Download or read book The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge written by Rainer Maria Rilke and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-06 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the definitive, widely acclaimed translation of the major prose work of one of our century's greatest poets -- "a masterpiece like no other" (Elizabeth Hardwick) -- Rilke's only novel, extraordinary for its structural uniqueness and purity of language. First published in 1910, it has proven to be one of the most influential and enduring works of fiction of our century. Malte Laurids Brigge is a young Danish nobleman and poet living in Paris. Obsessed with death and with the reality that lurks behind appearances, Brigge muses on his family and their history and on the teeming, alien life of the city. Many of the themes and images that occur in Rilke's poetry can also be found in the novel, prefiguring the modernist movement in its self-awareness and imagistic immediacy.
Download or read book A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka written by James Rolleston and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2006 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kafka's novels and stories fascinate readers and critics of each generation. Although all theories attempt to appropriate Kafka, there is no one key to his work. This work aims to present a point of view while taking account of previous Kafka research.
Download or read book Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre written by Walter Kaufmann and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1975-03-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the foremost resources on existentialism from renowned philosopher, poet, and Nietzsche translator Walter Kaufmann—a must-read for philosophers, both armchair and professional. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre provides basic writings of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kafka, Ortega, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, including some not previously translated, along with an invaluable introductory essay by Walter Kaufmann.
Download or read book Franz Kafka written by Louis Begley and published by Atlas and Company. This book was released on 2009-12 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Refreshingly factual. . . . Here prophet Kafka and quotidian Kafka are not in conflict.” —Zadie Smith, New York Review of Books Franz Kafka is the voice of the outsider at once defined by its affiliations and completely, utterly alone. He was a Jew among Christians, a nonobservant Jew among believers. Louis Begley, himself a multilingual exile and, like Kafka, a lawyer and writer, renders Kafka’s life with sensitivity and insight.
Download or read book Sense and Creative Labor in Rainer Maria Rilke s Prose Works written by Nicholas Carroll Reynolds and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-08-06 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an investigation of the role of creative labor and the five senses in Rainer Maria Rilke’s prose works, including his “Primal Sound” essay, the Stories of God, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and his monograph on Auguste Rodin. It is about several protagonists’ quest to achieve creative labor by reconnecting spirit or the unconscious to the hand. There are many difficulties in the way, however, illustrated by Rilke’s essays, tales, and monographs. In the process of overcoming these impediments, the five senses are expanded and refined. Rilke’s characters undergo a transformation that not only allows them to do true creative labor, but also brings them into a new relationship with themselves, the world around them and other people. Nicholas Carroll Reynolds received his PhD at the University of Oregon, USA. He has authored several articles on philosophy and literature, and has worked as an editor and translator. He is currently employed at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, USA, where he teaches in the German, Philosophy, and First Year Experience programs, as well as in Trinity’s Study abroad program in Berlin, Germany.
Download or read book Modernism written by Astradur Eysteinsson and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-10-04 with total page 1059 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two-volume work Modernism has been awarded the prestigious 2008 MSA Book Prize! Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres, locations, and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical, aesthetic, and historical questions, 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts, from individual texts to national literatures, from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism, literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical, environmental, urban, and political domains, including issues of race and space, gender and fashion, popular culture and trauma, science and exile, all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.
Download or read book The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages written by Anna Balakian and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by Anna Balakian, this volume marks the first attempt to discuss Symbolism in a full range of the literatures written in the European languages. The scope of these analyses, which explore Latin America, Scandinavia, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria as well as West European literatures, continues to make the volume a valuable reference today. As René Wellek suggests in his historiographic contribution, the fifty-one contributors not only make us think afresh about individual authors who are “giants,” but also draw us to reassess schools and movements in their local as well as international contexts. Reviewers comment that this “copious and intelligently structured” anthology, divided into eight parts, traces the conceptual bases and emergence of an international Symbolist movement, showing the spread of Symbolism to other national literatures from French sources, as well as the symbiotic transformations of Symbolism through appropriation and amalgamation with local literary trends. Several chapters deal with the relationships between literature and the other arts, pointing to Symbolism at work in painting, music, and theatre. Other chapters on the psychological aspects of the Symbolist method connect in interesting ways to a vision of metaphor and myth as virtually musical notation and an experimental emphasis on the play afforded by gaps between words. The volume is “a major contribution” to “the most significant exponents” and “essential themes” of Symbolism. The theoretical, historical, and typological sections of the volume help explain why the impact of this important movement of the fin-de-siècle is still felt today.
Download or read book Distant Light written by Antonio Moresco and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man lives in total solitude in an abandoned mountain village. But each night, at the same hour, a mysterious distant light appears on the far side of the valley and disturbs his isolation. What is it? Someone in another deserted village? A forgotten street lamp? An alien being? Finally the man is driven to discover its source. He finds a young boy who also lives alone, in a house in the middle of the forest. But who really is this child? The answer at the secret heart of this novel is both uncanny and profoundly touching. Antonio Moresco's "Little Prince" is a moving meditation on life and the universe we inhabit. Moresco reflects on the solitude and pain of existence, but also on what we share with all around us, living and dead.
Download or read book The Twentieth Century 1890 1945 written by Raymond Furness and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-31 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1978, this study presents a detailed analysis of the major literary movements in Austria and Germany from the end of the nineteenth century to the collapse of the Third Reich. It examines the plethora of literary genres which marked the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century: the short-lived Naturalist movement rapidly giving way to various forms of symbolism and neo-romanticism. The situation in Vienna is studied in detail; the concept of modernism vis-à-vis expressionism with special regard to Rilke and Kafka. The literature of the Weimar period is also analysed, with emphasis on the symphonic novels of the time and the anti-illusionist devices of Brecht. It also draws a comparison between the literary situation in Nazi Germany and the literature of exile, and the positions of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Brecht and Gottfried Benn are examined.
Download or read book Permanent Liminality and Modernity written by Arpad Szakolczai and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive sociological study of the nature and dynamics of the modern world, through the use of a series of anthropological concepts, including the trickster, schismogenesis, imitation and liminality. Developing the view that with the theatre playing a central role, the modern world is conditioned as much by cultural processes as it is by economic, technological or scientific ones, the author contends the world is, to a considerable extent, theatrical - a phenomenon experienced as inauthenticity or a loss of direction and meaning. As such the novel is revealed as a means for studying our theatricalised reality, not simply because novels can be understood to be likening the world to theatre, but because they effectively capture and present the reality of a world that has been thoroughly ’theatricalised’ - and they do so more effectively than the main instruments usually employed to analyse reality: philosophy and sociology. With analyses of some of the most important novelists and novels of modern culture, including Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Mann, Blixen, Broch and Bulgakov, and focusing on fin-de-siècle Vienna as a crucial ’threshold’ chronotope of modernity, Permanent Liminality and Modernity demonstrates that all seek to investigate and unmask the theatricalisation of modern life, with its progressive loss of meaning and our deteriorating capacity to distinguish between what is meaningful and what is artificial. Drawing on the work of Nietzsche, Bakhtin and Girard to examine the ways in which novels explore the reduction of human existence to a state of permanent liminality, in the form of a sacrificial carnival, this book will appeal to scholars of social, anthropological and literary theory.
Download or read book German Literature of the Twentieth Century written by Ingo Roland Stoehr and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2001 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces literary developments in the German-speaking countries from 1900 to the present. This study of German literature in the past hundred years sets its subject clearly in the artistic and political context of developments in Western Europe during the century. It begins with the turn-of-the-century aestheticism andvisions of decay led by Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal and other Austrian writers, and the quite different explosion of new artistic energy in the Expressionist and Dada movements. These movements are succeeded by the rise of Modernism, culminating in the inter-war years: the poetry of Rilke, Brecht's epic theatre, and novels by Thomas Mann, Kafka, Hesse, Musil, Doblin and Broch; the influence of Nazism on literary production is considered. The study of developments after 1945 reflects the struggle to establish a post-Holocaust literature and to deal with the questions posed by the political division of Germany. Finally, the convergence of East and West German literature after unification is addressed. Ingo R. Stoehr teaches literature at Kilgore College, Texas, and is editor of the bilingual journal of German literature in English translation, Dimension2.
Download or read book On Creaturely Life written by Eric L. Santer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-06-24 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being—the open—concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges—what Eric Santner calls the creaturely—have a biopolitical aspect: they are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power and authority. Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors. An indispensable book for students of Sebald, On Creaturely Life is also a significant contribution to critical theory.
Download or read book The Pathos of Distance written by Jean-Michel Rabaté and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-04-21 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jean-Michel Rabaté uses Nietzsche's image of a “pathos of distance,” the notion that values are created by a few gifted and lofty individuals, as the basis for a wide-ranging investigation into the ethics of the moderns. Revealing overlooked connections between Nietzsche's and Benjamin's ideas of history and ethics, Rabaté provides an original genealogy for modernist thought, moving through figures and moments as varied as Yeats and the birth of Irish Modernism, the ethics of courage in Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Apollinaire, and others in 1910, T. S. Eliot's post-war despair, Jean Cocteau's formidable selfmythology in his first film The Blood of a Poet, Siri Hustvedt's novel of American trauma, and J. M. Coetzee's dystopia portraying an affectless future haunted by a messianic promise.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel written by Graham Bartram and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-05 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel, first published in 2004, provides a broad ranging introduction to the major trends in the development of the German novel from the 1890s to the present. Written by an international team of experts, it encompasses both modernist and realist traditions, and also includes a look back to the roots of the modern novel in the Bildungsroman of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The structure is broadly chronological, but thematically-focused chapters examine topics such as gender anxiety, images of the city, war, and women's writing; within each chapter, key works are selected for close attention. Unique in its combination of breadth of coverage and detailed analysis of individual works, and featuring a chronology and guides to further reading, this Companion will be indispensable to students and teachers.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann written by Ritchie Robertson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-11-29 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Key dimensions of Thomas Mann's writing and life are explored in this collection of specially commissioned essays. In addition to introductory chapters on all the main works of fiction, the essays and diaries, there are four chapters examining Mann's oeuvre in relation to major themes. These thematic explorations include his position as a realistic writer concerned with the history of his own times and as a commentator on German and American politics; his controversial reputation as an intellectual novelist; the literary techniques that enabled his challenging fictions to appeal to a wide audience; and the homosexual subtext running through his fiction and diaries. A final chapter looks at the pitfalls of translating Mann into English. The essays are well supported by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading. Altogether the volume provides an invaluable resource for scholars and students.
Download or read book Kafka s Travels written by J. Zilcosky and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1916, Kafka writes of The Sugar Baron , a dime-store colonial adventure novel, '[it] affects me so deeply that I feel it is about myself, or as if it were the book of rules for my life.' John Zilcosky reveals that this perhaps surprising statement - made by the Prague-bound poet of modern isolation - is part of a network of remarks that exemplify Kafka's ongoing preoccupation with popular travel writing, exoticism, and colonial fantasy. Taking this biographical peculiarity as a starting point, Kafka's Travels elegantly re-reads Kafka's major works ( Amerika , The Trial , The Castle ) through the lens of fin-de siecle travel culture. Making use of previously unexplored literary and cultural materials - travel diaries, train schedules, tour guides, adventure novels - Zilcosky argues that Kafka's uniquely modern metaphorics of alienation emerges out of the author's complex encounter with the utopian travel discourses of his day.
Download or read book The Ecstatic Quotidian written by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis&—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world. While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, C&ézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.
