In Translating the World , Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding ...the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar.
German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry; yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world.
A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, representations of Poland and the Slavic East cast the region as a primitive, undeveloped, or empty space inhabited by a population destined to remain ...uncivilized without the aid of external intervention. These depictions often made direct reference to the American Wild West, portraying the eastern steppes as a boundless plain that needed to be wrested from the hands of unruly natives and spatially ordered into German-administrated units.While conventional definitions locate colonial space overseas, Kristin Kopp argues that it was possible to understand both distant continents and adjacent Eastern Europe as parts of the same global periphery dependent upon Western European civilizing efforts. However, proximity to the source of aid translated to greater benefits for Eastern Europe than for more distant regions.
InPeripheral Desires, Robert Deam Tobin charts the emergence, from the 1830s through the early twentieth century, of a new vocabulary and science of human sexuality in the writings of literary ...authors, politicians, and members of the medical establishment in German-speaking central Europe-and observes how consistently these writers, thinkers, and scientists associated the new nonnormative sexualities with places away from the German metropoles of Berlin and Vienna.
In the writings of Aimée Duc and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Switzerland figured as a place for women in particular to escape the sexual confines of Germany. The sexual ethnologies of Ferdinand Karsch-Haack and the popular novels of Karl May linked nonnormative sexualities with the colonies and, in particular, with German Samoa. Same-sex desire was perhaps the most centrifugal sexuality of all, as so-called Greek love migrated to numerous places and peoples: a curious connection between homosexuality and Hungarian nationalism emerged in the writings of Adalbert Stifter and Karl Maria Kerbeny; Arnold Zweig built on a long and extremely well-developed gradation of associating homosexuality with Jewishness, projecting the entire question of same-sex desire onto the physical territory of Palestine; and Thomas Mann, of course, famously associated male-male desire with the fantastically liminal city of Venice, lying between land and sea, Europe and the Orient.
As Germany-and German-speaking Europe-became a fertile ground for homosexual subcultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what factors helped construct the sexuality that emerged?Peripheral Desiresexamines how and why the political, scientific and literary culture of the region produced the modern vocabulary of sexuality.
This new collection investigates German literature in its international dimensions. While no single volume can deal comprehensively with such a vast topic, the nine contributors cover a wide ...historical range, with a variety of approaches and authors represented. Together, the essays begin to adumbrate the systematic nature of the relations between German national literature and world literature as these have developed through institutions, cultural networks, and individual authors. In the last two decades, discussions of world literature-literature that resonates beyond its original linguistic and cultural contexts-have come increasingly to the forefront of theoretical investigations of literature. One reason for the explosion of world literature theory, pedagogy and methodology is the difficulty of accomplishing either world literature criticism, or world literary history. The capaciousness, as well as the polylingual and multicultural features of world literature present formidable obstacles to its study, and call for a collaborative approach that conjoins a variety of expertise. To that end, this collection contributes to the critical study of world literature in its textual, institutional, and translatorial reality, while at the same time highlighting a question that has hitherto received insufficient scholarly attention: what is the relation between national and world literatures, or, more specifically, in what senses do national literatures systematically participate in (or resist) world literature?
While the first decade after the fall of the Berlin wall was marked by the challenges of unification and the often difficult process of reconciling East and West German experiences, many Germans ...expected that the “new century” would achieve “normalization.” The essays in this volume take a closer look at Germany’s new normalcy and argue for a more nuanced picture that considers the ruptures as well as the continuities. Germany’s new generation of writers is more diverse than ever before, and their texts often not only speak of a Germany that is multicultural but also take a more playful attitude toward notions of identity. Written with an eye toward similar and dissimilar developments and traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, this volume balances overviews of significant trends in present-day cultural life with illustrative analyses of individual writers and texts.
New Hebrew prose at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries is characterized by the presence of a specific type of literary character called the “uprooted hero”(Hebr. talush). The article aims to ...present his image from the perspective of the diaspora reality. Regardless of the conditions that determine the fate of the protagonists of the stories discussed, they are accompanied by a common motive of alienation pertaining to many different spheres of life. In Micha Josef Berdyczewski’s prose, the protagonist is usually presented as a young man rebelling against the religious mentality of the Jewish diaspora, but at the same time unable to adapt to the secular world. Selected source texts have been translated, thoroughly analyzed and compared in terms of the aforementioned literary topos. The starting point of the research are the stages of uprooting described by Simon Halkin. The article is a contribution to further research on “the uprooted” appearing in the Hebrew fiction by other writers, such as Mordecai Ze’ev Feierberg or Uri Nissan Gnessin.
Gender, Canon and Literary Historyinvestigates the reception of 19th-century women's writing in German literary histories by way of case studies. It fills a longstanding gap both in the study of ...gender and literary history. The case studies concentrate on the reception of women writing in the Age of Romanticism (e.g., Rahel Varnhagen) as well as women who were inspired to write by the German Revolution (e.g., Fanny Lewald).
Peter Wohlleben’s book The Secret Life of Trees became a best-seller after the very first release in 2015. In the meantime, it has been translated into many languages, Serbian included. The question ...is why a book written by a forester received such positive public reactions. In order to answer this question, the paper takes a deeper insight into the concept of cultural memory of the German people. The paper is primarily focused on symbolic and semantic traits of the tree in German mythology, German literature since the Middle Ages onwards, as well as the significance of the tree symbolism in creating a national identity of the German people in the 19th century. The review from diverse fields that have formed the cultural memory of the German people explains that the concept of the tree has had a significant place in the cultural memory of the German people since the very beginning. Wohlleben’s revival of this topic explains the great success of the book in which the very essence and life of the trees are explained by the author. The paper shows how the author uses a refined way to connect his forestry expertise to the topics and motifs from world literature by reviewing certain chapters of the book. These are friendship, enmity, family, love, the process of getting old, benevolence, tolerance and death. Wohlleben depicts trees by permeating them with their symbolic and semantic meanings, while, at the same time, staying closer to science than literature. However, in order to get closer to his audience, the author uses different figures such as anthropomorphism, personification, comparison, metaphors and humor. By using such a thoughtful way of describing, Wohlleben has succeeded in reaching a wider audience.
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Monolingualism-the idea that having just one language is the norm is only a recent invention, dating to late-eighteenth-century Europe. Yet it has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring ...principle of modernity. According to this monolingual paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. As a result of this view, writing in anything but one's "mother tongue" has come to be seen as an aberration. Beyond the Mother Tongue demonstrates the impact of this monolingual paradigm on literature and culture but also charts incipient moves beyond it. Because newer multilingual forms and practices exist in tension with the paradigm, which alternately obscures, pathologizes, or exoticizes them, this book argues that they can best be understood as "postmonolingual" that is, as marked by the continuing force of monolingualism. Focused on canonical and minority writers working in German in the twentieth century, Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned "mother tongue" about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); writing by literally translating from the "mother tongue" into another language (Emine Sevgi Ozdamar); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu). Through these analyses, Beyond the Mother Tongue suggests that the dimensions of gender, kinship, and affect encoded in the "mother tongue" are crucial to the persistence of monolingualism and the challenge of multilingualism
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