University This elegant collection of essays ranges across eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought, covering philosophy, science, literature and religion in the ‘Age of Goethe.’ A recognised ...authority in the field, Nisbet grapples with the major voices of the Enlightenment and gives pride of place to the figures of Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller. The book ranges widely in its compass of thought and intellectual discourse, dealing incisively with themes including the philosophical implications of literature and the relationship between religion, science and politics. The result is an accomplished reflection on German thought, but also on its rebirth, as Nisbet argues for the relevance of these Enlightenment thinkers for the readers of today. The first half of this collection focuses predominantly on eighteenth-century thought, where names like Lessing, Goethe and Herder, but also Locke and Voltaire, feature. The second has a wider chronological scope, discussing authors such as Winckelmann and Schiller, while branching out from discussions of religion, philosophy and literature to explore the sciences. Issues of biology, early environmentalism, and natural history also form part of this volume. The collection concludes with an examination of changing atitudes towards art in the atfermath of the ‘Age of Goethe.’ The essays in this volume are brought together in this collection to present Nisbet’s widely-acclaimed perspectives on this fascinating period of German thought. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the intellectual life of Europe during the Enlightenment, while its engaging and lucid style will also appeal to the general reader.
Far from being a forerunner of Weimar Classicism or an addendum to the Enlightenment, the Sturm und Drang is best seen as part of an autonomous culture of impatience—as literature in which Germans, ...frustrated with their fragmented land, simulated a sense of power and effectiveness that political realities did not afford. This impatience drove not only authors and the characters they created; it also drew in German audiences and readers ready to partake vicariously in national sentiments that they otherwise could not have experienced.
Alan Leidner sees Lavater's work as a model for dealing with a limiting culture, Goethe's Werther as a subtly arrogant figure, the drama of the Kraftmensch as a literature legitimizing the violence of its protagonists, the famous split in the Urfaust as the result of Goethe's resistance to the impatience that led many writers to fabricate a German nation that did not exist, and Schiller's Die Räuber as a liberating ritual that allowed German audiences to enjoy temporary feelings of national community. He concludes his study with an analysis of J. M. R. Lenz, whose texts recoil unequivocally in the face of the impatient muse.
In Precarious Times, Anne Fuchs explores how works of German literature, film, and photography reflect on the profound temporal anxieties precipitated by contemporary experiences of atomization, ...displacement, and fragmentation that bring about a loss of history and of time itself and that is peculiar to our current moment. The digital age places premiums on just-in-time deliveries, continual innovation, instantaneous connectivity, and around-the-clock availability. While some celebrate this 24/7 culture, others see it as profoundly destructive to the natural rhythm of day and night-and to human happiness. Have we entered an era of a perpetual present that depletes the future and erodes our grasp of the past? Beginning its examination around 1900, when rapid modernization was accompanied by comparably intense reflection on changing temporal experience,Precarious Times provides historical depth and perspective to current debates on the "digital now." Expanding the modern discourse on time and speed, Fuchs deploys such concepts as attention, slowness and lateness to emphasize the uneven quality of time around the world.
In this ambitious book, Kirk Wetters traces the genealogy of the demonic in German literature from its imbrications in Goethe to its varying legacies in the work of essential authors, both canonical ...and less well known, such as Gundolf, Spengler, Benjamin, Lukács, and Doderer. Wetters focuses especially on the philological and metaphorological resonances of the demonic from its core formations through its appropriations in the tumultuous twentieth century. Propelled by equal parts theoretical and historical acumen, Wetters explores the ways in which the question of the demonic has been employed to multiple theoretical, literary, and historico-political ends. He thereby produces an intellectual history that will be consequential both to scholars of German literature and to comparatists.
Linked to propaganda and the dissemination of informations about colonies, German colonial literature played a very active part in the media campaign for German colonization. The colonial discourse ...developed by this literature incited the Germans to immigrate to the colony. Therefore, the colonial space became for colonial writers the object of the construction of a diversified knowledge allowing the reading of the relationship of the Self to the Other. This can be verified by the German colonial writer Alfred Mansfeld. From 1904 to 1907, he was assigned as regional manager of the German colonial administration in Cameroon. On the basis of a sample of ethnographic data, he collected many observations on the lives of the colonized and documented them in detail in his travel texts. From his travel writing Urwald-Dokumente: vier Jahre unter den Crossflussnegern Kamerun (1908), we propose, in this contribution, to show how the narrator-character construct diverse knowledge’s about Cameroon. At the end of our analyzes, we will come to the conclusion that the colonial novel, as exotic literary genre, often worked by the concepts of ethnocentrism, cultural hegemony and overhanging gaze, seems to be a vector of interculturality in a colonial situation.
Recent scholarship has broadened definitions of war and shifted from the narrow focus on battles and power struggles to include narratives of the homefront and private sphere. To expand scholarship ...on textual representations of war means to shed light on the multiple theaters of war, and on the many voices who contributed to, were affected by, and/or critiqued German war efforts. Engaged women writers and artists commented on their nations' imperial and colonial ambitions and the events of the tumultuous beginning of the twentieth century. In an interdisciplinary investigation, this volume explores select female-authored, German-language texts focusing on German colonial wars and World War I and the discourses that promoted or critiqued their premises. They examine how colonial conflicts contributed to a persistent atmosphere of Kriegsbegeisterung (war enthusiasm) that eventually culminated in the outbreak of World War I, or a Kriegskritik (criticism of war) that resisted it. The span from German colonialism to World War I brings these explosive periods into relief and challenges readers to think about the intersection of nationalism, violence and gender and about the historical continuities and disruptions that shape such events.
The fact that the poet from Chernivtsi, Immanuel Weissglas, reworked, revised and resumed many of his poems in later volumes became an object of study relatively late, also due to his placement in ...the “shadow” of Paul Celan. His three volumes, Kariera am Bug, the unpublished volume Gottes Mühlen in Berlin and Nobiskrug, however, contain multiple examples of these variations of the original works, the poems being modified, quoted or changed to different degrees. A valuable starting point for studies on this topic is represented by Barbara Wiedemanns list of these equivalents and their type. This article aims to analyze the similarities and overlaps between the first and last volume of Weissglas, while trying to capture the character of these two volumes, possible motivations of Weissglas to maintain his work in a continuous process of transformation, and finding an answer to the question: What has the poem become in its new form?
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Travels and the longing for afar have been and still are the source of inspiration for many authors. This article analyses Bodo Kirchoff’s short story “Widerfahrnis” (“Encounter”), which belongs to ...the genre of travel literature and extends the literary tradition of German authors to choose the theme of travel to Italy in their work (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, etc.). The short story raises the existential questions of longing for love, loneliness, confrontation with refugees, and moral and social aspects of relations with them. The article aims to reveal how the structures of experience described by the German phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels appear in the work of Bodo Kirchhoff. What happens to us does not happen without our involvement but goes beyond it. The experience begins not with the intentional gaze of the subject, but when someone (a stranger) touches us, encounters us, causes us to react and raises tension. Bernhard Waldenfels attributes the encounter to the realm of pathos, meaning to the realm of feelings. Response or the inevitable response to an encounter comes earlier than an understanding or an answer. Although the title of the short story is in the singular form, it reveals many encounters: a meeting of an older couple, a spontaneous trip to Italy, an encounter with a refugee girl and a refugee family, the birth of love and its loss.
The fact that the poet from Chernivtsi, Immanuel Weissglas, reworked, revised and resumed many of his poems in later volumes became an object of study relatively late, also due to his placement in ...the “shadow” of Paul Celan. His three volumes, Kariera am Bug, the unpublished volume Gottes Mühlen in Berlin and Nobiskrug, however, contain multiple examples of these variations of the original works, the poems being modified, quoted or changed to different degrees. A valuable starting point for studies on this topic is represented by Barbara Wiedemanns list of these equivalents and their type. This article aims to analyze the similarities and overlaps between the first and last volume of Weissglas, while trying to capture the character of these two volumes, possible motivations of Weissglas to maintain his work in a continuous process of transformation, and finding an answer to the question: What has the poem become in its new form?
Full text
Available for:
IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
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