Download or read book The German Picaro and Modernity written by Bernhard Malkmus and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-03-13 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German Pícaro and Modernity reads the re-emergence of the picaresque narrative in twentieth-century German-language writing as an expression of modernity and its social imaginaries. Malkmus argues that the picaresque, whose origins date back to the Spanish Renaissance and the Baroque Age, re-emerged as a reflection both of Germany's explosive modernizing processes between 1880 and 1930 and of the most barbarous implosion of modern civilization under National Socialism. Another reason for the fertility of this literary form at that particular cultural moment is rooted in the complexities of German-Jewish relations and the history of Jewish assimilation in central Europe. A considerable number of authors who used the picaresque form in the twentieth century are from a Jewish background, and Malkmus demonstrates how the picaresque narrative template also offers a medium for German-Jewish self-reflection. In highlighting these connections, he contributes not only to scholarship in European literature, but also but also to our understanding of major social, economic and political issues at stake in modernity

Download or read book The German Picaro and Modernity written by Bernhard Malkmus and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-10-06 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German Pícaro and Modernity reads the re-emergence of the picaresque narrative in twentieth-century German-language writing as an expression of modernity and its social imaginaries. Malkmus argues that the picaresque, whose origins date back to the Spanish Renaissance and the Baroque Age, re-emerged as a reflection both of Germany's explosive modernizing processes between 1880 and 1930 and of the most barbarous implosion of modern civilization under National Socialism. Another reason for the fertility of this literary form at that particular cultural moment is rooted in the complexities of German-Jewish relations and the history of Jewish assimilation in central Europe. A considerable number of authors who used the picaresque form in the twentieth century are from a Jewish background, and Malkmus demonstrates how the picaresque narrative template also offers a medium for German-Jewish self-reflection. In highlighting these connections, he contributes not only to scholarship in European literature, but also but also to our understanding of major social, economic and political issues at stake in modernity

Download or read book Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel written by Jens Elze and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-28 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the contemporary picaresque novel. Despite its popularity, the picaresque, unlike the bildungsroman, is still an undertheorized genre, especially for the context of postcolonial literatures. This study considers the picaresque novel’s traditional focus on poverty and deprivation, and argues that its postcolonial versions urge us to conceive of as a more wide-ranging sense of precarity and precariousness. Non-linear biography, episodic style, protean identities, unreliable narratives, and abject landscapes are the social and formal aspects through which this precarity is thematized and performed. A concise analysis of these concepts and phenomena in the picaresque provides the structure for this book. What is especially significant in comparison to other forms of postcolonial (post)modernism is that the picaresque does not offer a general critique of a project of modernity, but through its persistent precarity points to the paradoxical logics of capitalism, which are especially nuanced under the conditions of neo-imperialism and neoliberalism. The book features texts by established postcolonial authors such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, but especially focuses on the more recent proliferation of the genre in works by Aravind Adiga, Mohsin Hamid and Indra Sinha.

Download or read book Robert Walser written by Samuel Frederick and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) is now recognized as one of the most important European authors of the modernist period, having garnered high praise from such prominent voices as Susan Sontag, W. G. Sebald, and J. M. Coetzee. Robert Walser: A Companion is the first comprehensive guide to Walser’s work in English. The twelve essays in this collection examine Walser’s literary output, historical milieu, and idiosyncratic writing process, addressing aspects of his biography; discussing the various genres in which he wrote (the novel, short prose, drama, lyric poetry, and letters); and analyzing his best-known novels and short stories alongside lesser-known but no less fascinating poems, plays, and prose pieces. An essential addition to the scholarship about this eccentric, prolific, and influential writer’s work, Robert Walser: A Companion will be of interest both to established scholars and to those coming to Walser for the first time.

Download or read book Never Better written by Miriam Udel and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was only when Jewish writers gave up on the lofty Enlightenment ideals of progress and improvement that the Yiddish novel could decisively enter modernity. Animating their fictions were a set of unheroic heroes who struck a precarious balance between sanguinity and irony that author Miriam Udel captures through the phrase “never better.” With this rhetorical homage toward the double-voiced utterances of Sholem Aleichem, Udel gestures at these characters’ insouciant proclamation that things had never been better, and their rueful, even despairing admission that things would probably never get better. The characters defined by this dual consciousness constitute a new kind of protagonist: a distinctively Jewish scapegrace whom Udel denominates the polit or refugee. Cousin to the Golden Age Spanish pícaro, the polit is a socially marginal figure who narrates his own story in discrete episodes, as if stringing beads on a narrative necklace. A deeply unsettled figure, the polit is allergic to sentimentality and even routine domesticity. His sequential misadventures point the way toward the heart of the picaresque, which Jewish authors refashion as a vehicle for modernism—not only in Yiddish, but also in German, Russian, English and Hebrew. Udel draws out the contours of the new Jewish picaresque by contrasting it against the nineteenth-century genre of progress epitomized by the Bildungsroman. While this book is grounded in modern Jewish literature, its implications stretch toward genre studies in connection with modernist fiction more generally. Udel lays out for a diverse readership concepts in the history and theory of the novel while also explicating the relevant particularities of Jewish literary culture. In addressing the literary stylistics of a “minor” modernism, this study illuminates how the adoption of a picaresque sensibility allowed minority authors to write simultaneously within and against the literary traditions of Europe.

Download or read book Authors and the World written by Rebecca Braun and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authors and the World traces how four core 'modes of authorship' have developed and inflect one another in modern Germany through a series of twenty different case studies, including the work of Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Anna Seghers, Walter Höllerer, Felicitas Hoppe and Katja Petrowskaja, and original interview material with contemporary writers Ulrike Draesner, Olga Martynova and Ulrike Almut Sandig. 'Modes of authorship' are attitudes taken towards being an author that can be seen both in what an individual author does and in how a particular literary tradition or trend is perceived and mediated by others both within and beyond Pierre Bourdieu's literary field. Consequently, they deliberately straddle questions of literary production and reception. Rebecca Braun sets out how the commemorative, celebratory, utopian and satirical modes interact with one another to produce a number of models of authorship that carry either foundational or otherwise normative force for society. In varying combinations and with deep roots in 19th- and early 20th-century practices, the four modes of authorship create a remarkably (and at times troublingly) stable German literature network that to a large degree still determines the way contemporary German-speaking authors enact their cultural significance in their writing, engage with their local circumstances, and are more broadly received around the world. Authors and the World provides not just a radically new approach to German literary history but a thoroughly new paradigm for thinking about literary authorship.

Download or read book Writing Rogues written by Cassio de Oliveira and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2023-01-15 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plot elements such as adventure, travel to far-flung regions, the criminal underworld, and embezzlement schemes are not usually associated with Soviet literature, yet an entire body of work produced between the October Revolution and the Stalinist Great Terror was constructed around them. In Writing RoguesCassio de Oliveira sheds light on the picaresque and its marginal characters – rogues and storytellers – who populated the Soviet Union on paper and in real life. The picaresque afforded authors the means to articulate and reflect on the Soviet collective identity, a class-based utopia that rejected imperial power and attempted to deemphasize national allegiances. Combining new readings of canonical works with in-depth analysis of neglected texts, Writing Rogues explores the proliferation of characters left on the sidelines of the communist transition, including gangsters, con men, and petty thieves, many of them portrayed as ethnic minorities. The book engages with scholarship on Soviet subjectivity as well as classical picaresque literature in order to explain how the subversive rogue – such as Ilf and Petrov’s wildly popular cynic and schemer Ostap Bender – in the process of becoming a fully fledged Soviet citizen, came to expose and embody the contradictions of Soviet life itself. Writing Rogues enriches our understanding of how literature was called upon to participate in the construction of Soviet identity. It demonstrates that the Soviet picaresque resonated with individual citizens’ fears and aspirations as it recorded the country’s transformation into the first communist state.

Download or read book Interwar Salzburg written by Robert von Dassanowsky and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-02-08 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A long-overdue reassessment of post-1918 Salzburg as a distinct Austrian cultural hub that experimented in moving beyond war and empire into a modern, self-consciously inclusive, and international center for European culture. For over 300 years, Salzburg had its own legacy as a city-state at an international crossroads, less stratified than Europe's colonial capitals and seeking a political identity based in civic participation with its own economy and politics. After World War I, Salzburg became a refuge. Its urban and bucolic spaces staged encounters that had been brutally cut apart by the war; its deep-seated traditions of citizenship, art, and education guided its path. In Interwar Salzburg, contributors from around the globe recover an evolving but now lost vanguard of European culture, fostering not only new identities in visual and performing arts, film, music, and literature, but also a festival culture aimed at cultivating an inclusive public (not an international elite) and a civic culture sharing public institutions, sports, tourism, and a diverse spectrum of cultural identities serving a new European ideal.

Download or read book Sissi s World written by Maura E. Hametz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-07-12 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sissi's World offers a transdisciplinary approach to the study of the Habsburg Empress Elisabeth of Austria. It investigates the myths, legends, and representations across literature, art, film, and other media of one of the most popular, revered, and misunderstood female figures in European cultural history. Sissi's World explores the cultural foundations for the endurance of the Sissi legends and the continuing fascination with the beautiful empress: a Bavarian duchess born in 1837, the longest-serving Austrian empress, and the queen of Hungary who died in 1898 at the hands of a crazed anarchist. Despite the continuing fascination with “the beloved Sissi," the Habsburg empress, her impact, and legacy have received scant attention from scholars. This collection will go beyond the popular biographical accounts, recountings of her mythic beauty, and scattered studies of her well-known eccentricities to offer transdisciplinary cultural perspectives across art, film, fashion, history, literature, and media.

Download or read book Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler s Prose written by Marie Kolkenbrock and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-02-08 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was the function of the invocation of destiny in the increasingly secularized era of turn-of-the-century Vienna? By exploring this question, Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler's Prose offers a new psycho-sociological perspective on the narrative works of Arthur Schnitzler. While Vienna 1900 as a site of crisis has been established in the scholarship, this book focuses on the presence of forces that deny the existence of said crisis and work to contain its subversive and critical potential. Stereotype and destiny emerge in Schnitzler's prose texts as a form of these counter-critical forces. In her readings, Kolkenbrock shows that stereotype and destiny serve as an interrelated coping mechanism for a central psychological conflict of modernity: the paradoxical need to be recognized as 'normal' and 'special' at the same time. While, through the complex of "stereotype and destiny," Schnitzler's prose addresses central modern questions of identity and subjecthood, Kolkenbrock's close readings also reveal how the texts inscribe themselves aesthetically in the literary tradition of Romanticism and as such offer crucial sources for understanding Schnitzler's representations of embattled subjecthood within broader social and aesthetic traditions.

Download or read book Ghostwriting written by Richard T. Gray and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghostwriting provides the first comprehensive analysis of the fictional prose narratives of one of contemporary Germany's most recognized authors, the émigré writer W. G. Sebald. Examining Sebald's well-known published texts in the context of largely unknown unpublished works, and informed by documents and information from Sebald's literary estate, this book offers a detailed portrait of his characteristic literary techniques and how they emerged and matured out of the practices and attitudes he represented in his profession as a literary scholar. The title “Ghostwriting” signals the convergence in Sebald's works of a set of diverse historical questions, philosophical views, and literary practices. Many historical ghosts haunt Sebald's narratives on the level of story. Moreover, Sebald's narrator plays the role of a ghostwriter in the profound sense that his stories fictionally re-enact the histories of obscure, but once-living individuals whose lives they revitalize, and whose fates are tied up with the most virulent historical conjunctures of the modern world. This study thus seeks to comprehend the constitutive elements of Sebald's “poetics of history,” his implementation of literary tools for effective historical memorializing.

Download or read book France Kafka written by John T. Hamilton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-02-09 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While his memory languished under Nazi censorship, Franz Kafka covertly circulated through occupied France and soon emerged as a cultural icon, read by the most influential intellectuals of the time as a prophet of the rampant bureaucracy, totalitarian oppression, and absurdity that branded the twentieth century. In tracing the history of Kafka's reception in postwar France, John T. Hamilton explores how the work of a German-Jewish writer from Prague became a modern classic capable of addressing universal themes of the human condition. Hamilton also considers how Kafka's unique literary corpus came to stimulate reflection in diverse movements, critical approaches, and philosophical schools, from surrealism and existentialism through psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and structuralism to Marxism, deconstruction, and feminism. The story of Kafka's afterlife in Paris thus furnishes a key chapter in the unfolding of French theory, which continues to guide how we read literature and understand its relationship to the world.

Download or read book The Emprise of Poetry written by Michael Eskin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-11-14 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Emprise of Poetry analyzes the insidious entwinement of anti-Americanism and antisemitism in modern and contemporary German culture through the writings of one of its most acclaimed literary figures: Dresden native Durs Grünbein (1962-). Michael Eskin offers an unprecedented view of the American-cum-Jewish discontents at the heart of modern and present-day German culture through the exemplary lens of the work of Durs Grünbein, the most widely translated and globally honored living German poet, and the only one to have been hailed as the Berlin Republic's “most qualified contemporary candidate for the office of German national poet.” Yet as Eskin outlines, Grünbein's work contains a paradoxical and tension-filled twofold self-construction: as an idiosyncratically 'American' poet and Ezra Pound's vociferously philosemitic heir, who merely happens to be writing in German, as it were, conjoined with an avidly anti-American German poet who writes emphatically, and not always savorily, as a German and a self-proclaimed heir to the legacies of Celan and Kafka – most notably, on matters American and Jewish. Against the foil of these tensions, Eskin traces and documents postwar German high culture's persisting inability to purge itself of ideological toxins that leach into the mainstream from centuries-old prejudices and antagonisms revolving around Germany's love-hate bond with America as well as its ostensibly enduring suspicion and antipathy toward Jews. Eskin's deep dive into the 'American' Grünbein's apparent philosemitism coupled with the German Grünbein's antisemitically-inflected anti-Americanism reveals the fault lines underlying the complex and contradictory legacies and contexts of postwar German culture.

Download or read book Theodor Fontane written by Brian Tucker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-06-03 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when fashionable forms of unserious speech prove to be contagious, when they adulterate and weaken communicative spheres that rely on honesty, trust, and sincerity? Demonstrating how the tension between irony and avowal constitutes a central conflict in Fontane's works, this book argues that his best-known society novels play out a struggle between the incompatible demands of these two modes of speaking. Read in this light, the novels identify an irreconcilable discrepancy between word and deed as both the root of emotional discord and the proximate cause of historical and political upheaval. Given the alarm since 2016 over unreliability, falsehood, and indifference to truth, it is now easier to perceive in Fontane's novels a profound concern about language that is not sincere and not meant to be taken literally. For Fontane, irony exemplifies a discrepancy between language and meaning, a loosening of the ethical bond between words and the things to which they refer. His novels investigate the extent to which human relationships can continue to function in the face of pervasive irony and the erosion of language's credibility. Although Fontane is widely regarded as an ironic writer, Tucker's analyses reveal a critical distance between his works and the prospect of irony as a dominant idiom. Revisiting Fontane's novels in a post-truth age brings the conflict between irony and avowal into sharper relief and makes legible the stakes and contours of our own post-truth condition.

Download or read book Weimar in Princeton written by Stanley Corngold and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Mann arrived in Princeton in 1938, in exile from Nazi Germany, and feted in his new country as “the greatest living man of letters.” This beautiful new book from literary critic Stanley Corngold tells the little known story of Mann's early years in America and his encounters with a group of highly gifted émigrés in Princeton, which came to be called the Kahler Circle, with Mann at its center. The Circle included immensely creative, mostly German-speaking exiles from Nazism, foremost Mann, Erich Kahler, Hermann Broch, and Albert Einstein, all of whom, during the Circle's nascent years in Princeton, were “stupendously” productive. In clear, engaging prose, Corngold explores the traces the Circle left behind during Mann's stay in Princeton, treating literary works and political statements, anecdotes, contemporary history, and the Circle's afterlife. Weimar in Princeton portrays a fascinating scene of cultural production, at a critical juncture in the 20th century, and the experiences of an extraordinary group of writers and thinkers who gathered together to mourn a lost culture and to reckon with the new world in which they had arrived.

Download or read book The Poet as Phenomenologist written by Luke Fischer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems opens up new perspectives on the relation between Rilke's poetry and phenomenological philosophy, illustrating the ways in which poetry can offer an exceptional response to the philosophical problem of dualism. Drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Luke Fischer makes a new contribution to the tradition of phenomenological poetics and expands the debate among Germanists concerning the phenomenological status of Rilke's poetry, which has been severely limited to comparisons of Rilke and Husserl. Fischer explicates an implicit phenomenology of perception in Rilke's writings from his middle period (1902-1910). He argues that Rilke cultivated an artistic perception that, in a philosophically significant manner, overcomes the opposition between the sensuous and the intelligible while simultaneously transcending the boundaries of philosophy. Fischer offers novel interpretations of central poems from Rilke's Neue Gedichte (1907) and Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil (1908) and frames them as the ultimate articulation of Rilke's non-dualistic vision. He thus demonstrates the continuity between Rilke and phenomenology while arguing that poetry, in this case, provides the most adequate response to a philosophical problem.

Download or read book Figures of Natality written by Joseph D. O’Neil and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Figures of Natality reads metaphors and narratives of birth in the age of Goethe (1770-1832) as indicators of the new, the unexpected, and the revolutionary. Using Hannah Arendt's concept of natality, Joseph O'Neil argues that Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist see birth as challenging paradigms of Romanticism as well as of Enlightenment, resisting the assimilation of the political to economics, science, or morality. They choose instead to preserve the conflicts and tensions at the heart of social, political, and poetic revolutions. In a historical reading, these tensions evolve from the idea of revolution as Arendt reads it in British North America to the social and economic questions that shape the French Revolution, culminating in a consideration of the culture of the modern republic as such. Alongside this geopolitical evolution, the ways of representing the political change, too, moving from the new as revolutionary eruption to economic metaphors of birth. More pressing still is the question of revolutionary subjectivity and political agency, and Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist have an answer that is remarkably close to that of Walter Benjamin, as that “secret index” through which each past age is “pointed toward redemption.” Figures of Natality uncovers this index at the heart of scenes and products of birth in the age of Goethe.