The article describes selected poetry by the Pomeranian diplomat Jurga Valentin Winther (1578–1623), which can be included in the inter–genre category of ‘poesis artificiosa’. The works discussed ...include: anagram, chronogram, acrostic, palindrome, ‘versus concordans’, emblem, labyrinth. The poetic repertoire of Winther clearly shows that while writing, he readily experimented with form, and his searches and innovations sometimes elude genology.
Banned in Berlin Stark, Gary D
2009., 20090315, 2009, 2011-01-01, Volume:
25
eBook
Imperial Germany’s governing elite frequently sought to censor literature that threatened established political, social, religious, and moral norms in the name of public peace, order, and security. ...It claimed and exercised a prerogative to intervene in literary life that was broader than that of its Western neighbors, but still not broad enough to prevent the literary community from challenging and subverting many of the social norms the state was most determined to defend. This study is the first systematic analysis in any language of state censorship of literature and theater in imperial Germany (1871–1918). To assess the role that formal state controls played in German literary and political life during this period, it examines the intent, function, contested legal basis, institutions, and everyday operations of literary censorship as well as its effectiveness and its impact on authors, publishers, and theater directors.
Literary exhibitions edit texts in their material aggregate states along with their material resistances and transitions and in a literary field which includes epi- and paratexts of all kinds. Texts, ...epi- and paratexts become ‘poetic things’ in an exhibition, in which production and reception merge. In this way, literary exhibitions can expand the traditional text-genetic edition. This is explained using the examples of exhibitions of the German Literature Archive / Museum of Modern Literature Marbach.
In eighteenth-century Germany, the aesthetician Friedrich Wilhelm Basileus Ramdohr could write of the phenomenon of men who evoke sexual desire in other men; Johann Joachim Winckelmann could place ...admiration of male beauty at the center of his art criticism; and admirers and detractors alike of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, felt constrained to comment upon the ruler's obvious preference for men over women. In German cities of the period, men identified as "warm brothers" wore broad pigtails powdered in the back, and developed a particular discourse of friendship, classicism, Orientalism, and fashion.
There is much evidence, Robert D. Tobin contends, that something was happening in the semantic field around male-male desire in late eighteenth-century Germany, and that certain signs were coalescing around "a queer proto-identity." Today, we might consider a canonical author of the period such as Jean Paul a homosexual; we would probably not so identify Goethe or Schiller. But for Tobin, queer subtexts are found in the writings of all three and many others.
Warm Brothersanalyzes classical German writers through the lens of queer theory. Beginning with sodomitical subcultures in eighteenth-century Germany, it examines the traces of an emergent homosexuality and shows the importance of the eighteenth century for the nineteenth-century sexologists who were to provide the framework for modern conceptualizations of sexuality. One of the first books to document male-male desire in eighteenth-century German literature and culture, Warm Brothers offers a much-needed reappraisal of the classical canon and the history of sexuality.
In Benjamin’s Library, Jane O. Newman offers, for the first time in any language, a reading of Walter Benjamin’s notoriously opaque work, Origin of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends ...to its place in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin’s day. Taking into account the literary and cultural contexts of Benjamin’s work, Newman recovers Benjamin’s relationship to the ideologically loaded readings of the literature and political theory of the seventeenth-century Baroque that abounded in Germany during the political and economic crises of the Weimar years.
To date, the significance of the Baroque for Origin of the German Tragic Drama has been glossed over by students of Benjamin, most of whom have neither read it in this context nor engaged with the often incongruous debates about the period that filled both academic and popular texts in the years leading up to and following World War I. Armed with extraordinary historical, bibliographical, philological, and orthographic research, Newman shows the extent to which Benjamin participated in these debates by reconstructing the literal and figurative history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books that Benjamin analyzes and the literary, art historical and art theoretical, and political theological discussions of the Baroque with which he was familiar. In so doing, she challenges the exceptionalist, even hagiographic, approaches that have become common in Benjamin studies. The result is a deeply learned book that will infuse much-needed life into the study of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.
In 1957, a discussion of literary reviewers about the nature of the contemporary modern novel started on the pages of a newly established Slovak journal of literature and art Mladá tvorba (1956 – ...1970). The discussion concerning the nature of the contemporary modern novel was launched by Jozef Bob in the journal Kultúrny život. In 1957, Bob termed the German author Hans Fallada’s novel Wolf unter Wölfen “contemporary“, although the book was published as early as 1937. Shortly after that, the debate moved to the journal Mladá tvorba. Among the authors who took part in the polemic, were the Anglicist Ján Vilikovský, the literary reviewer and film critic Ján Rozner, and the cultural worker and writer Vladimír Mináč. The conclusion of the debate shows that the percepcion of the prose in Slovak culture in late 1950ʼs was still burdened by the ideological nature of socialist realism. Mladá tvorba, however, gradually became a platform of reception and thinking about the modern world literature, and thus, especially in 1960ʼs, it significantly contributed to the democratization of Slovak culture.
