This dissertation examines the use of animal figures in Hoffmann, Nietzsche, and Kafka as a means for contemporary cultural critique. While animals in fable and allegory serve as mirrors of human ...beings, the counter-tradition formed by Hoffmann, Nietzsche, and Kafka goes one step further by using animals as distorting prisms through which to view human beings in modernity. In these texts, the human appears as a cultivated animal cut off from its instincts and stuck in its intellectual habits. At stake in this distorted vision of humanity, I argue, is the deformation of the individual at the hands of its own ideas and institutions. Though the immediate targets of their critique vary, these authors agree that something vital within modern German culture has died or become stifled as a result of modern bourgeois cultivation. Through a close analysis of specific case studies of cultivated animals in the nineteenth and twentieth century German imagination––E.T.A. Hoffmann’s literary tomcat Murr, the figures of the spider and the ruminant in early Nietzsche, and Kafka’s late animal figures––I demonstrate how these authors use animals to provide a perspective from which to critique the modern human and, in doing so, reshape it.Animals in Hoffmann, Nietzsche, and Kafka involve a direct or indirect critique of the German cultural ideal of cultivation. In Hoffmann’s Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (1819-1821), the trivialization of Bildung and the capitulation of the educated classes to the state results in the depoliticization and self-estrangement of the Bildungsbürger. In his early essays “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne” (1873) and “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben” (1874), Nietzsche takes up the critique of Bildung by revealing the denaturing consequences of a hermetic devotion to truth and Wissenschaft at the expense of bodily and instinctual life. In Kafka’s “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” (1917), Bildung appears as a taming and confining force that estranges human beings from themselves and each other. Since these texts represent the human as a being that has become estranged from its own nature as a result of its own formation, they register this deformation in their manipulation of aesthetic forms, whether through the deformation of the Bildungsroman (Hoffmann), the poeticization of philosophical writing (Nietzsche), or the destabilization of allegory (Kafka). Thus, in each case, this formal, generic experimentation points to another deformation taking place outside the text, thereby creating an opportunity for the reader to recognize their own self-estrangement.The first chapter, “Arrested Development: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Kater Murr and the Deformation of the Bildungsroman” investigates how Hoffmann uses the grotesque as a lens through which to view the German Bildungsbürger. By juxtaposing the autobiography with a self-educated tomcat with the biography of the musical genius Kreisler, Hoffmann performs a critique of the trivialization and depoliticization of Bildung. While Murr is often read as a parody of the Bildungsbürger, I argue that, as an agent of literary destruction, he points towards the possibility of remaking dead aesthetic and political forms. The second chapter, “Wir Spinnen”: Nietzsche’s Rhetoric of Transformation,” examines two animal figures––the spider and the ruminant––in the context of Nietzsche’s attempt to construct a life-affirming philosophy. By analyzing their rhetorical function in two early essays, I show how Nietzsche uses animals both to critique modern stagnation and to forge a new, more robust humanity. The third chapter, “The Invisible Cage: Rethinking Human Freedom in Kafka’s Animal Stories,” examines the entrapment that Kafka’s animal experience as recently acculturated animals. This entrapment, I argue, is an effect of living in the shadow of ideals such as freedom and progress. By analyzing the critique of idealistic thinking in Kafka’s animal stories, I show how Kafka’s animals observe the ways in which humans are shaped not only by culture, but by their ideas.
Fly fishing has produced an unusually large body of literary works, both fiction and nonfiction, yet scholars, even ecocritics, have given it minimal attention. In this dissertation I construct an ...ecocritically focused literary and cultural analysis of North American fly fishing literature and interpret fly fishers as politically active stakeholders in ongoing discussions related to issues such as the preservation of native species, the protection of public lands, the affective power of nature, and the commodification of the environment. The interdisciplinary nature of this examination highlights the complex set of interconnections among embodied activities like fly fishing and historical and contemporary conservation, environmental culture, and advocacy. I argue that fly fishing literature represents a body of works that showcase an ethical and ecological conception of the human place in nature.Chapters follow a thematic approach addressing a range of important considerations within the scope of ecocriticism. Centering on topics such as ecological and environmental rhetoric, ecofeminism, environmental ethics, and the Anthropocene I establish how the fly fishing community and fly fishing authors grapple with serious commitments to issues such as political activism, inclusivity, our responsibilities to non-human animals, and what place fly fishing might have in the changing world of the twenty-first century as we move further into the Anthropocene. Through these approaches, I demonstrate the ways that fly fishing represents a place-conscious ethic that creates social communities that promote environmental stewardship and political action. In this dissertation I provide a critique of fly fishing literature while also making the case that it is a rich genre worth studying. It is not enough, I argue, for ecocritical scholars to theorize ever more abstract ways of imagining or interacting with the more-than-human world, rather they must also engage more seriously with cultural activities—like fly fishing—that citizens regularly participate in.
This study followed 15 secondary students as they moved across multiple spaces of an unfolding writing program: a journalism summer writing camp; an educational online community for youth centered on ...social justice; and school year, drop-in writing workshop sessions. Aiming to understand how adolescent writers shifted participation and writing across these spaces, their perspectives are centered, in line with methodological and epistemological framing in YPAR and theoretical framings focused on movement in relation to power asymmetries: transliteracies and critical literacies. Program spaces were liminal and framed as “Third Spaces.” Data collection was both individual and collaborative with youth and included field notes, surveys, discussions, multimodal artifacts, and interviews. Data analysis involved early collaboration with youth and open, in-vivo coding and narrative analysis. One findings set unpacks liminality as intentional aspects of writing space construction and co-construction characterized by multiplicities in genres, modes, and adult-youth relationships. A second findings set attends to tensions between youth and adult participants (including me) within our spaces, positioning tensions as generative sources of transformation when directly discussed with youth. A third findings set examines interplays between journalism as a shifting genre and our liminal spaces, describing convergences between “citizen journalism” and youth journalistic engagement as personal and social, specifically as creative, narrative, and activist. Collective implications point to the importance of surfacing metacommunicative awareness in writing teaching, learning, and research and suggest participatory ethnography and participatory narrative analysis as future directions for engaging in participatory work with youth that allows choices and practices to emerge.
Women were nearly universal in their expression of a stronger desire for men with good financial prospects" (26). ...demonstrating an ability to combat other males or to secure resources (as opposed ...to physically eliminating rivals) is a way for males to increase their reproductive marketability and also to disincline any male rivals from competing. ...Jake's very awareness of Cohn's "satisfaction" with his broken nose indicates that Cohn displays it as if it were badge of honor rather than, say, an embarrassing scar-Jake infers (reads) this "satisfaction" based on Cohn's behavior (performance), which the reader is not able to witness-he or she must take Jake at his word. According to McConachie, the ability to conceive of and participate in strict ritualistic performances allowed early humans to begin to explain natural forces, which we can see in the live sacrifice dimension of the bullfights; they serve as a type of honoring of namre or whatever metaphysical force(s) were thought to have caused natural phenomena, which can be seen through Romero's, Jake's, and even Brett's appreciation and awe for the bull's beauty and power- '"My God, isn't he beautiful?' Brett said. According to Buss, aside from finding a good genetic match and a woman with good "parenting skills," part of successful reproduction on the part of men-who, unlike women, could at one time never be certain the child they were raising was in fact their own-means "ensuring increased probability of paternity," which is substantiated by most men today placing greater importance on "sexual fidelity and abhoring promiscuity in a woman" when considering a long-term mate (24, 26).
This work explores the affect of combat trauma on the military-civilian divide through the lens of predominantly British and American, English language texts from the 1840s through the early 2000s. ...The focus is on the effects of trauma on narratives with the combat trauma and war memoirs of various works utilized to analyze the catharsis of contact with these works by a civilian population in an attempt to understand the nature of warfare given the use of armed forces while at the same point in time absolving any nervousness around the costs by engaging texts with nominally conclusive, cathartic or positive endings.
The nonprofit organization Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing, established in 2005, is committed to helping American war veterans deal with the physical and emotional wounds incurred in combat. ...Volunteers teach veterans how to fly fish, tie flies, and build rods, and they accompany the vets to streams, rivers, and lakes for angling. Although the Project Healing Waters website makes no mention of Ernest Hemingway or his story “Big Two-Hearted River,” the organization’s mission suggests that contemporary veterans, like Hemingway’s Nick Adams, can find peace and become healthy while fishing on a body of water.
Current Bibliography Larson, Kelli A
The Hemingway review,
09/2015, Letnik:
35, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Rodenberg analyzes EH's long-term symbiotic relationship with celebrity media, from his early self-promotion as an apprentice journalist at the Kansas City Star to his tragic death. Covers trends in ...advertising and publishing during the first half of the century, focusing on the rise of the glamour industry, gentleman's magazines, photojournalism, and the Hollywood image of the virile male. Explicates subtle World War I allusions, including celebrity war dog Sergeant Stubby, the pictures of "dead" game animals (soldiers) Jake sees in Burguete as well as the 144th Infantry Regiment and other "war" numbers and dates to show the past is not far from Jake's mind as he writes his novel.
BOOKS RECEIVED
College literature,
01/2017, Letnik:
44, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Stanford: Stanford University Press. $45.00 hc. 248 pp. The Kent State University Press. $39.95 hc. 230 pp. Duke University Press. $26.95 sc. 300 pp. Columbia University Press. $60.00 hc. 304 pp. ...Columbia University Press. $35.00 hc. 164 pp. Columbia University Press. $60.00 hc. 368 pp. Duke University Press. $25.95 sc. 304 pp.
This note on Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises demonstrates that during Jake and Bill’s night walk in Paris there are subtle allusions to World War I: the stuffed dog in the window of a taxidermist’s ...shop, American involvement in the fall 1918 Meuse-Argonne Offensive, and more. The dog is an allusion to the war dog, Sergeant Stubby, a hero in American newspapers during and after the war. He died 16 March 1926 and was then stuffed. He now resides at the Smithsonian.
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