Download or read book Tracing Subversive Currents in Goethe s Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship written by John Thomas Blair and published by Camden House. This book was released on 1997 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fresh critical reading of Goethe's important novel, challenging orthodox scholarship. In this new reading of Goethe's most influential novel Blair's close attention to the text brings startling insights to light, often taking issue with received critical opinions. He shows, for example, that Goethe slyly introducedmaterial full of low-cultural, subversive vitality that mocks conservative, authoritarian power interested in conformity or propriety. The novel does not just find fault with developments of the late Enlightenment but rather seductively describes loci of resistance to them: the marketplace, the travelling theatre, the Hanswurst. Equally, the author argues that although 'high' aesthetics, morals, institutions and rationality are impugned, they are not completely discredited: the problem with such high principles is demonstrated as being their tendency to present themselves as the only valid voice.
Download or read book Goethe s Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship and Philosophy written by Sarah V. Eldridge and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades after its publication, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship served as a touchstone for such major philosophical and literary figures as Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher, and Schlegel, and was widely understood to be one of the greatest novels of the German canon. But in the decades and centuries following, the attention it has received in both disciplines has diminished in comparison to either Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther or his Elective Affinities. This volume follows the impetus of its early respondents to examine deeply what exactly Goethe's long and complicated novel is doing, and how it engages with problems and themes of human life. An interdisciplinary group of eminent scholars grapple with the novel's engagement with central philosophical questions such as individuality, development, and authority; aesthetic formation and narrative (and human) contingency; and gender, sexuality, and marriage. That these questions and their working-through in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre are in tension with one another speaks ultimately to how literature explores philosophical questions in ways that are open-ended, creative, and contain potential for new and different solutions to living with them. This unique philosophical approach to the form and purpose of a literary masterpiece illuminates new inroads into a novel at once famously complex and influential, and into the projects of one Germany's greatest writers.
Download or read book Goethe s Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship written by Jane Veronica Curran and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2002 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first detailed reader's commentary on one of the seminal works of world literature. Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is commonly acknowledged to have played a pivotal role in founding the genre known as the Bildungsroman. Although a wealth of critical material has accumulated since its publication in 1795-96, a detailed commentary in English on this novel of `apprenticeship' has been lacking from the corpus. Jane V. Curran's full-length commentary fills this gap. In her analysis, Curran presents the standard material familiar from traditional commentaries, but includes passages hitherto neglected, presenting new insights in a new form. Curran stresses the importance of narrative techniques, traces the development of the characters, and draws the reader'sattention to the intertextual echoes, the use of symbols, and the many instances of irony. Curran also points out parallels between Wilhelm Meister's experiences and Goethe's life, and illuminates contemporary issues that are touched on in the novel, particularly the development of the German theater. The book provides notes with additional information for the interpretation of Goethe's work, including factual details of general interest, scholarly sources, and background information. This is a vade mecum not only for students of Goethe and of German literature, but also for all those interested in the development of the Bildungsroman. Jane V. Curran is chair of the German Department, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Download or read book In Proximity written by Melvyn New and published by Texas Tech University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world in which everything is reduced "to the play of signs detached from what is signified," Levinas asks a deceptively simple question: Whence, then, comes the urge to question injustice? By seeing the demand for justice for the other—the homeless, the destitute—as a return to morality, Levinas escapes the suspect finality of any ideology.Levinas’s question is one starting point for In Proximity, a collection of seventeen essays by scholars in eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, history, and religion, and their readings of Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Wordsworth, Behn, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, and Mendelssohn. The title In Proximity alone speaks volumes about Levinas’s philosophy and its relevance today. "If it is true that we are, through technology, moving closer and closer to one another," writes editor Melvyn New, then "the importance of proximity and our response to it cannot be overstated." For the contributors to this volume, the question of whether we may, ethically, appropriate the object of study for our own causes has become vital. Levinas asks us to see ourselves, our own reading, "in proximity" to what is not ourselves, not our understanding of the world.The dialogue created among the essays themselves establishes an enormous diversity of texts and ideologies to which Levinas can contribute something of significant value. At a time when the secondary literature on Levinas and his work is expanding explosively, the cross-disciplinary voices gathered together in In Proximity come at precisely the right time.
Download or read book Goethe and the Myth of the Bildungsroman written by Frederick Amrine and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-23 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goethe's Willhelm Meister novels, widely held to be the most significant and influential in all of German literature, have traditionally been classed as Bildungsroman, or 'novels of formation'. In Goethe and the Myth of Bildungsroman, Frederick Amrine offers a unique reading of Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre, which posits the second novel as a sequel to the first. Deconstructing and jettisoning the notion of the Bildungsroman, the features of the novels which have historically proved problematic for critics, seeming to testify to the novels' disunity, become instead the articulation points of a subtle concord between thematic and formal elements. Reading the novels in light of the eminent criticism of Northrop Frye, this book productively shifts away from social commentary towards the archetypal and symbolic, showing Goethe not to be an exception within world literature; rather, that he participates deeply in its overarching structures.
Download or read book The Present Word Culture Society and the Site of Literature written by John Walker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book addresses three key areas of intellectual enquiry: literary criticism, cultural critique, and philosophical theology. Once closely related, especially in the Catholic tradition, they often appear to be separate and unconnected domains in the modern university. The work of Nicholas Boyle is one of the most significant recent attempts to reconnect them. Responding to that initiative, The Present Word challenges this fragmentation of knowledge. Several of the essays reflect a major change of emphasis in literary studies over the last two decades: the reconnection of an idea of literary criticism closely related to the experience of reading, and the wider societal and political concerns addressed by Cultural Studies. Contributors also debate, from both perspectives, whether theological concepts can illuminate the secular culture in which literature is written and read. John Walker is Senior Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, London, where he served as Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture from 2006-2009."
Download or read book The Virginal Mother in German Culture written by Lauren Nossett and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Virginal Mother in German Culture presents an innovative and thorough analysis of the contradictory obsession with female virginity and idealization of maternal nature in Germany from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Lauren Nossett explores how the complex social ideal of woman as both a sexless and maternal being led to the creation of a unique figure in German literature: the virginal mother. At the same time, she shows that the literary depictions of virginal mothers correspond to vilified biological mother figures, which point to a perceived threat in the long nineteenth century of the mother’s procreative power. Examining the virginal mother in the first novel by a German woman (Sophie von La Roche), canonical texts by Goethe, nineteenth-century popular fiction, autobiographical works, and Thea von Harbou’s novel Metropolis and Fritz Lang’s film by the same name, this book highlights the virginal mother at pivotal moments in German history and cultural development: the entrance of women into the literary market, the Goethezeit, the foundation of the German Empire, and the volatile Weimar Republic. The Virginal Mother in German Culture will be of interest to students and scholars of German literature, history, cultural and social studies, and women’s studies.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Goethe written by Lesley Sharpe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-05-02 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Goethe provides a challenging yet accessible survey of this versatile figure, not only one of the world's greatest writers but also a theatre director and art critic, a natural scientist and state administrator. The volume places Goethe in the context of the Germany and Europe of his lifetime. His literary work is covered in individual chapters on poetry, drama (with a separate chapter on Faust), prose fiction and autobiography. Other chapters deal with his work in the Weimar Theatre, his friendship with Schiller, his scientific studies and writings, his engagement with the visual arts, with religion and philosophy, the controversies surrounding his political standpoint and the impact of feminist criticism. A wide-ranging survey of reception inside and outside Germany and an extensive guide to further reading round off this volume, which will appeal to students and specialists alike.
Download or read book The Radical Enlightenment in Germany written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates the impact of the Radical Enlightenment on German culture during the eighteenth century, taking recent work by Jonathan Israel as its point of departure. The collection documents the cultural dimension of the debate on the Radical Enlightenment. In a series of readings of known and lesser-known fictional and essayistic texts, individual contributors show that these can be read not only as articulating a conflict between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, but also as documents of a debate about the precise nature of Enlightenment. At stake is the question whether the Enlightenment should aim to be an atheist, materialist, and political movement that wants to change society, or, in spite of its belief in rationality, should respect monarchy, aristocracy, and established religion. Contributors are: Mary Helen Dupree, Sean Franzel, Peter Höyng, John A. McCarthy, Monika Nenon, Carl Niekerk, Daniel Purdy, William Rasch, Ann Schmiesing, Paul S. Spalding, Gabriela Stoicea, Birgit Tautz, Andrew Weeks, Chunjie Zhang
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 321 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.
Download or read book Goethe Yearbook 15 written by Simon Richter and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2008 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New, interdisciplinary essays on an array of topics ranging from Goethe and mineralogy to theories of masculinity around 1800.
Download or read book Narrating Community After Kant written by Karin Lynn Schutjer and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book will prove insightful to students and scholars interested in German literary, philosophical, and cultural studies."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Goethe Yearbook 14 written by Simon J. Richter and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007-02-19 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on childhood in the Age of Goethe, in addition to various other topics and works. The Goethe Yearbook, first published in 1982, is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America and is dedicated to North American Goethe Scholarship. It aims above all to encourage and publish original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit, while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 14 features a special section on childhood in the Age of Goethe, co-edited with Anthony Krupp. In addition, readers will find two essays illuminating Goethe's Triumph der Empfindsamkeit, an inspired reading of Das Märchen against the background of Goethe's critique of Newtonian science, a careful analysis of the daemonic in the poem "Mächtiges Überraschen," and essays on Egmont and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. Contributors: Kelly Barry, Paul Fleming, Edgar Landgraf, Liliane Weissberg, Angus Nicholls, Robin A. Clouser Simon J. Richter is Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania, and book review editor Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German at Rutgers University. Anthony Krupp is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Miami.
Download or read book Lessing Goethe Kleist and the Transformation of Gender written by Eleanor E. Ter Horst and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2003 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The presence of such gender-ambiguous figures as hermaphrodites and Amazons in works by Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist continues to challenge perceptions of the Enlightenment and Classical periods of German literature. This book explores the conflicting definitions of masculinity and femininity in works by these authors from the perspective of current research in feminist and gender studies, and links varying representations of gender to aesthetic issues, such as the texts' relationship to the literature of antiquity and distinctions between drama and narrative. Lessing, Goethe, Kleist, and the Transformation of Gender also explores the literature's connections to extra-literary (medical and economic) discourses, while establishing that issues of gender are central to the aesthetic and practice of Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist.
Download or read book South Atlantic Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Eighteenth Century written by and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Goethe Revisited written by Irmgard Wagner and published by Macmillan Reference USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and discusses how his writings influenced other poets, what his inspirations were, and how his writings reflected the political, social, and economic atmosphere of the era he lived in.
