasswitz, Gustav Meyrinck, Ernst Weiss, Thomas Mann and Max Frisch. This twofold approach of general topics and individual literary case studies produces a deeper understanding of the symbolic implications of contagionism marking the boundaries between sick and healthy, familiar and alien, morally pure and impure.
Novels of the 21st century address contemporary issues and concerns in diverse ways. Is there a way to characterize their modernity from a poetological perspective? The essays collected in this volume systematically explore both explicit and implicit poetologies in German-language narrative literature since the turn of the century. Their particular focus is on the relationship between realistic and fantastic modes of writing.
This study furnishes literary anthropological research with a number of fruitful routes for approaching the issue of “literature and knowledge.” It elaborates the ways that knowledge is represented in contemporary German narrative texts (1996–2007), and how it functions as a tool for constructing life concepts.
Konrad von Würzburg’s ‘Trojan War’ pioneered a new pathway for vernacular mythography at the end of the 13th century. For the first time, this study systematically explores the poetic processes that effected this epistemic transformation in the narrative of myth. The author develops a model for analyzing the literary production of knowledge that is at once open to historicizing approaches and useful for general research about knowledge.
Loève-Veimars, the first French translator of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heine, is a key figure in Franco-German cultural transfer. This study focuses on his mediating role as a translator of German literature. An examination of his diplomatic career serves to reveal the extent of France’s contacts with cultures outside Europe. This portrait of a multi-faceted intermediary makes an important contribution to understanding the transnational cultural history of the 19th century.
At times of crisis and revolution such as ours, diagnoses of crucial junctures and ruptures – ‘turning points’ – in the continuous flow of history are more prevalent than ever. Analysing literary, cinematic and other narratives, the volume seeks to understand the meanings conveyed by different concepts of turning points, the alternative concepts to which they are opposed when used to explain historical change, and those contexts in which they are unmasked as false and over-simplifying constructions. Literature and film in particular stress the importance of turning points as a sensemaking device (as part of a character’s or a community’s cultural memory), while at the same time unfolding the constructive and hence relative character of turning points. Offering complex reflections on the notion of turning points, literary and filmic narratives are thus of particular interest to the present volume.
The essays in this volume discuss the overlap between philosophical, aesthetic, and political concerns in the 1790s either in the work of individuals or in the transfer of cultural materials across national borders, which tended to entail adaptation and transformation. What emerges is a clearer understanding of the “fate” of the Enlightenment, its radicalization and its “overcoming” in aesthetic and political terms, and of the way in which political “paranoia”, generated by the fear of a spreading revolutionary radicalism, facilitated and influenced the cultural transfer of the “radical”.
The collection will be of interest to scholars in French, German, English, and comparative studies working on the later 18th century or early 19th century. It is of particular interest to those working on the impact of the French Revolution, those engaged in reception studies, and those researching the interface between political and cultural activites. It is also of key interest to intellectual historians of this period, as well as general historians with an interest in modern conservatism and radicalism.
This study uses a comparative analysis of key texts in the history of literature and philosophy to uncover the historical-semantic foundations of structuralist thought. By examining shifts within the paradigm of “articulation” the author demonstrates how language became an explanatory model for a range of other organizing systems. This background makes it possible to comprehend the broadly disseminated network of modern structuralist theories.
Der Band untersucht das spannungsreiche Verhältnis des Schriftstellers und Kunsttheoretikers Carl Einstein (1885-1940) zur europäischen Avantgarde. Die literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Beiträge setzen Leben und Werk Einsteins in Beziehung zu einzelnen Bewegungen und Künsten, wobei sie z.T. auch neue Materialien liefern. Einsteins Bedeutung für die avantgardistische Ästhetik und seine Rolle im europäischen Primitivismus werden im Licht neuerer Ansätze in der Avantgardeforschung wie dem Postokolonialismus und dem 'spatial turn' eingeschätzt.
The fall of Phaethon, son of the sun god Helios, has been taken up in art and literature as a warning against hubris. The present study analyzes the myth of Phaethon in German literature and its European contexts. Intertextual relations from antiquity to the present are unfolded, including works by Euripides, Ovid, Wickram, Gryphius, Schiller, Goethe, Achim von Arnim, Stefan George, Gerhart Hauptmann and Alexander Kluge.
There is no question that intertextuality plays an enormous role in the work of W. G. Sebald. This investigation takes up the question of its function in the context of Sebald’s poetics. A close reading of his literary scholarship reveals that quotations in his work are intended both to guide reception by mystifying the texts, and to create a subtext from the reference texts by exploiting their potential meanings. That subtext in turn provides an insight into the metaphysics of Sebald’s narratives.
“Hamlet” by Olivier, Kaurismäki or Shepard and “Pride and Prejudice” in its many adaptations show the virulence of these texts and the importance of aesthetic recycling for the formation of cultural identity and diversity. Adaptation has always been a standard literary and cultural strategy, and can be regarded as the dominant means of production in the cultural industries today. Focusing on a variety of aspects such as artistic strategies and genre, but also marketing and cultural politics, this volume takes a critical look at ways of adapting and appropriating cultural texts across epochs and cultures in literature, film and the arts.
The essays collected in this volume highlight the narrative as a phenomenon inherent in human nature. They examine the likely purpose of artistic and literary expression and its contribution to survival in an early human environment. They also consider the developing interest in shaping experience through the narrative, and investigate the consequent significance of traits acquired throughout the ages for the production and reception of texts. In doing so, the book provides a highly diverse overview of the latest research and debates in this innovative field of research.
This study focuses on the significance and functions of last letters written before death in the literature and culture of the eighteenth century. Last letters are understood in the study as an epistolary sub-genre with a shared theme and distinctive features which are shaped by culture-specific rituals of dying and which are subject to historical change. By drawing on epistolary theory, the analysis shows that last letters in the period were characterized by particular conventions, functions, and modes of reception, which were not codified but established and transmitted through usage and public or private discourse, primarily with the help of examples. Based on close readings of literary texts and published historical letters written in German, English, and French, it is argued that there were two predominant trends in the usage of fictional and real last letters. On the one hand, given the special authority attributed to the words of the dying, last letters were written to conform to contemporary ideals of a ‚good death‘ and then used as examples for the edification, education, and consolation of their readers. In contrast, other authors, suicides in particular, used the protection death and the written medium afforded them to communicate freely and in a consciously nonconformist manner. They revealed intimate secrets, tried to legitimate their actions, or expressed unconventional beliefs. In real life and fiction, last letters served the dying as a means of shaping posteriority’s reaction, and retaining control of their bodies or corpses.
The contributions presented here discuss the possibilities and conditions of finding a consensus about the meaning of literature. First, the existing diversity of approaches to literary theory, methods and methodology are discussed. From very different perspectives the individual contributions review the canonic criteria ‑ descriptiveness, form, insight, spirit, reflexivity, linguistic level, self-reference, mediality, accuracy, poeticity etc. ‑ and develop from that suggestions for a sustainable determination of concepts. Thus the volume offers insight into the methodological bases and the scientific self-understanding of present-day German literary studies.
Media revolutions awaken longings for the authentic. Literature and art react by turning to the facts, the action and the moment and by pretending to be life. The historical avant-garde movements, which were exemplary for much of the aesthetics around 1970, testify to this. This study explores the history and theory of aesthetics from Nietzsche to Adorno and shows examples of authenticity in various art forms (documentary literature, performance art, autobiography, narrative, collage) as an aesthetic effect.
In his famous book "Homo Ludens" Johan Huizinga confirmed that "Animals play just like humans do" and defined play as the anthropological basis of culture. At the same time, Wittgenstein conceived of the notion of the "language-game". Developing these research traditions further, the 43 essays in this volume examine linguistic, literary, aesthetic and pedagogical aspects of play - using examples from Antiquity up to present-day computer games. The book provides important foundations and manifold stimuli for a cultural theory of games.
French surrealism exercised a deep influence on the visual arts and literature throughout Europe. To what extent, however, did this movement exist within German literature as well? Besides fundamental considerations of surrealism from the perspectives of literary, art and theatre studies, this volume is concerned with the search for evidence of the surreal in German literature from Romanticism to the present age ‑ and with answering the question of why a Germanophone surrealism has previously not surfaced in the history of literature.
Robert Musil (1880-1942) and Paul Valéry (1871-1945) dealt with the topic of thinking both on a theoretical level and then in their literary works produced detailed accounts of thought processes. This study first analyses and compares their conceptions of thought and locates these in contemporary psychological and philosophical theories of thought. It then carries on to examine Musil’s and Valéry’s literary presentations of thinking and demonstrates the relations between their theoretical concepts and their creative writing processes.
This collected volume examines “intermediality” for the period from 1918 to 1968, a period determined by paradigm changes in the media (photography, film, radio etc) to a particular extent. The papers, on works by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, Robert Musil, Heiner Müller et al., reveal intermediality as a central "sub-structure" in artistic discourse and force a re-evaluation of established models of works, genres and epochs.
Myths determine the way cultures understand themselves. The papers in this volume examine culturally specific myths in Britain and the German-speaking world, and compare approaches to the theory of myth, together with the ways in which mythological formations operate in literature, aesthetics and politics ‑ with a focus on the period around 1800. They enquire into the consequences of myth-oriented discourses for the way in which these two cultures understand each other, and in this way make a significant contribution to a more profound approach to intercultural research.
The study is concerned with aspects of the culture of memory in the role played by the Middle Ages in literature, drama and film. Its thematic point of reference is the myths surrounding King Arthur (Matière de Bretagne) and Jeanne d'Arc. Wodianka answers the question of the way in which treatments of the Middle Ages are determined by internal medial, chronological or national structures and the extent to which in this a part is played by differing emphases on memory as myth or history. The main focus is on France and Italy, but account is also taken of the German and English-speaking worlds.
This collected volume contains eleven papers dealing with the relationship between Freud’s psychoanalysis and the literature of classical modernism (1890-1930). Case studies are used to examine the techniques and modes of representation used to process and re-form the knowledge gained from psychoanalysis. Here attention is also focussed on Freud’s own views on literature and literary authorship. Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, Musil and Kafka are among the authors dealt with in the volume.
Although literature gained its autonomy around 1800, it has since then continually engaged in a poetologically relevant discourse with the alien system of science. The present volume examines this phenomenon from a comparatistic perspective, and considers the following questions:
- System theory : What is the status of the autonomy of a system if it engages with another system through more than casual borrowings?
- Aesthetics of representation : What consequences do references to science have for literary form and style?
- Epistemology: Does literature transmit its own knowledge? If it does, of what does this knowledge consist, and how is it distinguished from non-literary knowledge?
Alongside the recent cultural turn in the humanities, there has been a noticeable return to ethical considerations. With regard to literature as well as other media, this has rekindled awareness of a tension, antagonism, or even disparity between ethics and aesthetics.
This volume of articles takes a more systematic and cross-disciplinary approach to the widely mooted ethical turn in literature and other media than has been pursued so far. It brings together a wide range of critical perspectives from literary studies, media and cultural memory studies, and philosophy, tracing the complex and sometimes conflicting relationship between ethics and aesthetics in theoretical contexts and individual case studies as diverse as colonial architecture, nineteenth-century literary histories, and postmodern writing and art.
Conspiracy theories hold an unending fascination. As early as the 17th century, stories were in circulation of the allegedly omnipotent Jesuit Order and its global activities. 18th century journalists observe the numerous secret societies and search for the hidden processes of human machinations. In the Age of Enlightenment, “unknown high-ups” are seemingly at work everywhere; “disguised” and working with “invisible venom” they direct bad fortune or plan the overthrow of the established order. The present study is the first to use broadly-based material to present a comprehensive reconstruction of the literary composition of conspiracy scenarios between 1750 and 1850.
Characters behaving out of the norm, poems about poets, films about film-making or the cinema — metaizing methods of expression, that is, reflections on an art in that art, are diverse and can be found in all genres, media and epochs. This compendium is the first to provide a systematic overview of the theories, forms and functions of metaization. Numerous sample analyses introduce the historical perspectives and media-specific approaches — from Homer’s metanarrative The Odyssey to The Simpsons as a metacartoon.
This study in the history of ideas consults a wide range of sources both known and less familiar to trace the development in the 18th century of an anthropological historiography, which aims to ascertain the unity of human nature and human cultural history. The study unfolds a picture of European enlightenment thinking that reflects seemingly irrational phenomena of imagination together with the cultural practices and mythologies of ‘uncivilized’ peoples and thus formulates fundamental questions for modern anthropology and the philosophy of history.
In our globalised world, literature is less and less confined to national spaces. Europe-centred frameworks for literary studies have become insufficient; academics are increasingly called upon to address matters of cultural difference. In this unique volume, leading scholars discuss the critical and methodical challenges that these developments pose to the writing of literary history. What is the object of literary history? What is the meaning of the term “world literature”? How do we compare different cultural systems of genres? How do we account theoretically for literary transculturation? What are the implications of postcolonial studies for the discipline of comparative literature? Ranging in focus from the Persian epic of Majnun Layla and Zulu praise poetry to South Korean novels and Brazilian antropofagismo, the essays offer a concise overview of these and related questions. Their aim is not to reach a consensus on these matters. They show instead what is at stake in the emergent field of global comparatism.
The genre of the comic novel, which includes Charles Sorel’s Histoire comique de Francion, Paul Scarron’s Roman comique and Antoine Furetières Roman bourgeois, was extremely popular in 17th century France. The present study examines the relations between individuality and comedy in these novels, and thus casts new light on the early history of the novel and of the modern individual.
The book examines how and under what conditions the ‘alien’ is first experienced in a concrete encounter and is then constructed in writing and reading, i.e. is made available in texts and then re-created in the process of text reception. This process is exemplified by taking German texts about ‘Alien Japan’ over a period of more than 100 years, analysing them and examining their transmission and transformation in literary and cultural history. The work also reflects on questions of the conditions, scope, and boundaries of understanding the alien other.
The Wisdom of the Silenus plays around the motif of the misery of human life. Omnipresent in literature and art in the first half of the 19th century, it is the antitype and spur to that “Banquet of life” with which Heine motivates the aim of his social and political commitment. This study is the first to place Heine’s work comprehensively within the context of the literary and artistic scene of the age in Paris.
Cyclical-serial narratives are an anthropological cultural constant. The social circles in one of the central genres of German literature since Goethes ‘Conversations among German émigrés’ – the framework cycle – tell stories in order to create social identity and counteract death. Using analyses of individual cycles, a comprehensive corpus of the genre is created, and an analysis given of the socio- and mediahistorical preconditions for their widespread reception in the age of almanac culture. In a broad mediahistorical sweep and in the context of an intermedial narratology, the course of ‘narrated narrative’ is then followed comparatistically from Sherezade and the narrative circles in the literature of the English, German and the Romance languages (Tieck, Hoffmann, Hauff, Brentano, Kleist etc.), via the magazine serial right up to cinema, radio and TV series, above all the soap opera. By focussing on the contents of the frameworks, a need is met from research into the novella, and in the same way the TV series becomes visible in its literary tradition. Narration reveals itself as an anthropological cultural constant, as narration for social identity and against death.
The sublime – along with beauty the most important aesthetic category of the 18th century – experienced an amazing renaissance in art, philosophy and scholarship at the end of the 20th century. Using the examples of Peter Handke, Christoph Ransmayr, Botho Strauss and Raoul Schrott, the present study shows the extent to which notions of the sublime have proved productive in contemporary literature. Particular attention is paid to the interrelationships between the literary texts and the aesthetic theories of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Jean-François Lyotard and Martin Seel, among others. The study demonstrates the multiplicity of forms in which the sublime appears in literature – and shows how the traditional idea of the sublime in human superiority over nature has been transformed into a poetics of sublime weakness.
This collected volume deals with the literary representation of dreams in central texts from European Romanticism. The papers provide new insights into the links between literature and anthropological discourse by illuminating the interplay between Romantic psychology and literary fiction that makes dreams exemplary objects of a poetic science of humanity.
The concept of corrected myths is not (yet) established in literary studies. This volume introduces this concept and demonstrates its power using exemplary interpretations. It is the case that in numerous literary works, knowledge of a conventional mythical connection is assumed, but then, at a particular point, the traditional narrative is negated – Candaule’s wife was not beautiful, the Sirens did not sing, Oedipus was not surprised by the news (Brecht) etc. The corrections always occur at a significant point, so that the intervention casts a new light on well-known narratives, but in principle does not affect the core of the myth.
The present volume examines the forms and functions of such corrected myths. For this, relevant works of European literature are studied and their interpretation related with considerations of Antique myths, Christian corrections of myths, new mythology and the correction of myths from existentialism to post-modernism. The spectrum of texts examined is kept as wide as possible to allow for a broad conception of correction. The texts include those from authors such as Heiner Müller, Thomas Brasch, Christa Wolf und Volker Braun and by Shakespeare, Goethe and Kleist.
The volume analyses some of the travelling and bridge-building activities that went on in Renaissance Europe, mainly but not exclusively across the Channel, true to Montaigne's epoch-making program of describing 'the passage'. Its emphasis on Anglo-Continental relations ensures a firm basis in English literature, but its particular appeal lies in its European point of view, and in the perspectives it opens up into other areas of early modern culture, such as pictorial art, philosophy, and economics. The multiple implications of the go-between concept make for structured diversity.
The chapters of this book are arranged in three stages. Part 1 ('Mediators') focuses on influential go-betweens, both as groups, like the translators, and as individual mediators. The second part of this book ('Mediations') is concerned with individual acts of mediation, and with the 'mental topographies' they presuppose, reflect and redraw in their turn. Part 3 ('Representations') looks at the role of exemplary intermediaries and the workings of mediation represented on the early modern English stage.
Key features
- High quality anthology on phenomena of cultural exchange in the Renaissance era
- With contributions by outstanding international experts
The cosmopolitan discourse in German and European literary history and history of ideas of the 18th century is the focus of this study. The book discusses the concept and history of 'cosmopolitanism' according to theories by Koselleck, Luhmann, Derrida, Habermas, Gumbrecht, etc., and reconstructs this important discourse of the European enlightenment based on the works of Rousseau, Kant, Wieland, Schiller, Jean Paul, Schlegel and Eichendorff against the background of European literary and intellectual history.
