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This work reconsiders the connections between mysticism, nationalism and modernity in twentieth-century German cultures. Disengaging mysticism from occultism, the author creates a new space for reconsidering mysticism's links to larger structures of modernity already at play at the turn of the century. Rather than dismissing mysticism as a strain of anti-modern irrationalism with troubling links to radical politics such as Nazism, the author reconceptualizes modern mysticism as an unwittingly logical expression of the same compression of time and space created by the emergence of the newspaper, radio, railways and telegraph and reflected in the novels of Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil and Max Frisch.
Biennial volume of new and innovative essays on German Jewish Studies, featuring forum sections on Heinrich Heine and Karl Kraus. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop, which was inaugurated at Duke University in 2009 and is now held at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish Studies. Nexus publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies, introducing new directions, analyzing the development and definition of the field, and considering its place vis-à-vis both German Studies and Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and program...
Maria Tatar analyses the many forms the tale of Bluebeard's wife has taken over time, showing how artists have taken the Bluebeard theme and revived it with their own signature twists.
Using the character as a central element, this volume provides insights into the Theatre of the Absurd, highlighting its specific key characteristics. Adopting both semiotic-structuralist and mathematical approaches, its analysis of the absurdist character introduces new models of investigation, including a possible algebraic model operating on the scenic, dramatic and paradigmatic level of a play, not only exploring the relations, configurations, confrontations, functions and situations but also providing necessary information for a possible geometric model. The book also takes into consideration the relations established among the most important units of a dramatic work, character, cue, décor and régie, re-configuring the basic pattern. It will be useful for any reader interested in analyzing, staging or writing a play starting from a single character.
The current crisis in thinking the “human” raises questions not only about who or what may come after the human, but also about what happened before. What dark secrets lie in our ancestral past that may be stopping us from becoming human “otherwise”?
Death still comes to Everyman, but this study of three twentieth-century German plays shows the harder challenge of living without salvation in an age of war and unprecedented mass destruction. Death comes to everyone, and in the late-medieval morality play of Everyman the familiar skeleton forces the universalized central figure to come to terms with this. Only his inner resources, in the forms of Good Deeds and Knowledge, ensure that he repents and is redeemed. Three important twentieth-century German plays echo Everyman - Toller's Hinkemann, Borchert's The Man Outside, and Frisch's The Arsonists/Firebugs - but the unprecedented scale of killing in the First and Second World Wars changed t...
Karl Kraus and the Critics, the first study devoted entirely to a century of critical reactions to this controversial satirist, who was both deified and vilified in his lifetime and in the six decades since his death, attempts to reduce an enormous amount of criticism to manageable dimensions and to give a typology of this commentary. By means of copious quotation from both major and minor studies as well as reliable translation it provides some access to criticism that has been published only in German. A chronology of Kraus's life and works and an extensive bibliography of both primary and secondary writings are intended to enhance the reference value of this book and to stimulate further reading and research.
This new collection updates, integrates, and contextualizes Richard Sheppard's essays on the historical avant-garde. Sheppard examines responses of modernist writers, artists, and philosophers to a changed sense of reality and human nature. With its combination of previously published and new essays and its perspective on the theoretical avant-garde-modernism debate in the U.S., the volume provides the specialist and the general reader insight into European scholarly discourse on this hotly debated subject.
This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies
The new challenges that face twentieth-century man in his relationship to today's women are a major concern of the Swiss writer Max Frisch (1911 - 1991) and evident in most of his major novels. This comprehensive study in English investigates that challenge as it affects or is affected by society's changing mores, love and marriage, jealousy, guilt, time and aging, and the search for a meaningful life. Major chapters discuss Die Schwierigen, Stiller, Homo faber, Mein Name sei Gantenbein, and Montauk. Also included are discussions of two early works, Jürg Reinhart: Eine sommerliche Schicksalsfahrt and Bin oder Die Reise nach Peking, and the recent novels Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän and Blaubart.