Download or read book New Approaches to Theodor Fontane written by Marion Villmar-Doebeling and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2000 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Fontane scholarship has primarily focused on the "objective" portrayal of nineteenth-century German/Prussian culture and on the authenticity with which his work supposedly mirrors social reality, this collection investigates rhetorical and communicative patterns in his works that call this mirroring effect into question, emphasizing the difficulty - and ultimate impossibility - of "realist" representation."--BOOK JACKET.
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 360 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 Fontane in the Twenty First Century written by John B. Lyon and published by Camden House (NY). This book was released on 2019 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assesses the relevance of the works of Fontane, perhaps the foremost German novelist between Goethe and Mann, for the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Fontane s Landscapes written by James N. Bade and published by Königshausen & Neumann. This book was released on 2009 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aimed primarily at English-speaking undergraduate students of German literature, but also with graduate students and a general readership in mind, this book deals with the literary landscapes in Theodor Fontane's best known novels - 'Schach von Wuthenow' (1882), 'Irrungen, Wirrungen' (1888), and 'Effi Briest' (1895). It is an illuminating introduction to one of Europe's finest novelists. "It is an excellent idea to guide readers through the novels by way of focusing on the landscapes. James Bade brings an enormous amount of material into the discussion and is always detailed and precise. The book reads very well and enriches the Fontane literature.--publisher website.
Download or read book The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel written by Sonja Boos and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-29 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel: Poetics of the Brain revises the dominant narrative about the distinctive psychological inwardness and introspective depth of the German novel by reinterpreting the novel’s development from the perspective of the nascent discipline of neuroscience, the emergence of which is coterminous with the rise of the novel form. In particular, it asks how the novel’s formal properties—stylistic, narrative, rhetorical, and figurative—correlate with the formation of a neuroscientific discourse, and how the former may have assisted, disrupted, and/or intensified the medical articulation of neurological concepts. This study poses the question: how does this rapidly evolving field emerge in the context of nineteenth century cultural practices and what were the conditions for its emergence in the German-speaking world specifically? Where did neuroscience begin and how did it broaden in scope? And most crucially, to what degree does it owe its existence to literature?
Download or read book At the Limit of the Obscene written by Erica Weitzman and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-15 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As German-language literature turned in the mid-nineteenth century to the depiction of the profane, sensual world, a corresponding anxiety emerged about the terms of that depiction—with consequences not only for realist poetics but also for the conception of the material world itself. At the Limit of the Obscene examines the roots and repercussions of this anxiety in German realist and postrealist literature. Through analyses of works by Adalbert Stifter, Gustav Freytag, Theodor Fontane, Arno Holz, Gottfried Benn, and Franz Kafka, Erica Weitzman shows how German realism’s conflicted representations of the material world lead to an idea of the obscene as an excess of sensual appearance beyond human meaning: the obverse of the anthropocentric worldview that German realism both propagates and pushes to its crisis. At the Limit of the Obscene thus brings to light the troubled and troubling ontology underlying German realism, at the same time demonstrating how its works continue to shape our ideas about representability, alterity, and the relationship of human beings to the non-human well into the present day.
Download or read book Out of Place written by John B. Lyon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-11-17 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In late nineteenth-century Germany, the onset of modernity transformed how people experienced place. In response to increased industrialization and urbanization, the expansion of international capitalism, and the extension of railway and other travel networks, the sense of being connected to a specific place gave way to an unsettling sense of displacement. Out of Place analyzes the works of three major representatives of German Realism-Wilhelm Raabe, Theodor Fontane, and Gottfried Keller-within this historical context. It situates the perceived loss of place evident in their texts within the contemporary discourse of housing and urban reform, but also views such discourse through the lens of twentienth-century theories of place. Informed by both phenomenological (Heidegger and Casey) as well as Marxist (Deleuze, Guattari, and Benjamin) approaches to place, John B. Lyon highlights the struggle to address issues of place and space that reappear today in debates about environmentalism, transnationalism, globalization, and regionalism.
Download or read book Networks of Modernity written by Jean-Michel Johnston and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Networks of Modernity: Germany in the Age of the Telegraph, 1830-1880 offers a fresh perspective on the history of Germany by investigating the origins and impact of the 'communications revolution' that transformed state and society during the nineteenth century. It focuses upon the period 1830-1880, exploring the interactions between the many different actors who developed, administered, and used one of the most important technologies of the period-the electric telegraph. It reveals the channels through which scientific and technical knowledge circulated across Central Europe during the 1830s and 1840s, stimulating both collaboration and confrontation between the scientists, technicians, businessmen, and bureaucrats involved in bringing the telegraph to life. It highlights the technology's impact upon the conduct of trade, finance, news distribution, and government in the tumultuous decades that witnessed the 1848 revolutions, the wars of unification, and the establishment of the Kaiserreich in 1871. Following the telegraph lines themselves, it weaves together the changes which took place at a local, regional, national, and eventually global level, revisiting the technology's impact upon concepts of space and time, and highlighting the importance of this period in laying the foundations for Germany's experience of a profoundly ambiguous, networked modernity.
Download or read book Rhetoric and Contingency written by DS Mayfield and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 1115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human life is susceptible of changing suddenly, of shifting inadvertently, of appearing differently, of varying unpredictably, of being altered deliberately, of advancing fortuitously, of commencing or ending accidentally, of a certain malleability. In theory, any human being is potentially capacitated to conceive of—and convey—the chance, view, or fact that matters may be otherwise, or not at all; with respect to other lifeforms, this might be said animal’s distinctive characteristic. This state of play is both an everyday phenomenon, and an indispensable prerequisite for exceptional innovations in culture and science: contingency is the condition of possibility for any of the arts—be they dominantly concerned with thinking, crafting, or enacting. While their scope and method may differ, the (f)act of reckoning with—and taking advantage of—contingency renders rhetoricians and philosophers associates after all. In this regard, Aristotle and Blumenberg will be exemplary, hence provide the framework. Between these diachronic bridgeheads, close readings applying the nexus of rhetoric and contingency to a selection of (Early) Modern texts and authors are intercalated—among them La Celestina, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Wilde, Fontane.
Download or read book Realism s Others written by Eva Aldea and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-07-12 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For at least a century, scholarship on realist narrative, and occasional polemics against realist narrative, have assumed that realism promotes the values of sameness against those of otherness, and that it does so by use of a narrative mode that excludes certain epistemologies, ideologies, and ways of thinking. However, the truth is more complex than that, as the essays in this volume all demonstrate. Realism’s Others examines the various strategies by which realist narratives create the idea of difference, whether that difference is registered in terms of class, ethnicity, epistemology, nationality, or gender. The authors in this collection examine in detail not just the fact of otherness in some canonical realist and canonical magical-realist and postmodern novels, but the actual means by which that otherness is established by the text. These essays suggest that neither realist narrative nor narratives positioned as anti-realist take otherness for granted; rather, the texts discussed here actively create difference, and this creation of difference often occasions severe difficulties for the novels’ representational schema. How does one represent different types of knowledge, other aesthetic modes or other spaces, for example, in texts whose epistemology has long been seen as secular and empirical, whose aesthetic mode has always been approached as pure descriptive mimesis, and whose settings are largely domestic? These essays all begin with a certain collision—of nationalities, of classes, of representational matrices, of religions—and go on to chart the challenges that this collision presents to our ideas or stereotypes of realism, or to the possibilities of writing against and beyond realism. This question motivates examination of key realist or social-realist texts, in some of these essays, by Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Franz Grillparzer, Theodor Storm, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, Wilhelm Raabe, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, H. T. Tsiang, Alan Sillitoe, and Richard Yates. However, it is no less central a question in certain non-realist texts which engage realist aims to a surprising degree, often to debate them openly; some of these essays discuss, in this light, fantastic, magical realist, and postmodern works by Abram Tertz, Paul Auster, Alejo Carpentier, Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, and A. S. Byatt. Realism becomes more than an aesthetic aim or narrative mode. It becomes, rather, a value evoked and discussed by all of the works analyzed here, in order to reveal its impact on fiction’s treatment of ethnicity, nationality, ideology, space, gender, and social class.
Download or read book The Truth of Realism written by John Walker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In his new book, Walker offers a radical reassessment of the German realist novel in the nineteenth century. Especially in the English- speaking world, German narrative realism has persistently been interpreted as the literary expression of an ideology of the aesthetic. The German realist novel is alleged to reflect philosophical idealism: to reject the prose of modern society in favour of the poetry of the inner aesthetic life. This book challenges that received view. Walker argues that German narrative realism should be read not only in relation to, but in crucial respects against, the dominant philosophical idiom of nineteenth century Germany. German narrative realism often functions as a critique of the idea and ideology of inwardness in nineteenth century German culture. To understand this, the author argues, we must reread German realist novels above all as narratives, not as the supposed reflection of philosophical categories. The core of the book is therefore the close reading of eight of the best known realist novels in German by Keller, Raabe and Fontane. This reading shows how the German realist novel, far from transposing the assumptions of aesthetic idealism into narrative form, exposes the real consequences of those assumptions in the culture and society of its time. John Walker is Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture at Birkbeck, University of London."
Download or read book The Changing Image of Theodor Fontane written by Helen Chambers and published by Camden House. This book was released on 1997 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wide-ranging survey of the criticism devoted to Theodor Fontane, with particular emphasis on more recent theoretical trends. This study of the literary scholarship on Fontane's narrative works is the first to present a systematic review of the ever-growing body of criticism on Germany's major realist novelist. Significant developments in Fontane criticism are traced in historical context, from their beginnings in contemporary commentary to the present day. The author places special emphasis on scholarship since 1980, analysing the influence of new literary critical trends in this period; she also considers the effect upon traditional literary criticism of feminism, psychoanalysis, and comparatist approaches, and the fresh developments in reception history, translation, and media studies.
Download or read book Theodor Fontane and the European Context written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the centenary of Fontane’s death and at the turn of the century these essays take a new look at this supreme chronicler of Prussia and of the Germany that emerges after 1871. Written by scholars from different countries and disciplines, they focus on novels and theatre reviews from the perspectives of philosophy, sociology, comparative literature and translation theory, and in the contexts of topography and painting. Connections and crosscurrents emerge to reveal new aspects of Fontane’s poetics and to produce contrasting but complementary readings of his novels. He appears in the company of predecessors and contemporaries, such as Scott, Thackeray, Saar, Ibsen, Turgenev, but also in that of writers he has rarely, if ever, been seen beside, such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Stendhal, Trollope, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Beckett and Faulkner. The historical novel and the social position of women are each a recurring focus of interest. Fontane emerges as receptive to other voices, as a precursor of developments in modern narrative, and confirmed as the novelist who brings the nineteenth-century German novel closest to the broad traditions of European realism.
Download or read book The Fontane Workshop written by Petra S. McGillen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures (Awarded by the MLA) With an innovative approach that combines material media history, media theory, and literary poetics, this book reconstructs the great German writer Theodor Fontane's creative process. Petra McGillen follows Fontane into the engine room of his text production. Analyzing a wealth of unexplored archival evidence--which includes a collection of the author's 67 extant notebooks, along with an array of other "paper tools," such as cardboard boxes, envelopes, and slips--McGillen demonstrates how Fontane compiled his realist prose works. That is, he assembled them from premediated sources, literally with scissors and glue, in an extraordinarily inorganic and radically intertextual manner that turned "writing" into a process of ongoing remix. By exploring the far-reaching implications of Fontane's creative practices for our understanding of his authorship, originality, and poetics, this book opens up a completely new way to think about his works and, by extension, 19th-century literary realism. This conceptualization of authors' notebooks as creative tools makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on the history of writing media in several disciplines, from German studies and literary studies to media history, and to our understanding of the relationship between mass media and literary creativity in the late 19th century.
Download or read book Dreams and Delusions written by Fritz Richard Stern and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays by historian Fritz Stern ponders the promise and catastrophe of twentieth-century German history. It is now reissued with a new introduction by the author.
Download or read book Theodor Fontane written by Gordon Alexander Craig and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in Germany to popular and critical acclaim, this is a unique portrait of the life and work of Theodor Fontane, the greatest German novelist of his age, as well as a major poet and theater critic and much loved travel writer. Gordon A. Craig, one of the foremost scholars of German history, interpolates a cohesive historical biography of Fontane with his own reflections on the art, culture, and politics of Fontane's world. The ideas and impressions of Fontane and Craig echo one another throughout the book in compelling and fascinating ways. Fontane's travel accounts of Scotland and Prussia are enriched by Craig's discussion of Germany's increasingly national vision of itself and the world at the time of unification. Similarly, Craig's mastery of German military history dovetails remarkably well with Fontane's reportage on Germany's wars with Denmark, Austria, and France. Interesting are Fontane's ruminations over his great contemporary Otto von Bismarck, whom he revered as founder of the Reich but whose policies he feared would in the end be self-defeating. Although Fontane's Wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg and his novels are more widely read in Germany today than they were in his own time, and although his masterpiece Effi Briest was the basis for a famous Fassbinder film, Fontane remains little known in the English-speaking world. Theodor Fontane is the ideal introduction to this major European writer, a master of social analysis and one of the great letter writers of his age.
Download or read book Fontane and Cultural Mediation written by Robertson Ritchie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-1880s, the Realist author and Anglophile Theodor Fontane observed:nowhere is so much translation done as in Germany. Characterizing Germany as a special locus of literary translation and reception, Fontane contests a prejudice which has since become a significant problem for nineteenth-century German studies, namely the frequent assessment of the epoch as narrowly national. The present collection of essays by thirteen eminent literary scholars and historians is intended to correct this prejudice: it demonstrates that literary life and production in the nineteenth century were governed by complex networks of intercultural exchange, influence and translation, and it does justice to this complexity through its range of complementary critical approaches, focussing on Fontane, Anglo-German relations, translation, and European reception. In so doing, this book not only offers a nuanced appreciation of literary production and reception in the nineteenth century, but also demonstrates the continued relevance of that period for Germanists today.