The intertwining of landscape and face belongs to human spatial epistemology: as suggested by Matteo Meschiari, primitive humans used to orientate themselves in landscape through recognition of ...facial patterns. By reflecting upon Marlen Haushofer’s novel The Wall (Die Wand), the article aims to question the semantic of the “face of the landscape” in the wake of an imagined nuclear apocalypse that leaves behind a cat, a cow, a dog, a woman and a wall. The wall transcends the boundaries between human and other-than-human: in terms of Roberto Marchesini, it creates a somato-landscape – a hybridization of inner and outer landscapes typical of post-human awareness. Finally, such a landscape culminates in the dismissal of the pre-apocalyptic culture of the face: faces no longer function as a means of recognition.
The essay "Going beyond the Window: the deconstructed Window" provides a critical interpretation of Zäzilie in Palmstrom (Humoristic Poems, III, 1990:128), one of the humoristic poems by C. ...Morgenstern. The essay makes an important reference to W. Ross, Zäzilie(II) (in Ein Knie geht einsam durch die Welt, 1989:108 111). In such a context, it first focuses on the concept of anti-bourgeois in Morgenstern's poetics and interprets the reduction of the window to its wooden skeleton as a challenge posed by the man to the role of the objects in bourgeois aesthetics: the deconstructed window turns into the metaphor of an anti-mimetic view of the world. Second, the essay examines Zäzilie within the philosophical side of Morgenstern's poetics: the philosophical dilettantism (Giffei, 1931:28). Finally, it provides an analysis of Zäzilie based on the main concepts of Morgenstern's poetics. Such an analysis highlights that Zäzilie's housework reproduces the author's never-ending philosophical research and his way of looking beyond and though the man (Morgenstern, Letters, 1979:138).
Christian Morgenstern verstand den Humor als einen alternativen Weg in die Wissenschaft, von der er sich wegen ‚Dilettantismus‘ ausgeschlossen sah. Die Entwürfe aus dem Nachlass zeugen von dieser ...Leidenschaft: Im posthum erschienenen Text Aus dem Anzeigenteil einer Tageszeitung des Jahres 2407 stellt Morgenstern eine Reihe von „Erfindungen“ vor. Unter ihnen findet man die Anzeige für Künstliche Köpfe, die über die natürlichen gestülpt werden und damit nur Vorteile bieten können. Morgenstern träumt von einer Hybridisierung mit technischen Apparaten, die Hören und Sehen schärfen und den Menschen in eine technologische Puppe verwandeln. Wovon sie träumen, das ist jedoch eine ganz andere Frage …
Published during the COVID-19 pandemic, Yoko Tawada’s “Paul Celan and the Chinese Angel” pays homage to the German-speaking poet Paul Celan by depicting the strange liaison between the obscure ...university researcher Patrik and his evanescent friend and counter-ego, Leo-Fu. Together, they join forces on a sentimental journey through Celan’s work and life. Within the theoretical context of the transcultural shift in the Humanities, the present article aims at presenting teachers of German as a foreign language with the newest literary concepts in the field of translinguistic literature. Therefore, the article focuses on the literary analysis of the novel and underlines its trans-textual entanglement with Paul Celan’s poetics in order to sketch an alternative path to the Didactics of German Literature.
L’anello che manca. E quello che non torna in Nathans Tod di Georg Tabori propose a modern rereading of Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise): Georg Tabori’s Nathans Death (Nathans Tod). ...The paper aims for a comparative analysis of the famous ring parable. Asked by the Sultan to decide which of the three religions owns the truth, Nathan narrates the fable of a magic ring that has been passed from generation to generation and finally lost, when a father with three sons makes two copies of the original one. The ring symbolises the tyranny of a unique truth that has to be overcome, in order to achieve tolerance. My interest focuses on two moments of Tabori’s rewriting of this fable. On the one hand, I analyse the way in which Tabori glosses over the ring parable in the dialogue between Nathan and Saladin thanks to Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightement (Dialektik der Aufklärung) and to Arendt’s Man in Dark Times (Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren Zeiten). In the economic and social paradigm of the modern Totalitarianism there is no more place for tolerance. On the other hand, I reflect on the new context in which Tabori places the ring fable narrated by Nathan just before his death in front of the bodies of his dead sons. I consider that choice to be a parody: The contrast between the original context of enunciation and the modern one is the way in which Lessing’s tolerance is finally checkmated.
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