This study examines a persistent engagement with the ambiguity of the human and non-human in literary grotesques of German modernism. It maps out the emergence of the micro-genre of the literary ...grotesque, which was instituted with deliberate provocation by Oskar Panizza in the early 1890s, popularized by Hanns Heinz Ewers and Salomo Friedlaender at the beginning of the 20 th century, and transformed into its most renowned form in Franz Kafka's oeuvre. Engaging with interdisciplinary debates surrounding the post-human turn and working with concepts from the fields of animal studies and history of science, the author argues that these grotesque texts critique normative measures of biopolitical control at the sites of sexual and linguistic reproduction. She demonstrates how the text's fantastic figures, such as masturbating plants, narrating dogs, and marginalized humans, challenge categories of species, race, and gender by staging the fragility of the anthropocentric point of view and exploring the possibilities of expression at the limits of language. Shaped by literary censorship, the micro-genre puts forward a previously neglected political dimension in the language crisis around 1900. These linguistic limitations paradoxically generate abundant creative and multilingual expressivity, which, in the case of these four authors, intricately intertwines the concerns of (bio)politics and modernist aesthetics.
Bu çalışmada Alman Edebiyatı'nın en önemli yazarlarından Nobel Edebiyat Ödülü sahibi Thomas Mann'ın kendisi gibi yazar olan oğlu Klaus Mann'ın Almanya'da yaşarken ve daha sonrasında sürgündeyken ...kaleme aldığı eserler incelenecektir. Çalkantılı bir dönemde yaşayan yazar Avrupa'daki iki büyük savaş arası dönemi iyi gözlemleyen entelektüeller arasında yer almaktadır.Kendisini güç kazanan yeni siyasi ve ideolojik yapının fikren karşı cephesinde konumlandıran Klaus Mann'ın eserleri çerçevesinde Almanya Edebiyatı'nda Sürgün konusuna kısa değinilecek, Mann'ın yaşamak zorunda kaldığı acı tecrübelere ve bunların hayatındaki izdüşümlerine ver verilerek; edebiyatının şekillendiği toplumsal ortam ve siyasi yapıdan söz edilerek ele aldığı konuların sürgün öncesi dönem ve sonrasında benzerlikleri ve farklılıkları gösterilmeye çalışılacaktır. Edebiyat alanında etkin bir kariyere sahip olan Klaus Mann'ın öne çıkan eserleri romanlarıdır.Bu romanlar aracılığıyla Avrupa'nın ve Almanya'nın değişen yüzü ve sosyokültürel ve sosyoekonomik durumu hakkında bilgi edinmek mümkündür. Bu sebeple, çalışmamıza yazarın öne çıkan üç romanını (Treffpunkt im Unendlichen/Sonsuzda Buluşma, Flucht in den Norden, Der Vulkan. Roman UnterEmigranten) ele alıp ve bu romanlarda kişiler arası ilişkileri ve kişilerin toplumsal/politik yönelimlerini irdelemeye çalışacağız.
This thesis is based on the project completed for the Master's degree at Stony Brook University, which was split into two parts: translation of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening from German to ...English, and the presentation of this translation as a production. In order to endow further meaning on the controversial play, I sought to undermine the audience's expectations of sex and gender by using cross gender casting and other production values in order to cause an audience to question their expectations of the gender binary and the societal expectation for men and women to adhere to prescribed gender roles. This thesis first traces the inspiration for the project and factors that led to my interest, methodology used in translating the play and casting for the gender bent production, and its overall effectiveness.
Spring Awakening Debruge, Peter
Variety,
10/2015, Volume:
329, Issue:
13
Journal Article, Magazine Article
Camryn Manheim, Marlee Matlin, Patrick Page, Russell Harvard For nearly a quarter century, Deaf West Theatre has been pioneering opportunities for deaf actors and audiences to share theater ...experiences, incorporating sign language and projected text directly into stagings of popular plays and musicals. Director Michael Arden introduces this device from the first scene, as Wendla (Sandra Mae Frank) studies herself in the mirror, passing an electric guitar through to her speaking/ singing counterpart (Katie Boeck) on the other side in exchange for the babydoll dress that kicks off her first number, "Mama Who Bore Me." Arden hasn't strayed that far from Michael Mayer's 2006 staging, doubling the number of adult actors to accommodate both deaf and speaking actors (meaning we get Marlee Matlin and Camryn Manheim with one ticket).
The decreasing interest in the study of foreign languages forces us to reconsider and re‐evaluate new teaching methods and approaches. Nevertheless, the use of music, in particular modern or pop ...music, for interdisciplinary studies and students' language skills appears to be still neglected. I claim that the lyrics and music of the popular group Rammstein deal with classical German literature and music and therefore should be added to the curriculum. Based on personal teaching experiences while teaching German for a couple of years at both high‐school and university level I will provide insight into some aspects dealing with Rammstein in the classroom.
... long as modernism, with its affirmation of the aesthetic, remained culturally dominant, this German literary canon proved flexible for teaching purposes: the dialectical relation of Brecht's ...Marxism to the "autonomous" tradition could be readily and excitingly articulated.
This dissertation seeks to trouble our culture's overvaluation of innocence by exploring the literary consequences of theatrical situations in which the scene of seduction and the scene of ...instruction are presumed to be one and the same. Because the adolescent stands in between the more actively theorized positions of child and adult, partaking of characteristics of both but not fully either, the adolescent crystallizes our cultural anxieties about what it means to pass on culture linguistically, morally, aesthetically, and politically. By focusing on the figure of the adolescent as the proto-citizen I am able to investigate the degree to which the overvaluation of innocence is connected to a desire to deny possibilities for radical social transformation. Chapter 1 reads Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia in order to establish norms of discourse around adolescence: more specifically investigating how the text participates in fetishization of the child figure in order to stave off the threat of the teenager's uncanny knowledge. Chapter 2 uses Peter Shaffer's play Equus to map out the widespread influence of Freud's legacy on our modern conceptions of adolescence and adolescent sexuality, exploring how deviant sexuality is constructed as a potent threat the social order which dangerously reduces the adolescent's ability to take their place in the machinery of citizenship. While my first two chapters delineate the rhetorical tactics used to keep adolescents from achieving full citizenship, my second two chapters explore what happens when youth act as citizens anyway, disregarding their structural disenfranchisement in attempts to remake the civic sphere. Chapter 3 contrasts the different models of citizenship articulated by Arthur Miller's The Crucible and Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive. Drawing heavily on Lauren Berlant's theories of infantile and diva citizenship I argue that these plays investigate the relationship of private trauma to public embodiment, reframing the relationship between intellectual and sexual knowledge as the capacity to successfully enter into critical consciousness. Chapter 4 gives a reading of the film The City of Lost Children to demonstrate how a reimagining of the child and adolescent through aesthetics rather than ideology can support the development of new epistemologies.
This study analyzes the diverse cultural output of the Weimar Republic in terms of media, narrative and modernity. I investigate a series of filmic adaptations, capturing two nearly simultaneous ...iterations of a narrative in different media. I argue that consistent lines of development can be discerned despite incongruities in medium, style and narrative content. These texts and films reinscribe the role of the narrator in a two-fold manner. First, these narratives break open the hermetically sealed diegetic world by allowing an interpenetration of levels of narrating and narrative content. Second, these narratives utilize and explore the potential of multiple media in telling one story; a process repeated in the work's adaptation into film. The role of the narrator becomes a performative and self-reflexive processes of selection, editing and representation (or reiterative re-presentation), drawing readerly and/or spectatorial attention to the process of narrating as much as it does to the narrative content. I analyze the adaptations of Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, Die Dreigroschenoper and Berlin Alexanderplatz. Ranging from 1921 to 1931, all of these texts were adapted into films within three months to three years. In chapter one, I show that the alternating power over texts in Norbert Jacques' Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler novel is reflected in the shifting narrative focalizations and the final, performative recapitulation of the crimes as entertainment in Sandor Weltmann's stage show. Fritz Lang's film starts with performative criminality as reflected in the use of post-production editing techniques which highlight the power of the criminal. It is Mabuse's failing visual power and the transference of cinematic visions to the prosecutor which will prove to be Mabuse's downfall. In chapter two, I argue that Bertolt Brecht spatializes his medialization of Die Dreigroschenoper to effect a more direct and obvious interplay of his fiction on stage and the real world, doubling and recasting real social conditions as drama. G.W. Pabst's film also participates in this sort of interplay, comparison and doubling. However, Pabst's cinematic space is diametrically opposed to Brecht's theatrical space, and Pabst's film becomes a piece in dialogue with itself, underscoring its own mediality, the medialization of its characters (especially Mackie Messer) and the interchangeability of characters and inanimate objects. In chapter three, I discuss Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz. Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf. While his predilection for montage is often cited in scholarly work, I argue that it is the very material basis of cut-and-pasted texts which is of central importance to Döblin's masterpiece. Thus, Döblin's modern realism exposes itself as construct, collaborating with unwitting narrative co-creators in this style of appropriation and recapitulation. Piel Jutzi's film version is also highly cognizant of media, utilizing sound and image in rather creative manners. And yet, Franz Biberkopf becomes the point at which these media harmonize to tell the tale of one individual, eliding the complex medial and social context of the urban environment Döblin paints in his novel.
Representations of female adolescent figures in German literature from around 1750 to 1900 regularly play out in a similar way: the adolescent girl encroaches upon and transgresses sexual norms. In ...the vast majority of these scenarios, the girl consequently dies, often after giving birth or in the course of a pregnancy, thereby reaffirming the patriarchal norms of sexual abstinence and passivity prescribed for the young girl, which she initially put into question through her unorthodox actions. In this manner, the female adolescent is both a threat to and victim of the patriarchal system governing the text, and to the violence it entails. Not only her gender but, as this dissertation tries to argue, specifically her young age plays a significant role in this constellation. Only a few of these figures survive and continue to play a central role in the text. It is these exceptional female figures - girls who survive - that this dissertation explores, for their actions open up questions regarding the usual role prescribed to the figure of the young girl in German literature. The introduction seeks to consider the scholarship surrounding female death and representation, (notably the female as other, one who both stands in for and is supposed to ward off death) as well as to add to existing research by focusing on the factor of age and its relation to societal violence. The dissertation then examines plays by J.M.R. Lenz and Frank Wedekind's work, specifically the fragment Mine-Haha, where alternative scenarios, in which female adolescents survive, are developed. In Lenz's case the girl's survival depends on her limitation to the home, Wedekind's figures stand in for the principle of survival itself. The interplay between gender and age here becomes central to the questioning of the patriarchal order in these texts, and especially its economy of violence. One main question this dissertation investigates is whether the structural and interpersonal violence of the prevailing social system is minimized, or simply reorganized, if its usual victim – the young girl – is not as radically subjected to it.
