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.
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
Reseña de la obra de Cáceres Würsig, Ingrid / Solano Rodríguez, Remedios: Reyes y pueblos: poesía alemana del Trienio Liberal. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca 2019. 336 pp.
The beginnings of psychology are usually dated from experimental psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth century. Yet the period from 1700 to 1840 produced some highly ...sophisticated psychological theorising that became central to German intellectual and cultural life, well in advance of similar developments in the English-speaking world. Matthew Bell explores how this happened, by analysing the expressions of psychological theory in Goethe's Faust, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and in the works of Lessing, Schiller, Kleist and E. T. A. Hoffmann. This study pays special attention to the role of the German literary renaissance of the last third of the eighteenth century in bringing psychological theory into popular consciousness and shaping its transmission to the nineteenth century. All German texts are translated into English, making this fascinating area of European thought fully accessible to English readers for the first time.
»Einfachheit« gehört zu den maßgeblichen Wertzuschreibungen der Kunst-, Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte. Nadine Wisotzki greift das mit der »Sehnsucht nach Einfachheit« einhergehende ...Funktionalisierungspotential auf, um dem bemerkenswerten Erfolg der Einfachheit in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur nachzugehen. Am Beispiel des erzählerischen Werks von Judith Hermann, Peter Stamm und Robert Seethaler fragt sie, mit welcher Intention und Qualität sich die Einfachheit hier formiert und ob es sich bei der Kunst der Reduktion um ein spezifisch für die Gegenwart relevantes Konzept handelt. Damit leistet sie einen wesentlichen Beitrag zu der noch ausstehenden literaturwissenschaftlichen Systematisierung einer »Ästhetik der Einfachheit«.
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