WeltLiteraturen / World Literatures

Literary career milestones, crucial tools of cultural promotion and foreign cultural policy, hubs of artistic mobility – abroad, German residency programs are seen as all this and much more. What criteria guide their support for literature? What are their goals? How do they influence the literary landscape and forms of literary production? This volume delves into these questions.

In the 18th century Italian theatre and its artists became vital to Russian rulers, who employed Italian musico-dramatic works to advance their political agendas and emphasize Russia’s cultural uniqueness and its cosmopolitan character. Innumerable playwrights and composers, actors and singers were active at the Russian court. Usually considered at best peripheral to Europe, the faraway Russian Empire represents a particularly powerful example of the mobility of theatre agents and the circulation of artistic practices. This book sets a new regional accent on imperial Russia, thus mitigating the traditional historiographical emphasis on Western Europe, and adopts a transnational approach to theatre and music history. Its aim is twofold. First, to explore Italian music-theatrical repertoires that occupied a crucial position within the spectacle of absolutism in Russia. Second, to investigate careers and travel routes of the Italian theatre professionals. The examination of their activities at the Russian court aims not only to provide a fuller understanding of their vital role in the transmission of socio-political and artistic ideas, but also to more firmly situate Russia in the broader arena of European cultural production.

One aspect has been ignored in the debate about the origins of "world literature": the mediality and materiality of communicative networks, which is what makes talking transnationally about literature possible in the first place. This is all the more astounding considering it was no accident that Goethe coined the term in light of the fastest mass medium of his time – the periodical press – inspired by a review.

This book deals with the transnational dimension of the canonization of literature in the context of Greek-Soviet literary relations. It examines, from a comparative perspective, the reception, translation, publication, and presentation of Modern Greek literature in the Soviet Union in terms of narrative strategies, translation practices, and mediation activities.

“Prose” refers to a largely free mode of speaking and writing that is not tethered to any normative form, and which permits a wide range of composition styles due to the openness of its content and form. In 18 chapters, this volume makes “prose” – an important but thus far insufficiently examined category of literary studies – the subject of historical, methodological, and theoretical investigations.

Poetic critique – is that not an oxymoron? Do these two forms of behavior, the poetic and the critical, not pull in different, even opposite, directions? For many scholars working in the humanities today, they largely do, but that has not always been the case. Friedrich Schlegel, for one, believed that critique worthy of its name must itself be poetic. Only then would it stand a chance of responding adequately to the work of art.

Taking Schlegel’s idea of poetische Kritik as a starting point, this volume reflects on the possibility of drawing these alleged opposites closer together. In light of current debates about the legacy of critique, it investigates whether a concept such as poetic critique (or poetic criticism) lends itself to enriching our intellectual practice by engaging with the poetic potential of criticism and the critical value of art and literature.

The defiguration of writing – ink spots, paper waste, spelling mistakes – breaks with the figure of writing that stands apart from a shapeless background. This study examines this largely overlooked literary motif and material phenomenon in published texts, manuscripts, and drawings as the processing of an ambivalent, (early) Romantic concept of writing in E.T.A. Hoffmann and Nikolai Gogol.

This volume clarifies the meanings and applications of the concept of the transnational and identifies areas in which the concept can be particularly useful. The division of the volume into three parts reflects areas which seem particularly amenable to analysis through a transnational lens. The chapters in Part 1 present case studies in which the concept replaces or complements traditionally dominant concepts in literary studies. These chapters demonstrate, for example, why some dramatic texts and performances can better be described as transnational than as postcolonial, and how the transnational underlies and complements concepts such as world literature. Part 2 assesses the advantages and limitations of writing literary history with a transnational focus. These chapters illustrate how such a perspective loosens the epistemic stranglehold of national historiographies, but they also argue that the transnational and national agendas of literary historiography are frequently entangled. The chapters in Part 3 identify transnational genres such as the transnational historical novel, transnational migrant fiction and translinguistic theatre, and analyse the specific poetics and politics of these genres.

Drawing on Agamben’s notion of zoe – the fact of something’s being alive – this study develops a theory of the zoegraphical to describe nonhuman life in autobiographical texts. The work focuses on the novels of the Russian poet, visual artist, and performer Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov (1940–2007), in whom zoegraphical narrative becomes a poetological strategy navigating between the avant-garde, totalitarianism, and posthumanism.

This study examines how literary works use the peratext to signal and problematize their fictional or nonfictional status. Comparative analyses of examples mostly from the 18^th and 20^th centuries show that the peratext – whether of works billed as “true stories” or of those in which “any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental” – always negotiates acute problems in contemporary understandings of fiction.

A contribution to the philosophy and anthropology of literature, this book investigates seduction as an interpretative tool of modern fiction. The main axis of the study consists of comparative analyses of works by Robert Musil, Bruno Schulz, and Witold Gombrowicz. These authors use seduction in literary and theoretical texts to express their notions of art, subject, and reality.

Fiction research has traditionally developed its theories from narrative texts. While narratology has engaged in media comparisons for some time, such comparisons are still at an early stage in fiction theory. This volume examines the phenomena of fiction through a comparative arts and media perspective, thereby helping to create a theory of fiction grounded in transmediality.

This study examines the prose works of the Romanian writer M. Blecher in the context of modern philosophies of perception, from Bergson and Husserl through Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. It shows that Blecher’s poetics of remembrance was a literary-phenomenological quest for authentic or alternative access points to the world between reality and unreality. Its focus is on figurations of experience in crisis and situations of physical marginality.

The essays in this volume examine broadly interconnected British-German networks and include German-British references with a focus on twelve questions about the reception, translation, and dissemination of British writings in the German-speaking world as far as Prague, a comparison of aesthetic discourses, and depictions of journeys to England.

The study examines the parallel emergence of a new paradigm of deviation in literature and science. From Hoffmann and Poe to Henry James, from medical teratology and early psychiatry to the theory of evolution, the book traces the development of a modern dialectic of the defiguration and refiguration of monstrous forms.

The study compares the Horace commentaries by Cristoforo Landino and Denis Lambin, who took diametrically different approaches in their readings of Horace, the subject of their Renaissance era commentaries. It casts light on the commentaries and the reception of Horace during the Renaissance as well as on the work of two outstanding scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

When a term is overused, it tends to fall out of fashion. Cynicism seems to be an exception. Its polytropic versatility apparently prevents any discontinuation of its application. Everyone knows that cynicism denotes that which is deemed deleterious at a given time; and every time will specify its toxicities – the apparent result being the term’s non-specificity. This study describes the cynical stance and statement so as to render the term’s use scholarly expedient.
Close readings of textual sources commonly deemed cynical provide a legible starting point. A rhetorical analysis of aphorisms ascribed to the arch-Cynic Diogenes facilitates describing the design of cynical statements, as well as the characteristic features of the cynical stance. These patterns are identifiable in later texts generally labeled cynical – above all in Machiavelli’s Principe. With recourse to the Diogenical archetype, cynicism is likewise rendered describable in Gracián’s Oráculo manual, Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau, and Nietzsche’s Posthumous Fragments.
This study’s description of cynicism provides a phenomenon otherwise considered amorphous with distinct contours, renders transparent its workings, and tenders a dependable basis for further analyses.

This study examines the literary presentation of research expeditions, comparing the works of Forster, von Humboldt, and Chamisso. The 1^st part looks at third-party portrayals of expeditionary goals, while the 2^nd part focuses on the natural scientists’ own presentations. In addition to facilitating new perspectives on texts that have been researched before, this work, thanks to its novel methodology, spotlights new horizons for travel research.

This volume presents Yukio Mishima’s essay “On the Defense of Culture” (1968) for the first time in German translation. Mishima examines the relationship between culture, tradition, the emperor, and nation, and asserts his opinions about these issues, which also shape his fictional works. This volume engages in a close reading of the text, thus illuminating major currents in post-war Japanese intellectual discourse.

Unlike film presentations of narrative or dramatic literature, the audiovisual depiction of poetry has received little attention from researchers. This volume traces the history of the poetry film genre and subjects it to systematic examination. It thereby fills a gap in research on the relations between films and literature but also develops key categories for understanding ways of dealing with poetry in the audiovisual medium.

This book explores one of the central questions that has haunted husbands and wives and lovers over the millennia of history: What kind of afterlife might they expect for their love once one or both of them have died? Focusing on the evolution of ideas about posthumous love within medieval and early modern Europe, the book includes many religions and cultures in order to understand how expectations about the afterlife differed across traditions.

Grenzen, ihre Überschreitung, ihre Auflösung und ihre Wiederherstellung sind ein bisher nicht systematisch erforschtes Schlüsselkonzept für das Verständnis romantischer Literatur. Diese semiotisch-komparatistische Grundsatzstudie analysiert über drei Kulturräume hinweg vergleichend eine Vielfalt heterogener literarischer Entgrenzungsphänomene in der Romantik und entwickelt auf der Basis der romantischen Zeichentheorie ein Modell für die Analyse transepochaler Entgrenzungsphänomene. Dabei geht sie über bekannte Konzepte des paradoxen Subjekts hinaus, indem Entgrenzung als Interdependenz von Subjekt, Raum und Zeichen umfassend in detaillierten Lektüren literarischer Texte aus Deutschland, den USA und Großbritannien sowie in theoretischen Exkursen untersucht wird - von Novalis und Coleridge über Melville bis hin zu Deleuze und Guattari. Die Arbeit ist somit nicht nur ein Beitrag zur Romantikforschung, sondern lotet auch die methodologischen Möglichkeiten derselben neu aus. Die Studie wurde 2012 mit dem von der Ernst-Reuter-Gesellschaft der Freunde, Förderer und Ehemaligen der Freien Universität Berlin e.V. gestifteten Ernst-Reuter-Preis als herausragende und zukunftsweisende Promotionsarbeit ausgezeichnet. Boundaries constitute a key concept in Romanticism: their transgression, their elimination, but also their reconstruction. By analyzing the triad of sign, subject, and space, this study provides a comprehensive analysis of boundaries in German, English, and American Romanticism. Its trans-epochal approach reveals a shared dynamic of a multiplicity of heterogeneous boundary phenomena ranging from the late 18th century to postmodern Romantic texts and constructs a model for the examination of limits: a theory of a-limitation. The known concept of the transgressive Romantic subject is integrated into this triadic model whose primordial site of a-limitation, however, is the semiotics of Romanticism. With a creative theoretical design that allows the reader to survey readings of individual texts as well as broader theoretical frameworks, "Liminal Semiotics" offers a new perspective on a variety of literary texts and theories ranging from Novalis and Coleridge to Melville and finally to Deleuze and Guattari. The thesis was awarded the Ernst-Reuter-Prize 2012 for outstanding dissertations at Freie Universität Berlin.

Viele Überlebende der Shoah wollten vor allem eines – Zeugnis ablegen. Schon von dem Moment an, in dem sie die Lager der Nationalsozialisten verließen, waren sie erfüllt von dem Wunsch, der Welt von ihren unerhörten Erfahrungen zu berichten. Hiervon wissen wir nicht zuletzt durch die vielfältigen Zeugnisse, die uns mittlerweile von ihnen vorliegen. Doch wenig wissen wir über die eigentlichen Bedingungen der Erzählungen Überlebender: Welche Möglichkeiten, von den Erfahrungen ihrer Verfolgung Zeugnis abzulegen, welche Erzählräume standen ihnen überhaupt zur Verfügung? Und welchen Einflüssen, welchen Begrenzungen unterlag die narrative Gestaltung ihrer Erinnerungen? Wie waren die Kontexte ihres Erzählens bestellt und wie können wir ihren Berichten als Leser, Zuhörer und Zuschauer gerecht werden? Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die lange Suche Überlebender nach Zuhörern und konzentriert sich dabei auf zwei der wichtigsten Zeugnisformen der Nachkriegsgeschichte, die hier erstmals aufeinander bezogen werden: Zum einen geht es um literarische Zeugnisse, die von Überlebenden wie Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Imre Kertész oder Ruth Klüger in höchst unterschiedlicher Form und Absicht verfasst wurden. Zum anderen geht es um die relativ neue Form videographierter Interviews mit Überlebenden, die man vor allem im Laufe der neunziger Jahre gesammelt hat und die uns heute vermehrt in Museen und Unterrichtsräumen begegnet. Anhand von Fallbeispielen werden die Erzählsituationen in beiden Medien genauestens kontextualisiert und analysiert. Dabei ist der Gedanke leitend, dass wir Überlebenden erst dann richtig zuhören können, wenn wir die diskursiven Bedingungen durchschauen, unter denen ihre Zeugnisse entstanden sind. Erst dann wird es möglich, jenes ursprüngliche Dialogangebot anzunehmen, das uns die Zeugnisse Überlebender auch heute noch entgegenbringen.

The present volume introduces new considerations on the topic of “World Literature”, penned by leading representatives of the discipline from the United States, India, Japan, the Middle East, England, France and Germany. The essays revolve around the question of what, specifically in today's rapidly globalizing world, may be the productive implications of the concept of World Literature, which was first developed in the 18^th century and then elaborated on by Goethe. The discussions include problems such as different script systems with varying literary functions, as well as questions addressing the relationship between ethnic self-description and cultural belonging.

The contributions result from a conference that took place at the Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität Berlin, in 2012.