Search

Heroism is usually associated with great deeds, and heroes are regarded as superior and powerful individuals who take action. This opinion has dominated Western tradition since ancient times. At the same, the ability to bide one's time was and is equally classed as a heroic quality because it is an ‘inner form of action'(M. Weber). Fabius Cunctator was heroicised for tactically biding his time during the Second Punic War, as were the front-line soldiers during the First World War, who held out for so long in the trenches. Moreover, the Christian notion of salvation, the heroic, eremitical act of waiting in this life for the next, or the prophetic, messianic constellations of the 1920s also spring to mind in this context.The essays collected in this book examine ‘heroic waiting'as a literary phenomenon. They not only provide in-depth analyses of how biding one's time is conveyed as a heroic act, but also focus above all on how it is staged. The book's introduction, which was written by the editors, is based on a collective set of descriptive tools with which ‘heroic waiting'can be defined and understood in terms of its typological characteristics on the one hand and as a relational structure on the other.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka's work, rescuing his legacy from both obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership: the Jewish state, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka's three sisters perished in the Holocaust? Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts—brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political—that determined the fate of Kafka's manuscripts.

Captured here for the first time is the richness of the Charlemagne tradition in medieval Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Wales and Ireland and its coherence as a series of adaptations of Old French chansons de gesteThe reception of the Charlemagne legends among Nordic and Celtic communities in the Middle Ages is a shared story of transmission, translation, an exploration of national identity, and the celebration of imperialism. The articles brought together here capture for the first time the richness of the Charlemagne tradition in medieval Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Wales and Ireland and its coherence as a series of adaptations of Old French chansons de geste.Emerging from the French sources is a set of themes which unite the linguistically different Norse and Celtic Charlemagne traditions. The ideology of the Crusades, the dichotomy of Christian and heathen elements, the values of chivalry and the ideals of kingship are among the preoccupations common to both traditions. While processes of manuscript transmission are distinctive to each linguistic context, the essential function of the legends as explorations of political ideology, emotion, and social values creates unity across the language groups. From the Old Norse Karlamagnús saga to the Irish and Welsh narratives, the chapters present a coherent set of perspectives on the northern reception of the Charlemagne legends beyond the nation of England.Contributors: Massimiliano Bampi, Claudia Bornholdt, Aisling Byrne, Luciana Cordo Russo, Helen Fulton, Jon Paul Heyne, Susanne Kramarz-Bein, Erich Poppe, Annalee C. Rejhon, Sif Rikhardsdottir, Hélène Tétrel.

Rytíř, kterého jeho milenka přesvědčí, že by byl ženám ve skutečnosti daleko milejší, kdyby se vykastroval. Poutník do Svaté země, který se rozhodne vzít vážně výrok, že jeho srdce patří jeho milé, a dotáhne ho až do brutálně naturalistického konce. Žena, jež diskutuje s vlastním ohanbím o tom, co že vlastně muže na ženách přitahuje, a odhodlá se věci přijít na kloub vskutku neobvyklým pokusem. Nevěrná manželka, která se v převleku za muže pokouší přemluvit svého manžela k homosexuálnímu spojení. Kromobyčejné produktivní (a v Čechách prakticky neznámý) žánr středohornoněmeckých veršovaných novel, kvetoucí mezi 13. a 15. stoletím, se podobných témat nebál, ba právě naopak. Jeho cílem nicméně nebylo vytvářet lacinou pornografii i: v pozadí všech textu, do češtiny poprvé přeložených v této knize, stojí otázka vztahu mezi ideálem lásky muže a ženy, její přizemní realitou a v neposlední rady i literárními konvencemi, které ideály (ale i prožívanou realitu) do značné míry utvářely a dodnes utváří. Přímočarost a odvaha, s níž byly středověké texty ochotny podobné otázky klást, však dohánějí jejich hrdiny do situací, jichž se moderní čtenář muže leckdy až zaleknout.

Expanded and rev. versions of papers presented at a conference held Apr. 5-7, 1990 at the University of South Carolina, sponsored by the Dept. of Germanic, Slavic, and Oriental Languages and Literatures.

L'ampleur et l'exceptionnalité qui ont caractérisé le baby-boom ont concouru à en construire une représentation dénuée de nuances. L'ouvrage interroge alors l'hétérogénéité qui a caractérisé ce phénomène dans le contexte suisse. Dans une perspective de parcours de vie et en recourant à des méthodes mixtes, l'interrelation des trajectoires familiales et professionnelles des cohortes féminines est examinée au regard du système de valeurs promulgué dans la société suisse de l'époque pour montrer comment un phénomène d'ampleur a pu être le produit d'une diversité de parcours de vie. Si l'ouvrage se concentre sur la Suisse, le développement de l'approche méthodologique mixte qu'il propose offre un cadre d'analyse renouvelé, dont les apports pour la compréhension du baby-boom peuvent être transférer à divers contextes nationaux et à l'étude d'autres phénomènes démographiques.

Critique is common these days—and, in turn, is often subjected to criticism too. Against this background, this volume is an attempt to explore a Christian, social–ethical form of critique. Its aim is to critique the irrationality embedded in the structures of society with the practical purpose of creating more rational social institutions. There is no social critique, understood as a practice of reason, without a critique of domination, exclusion and subalternity. In that vein, any allegedly neutral practice or idea of reason also needs to be criticised. With contributions by Michelle Becka, Bernhard Emunds, Johannes Eurich, Gisela Kubon-Gilke, Torsten Meireis, Matthias Möhring-Hesse

Monografia ma charakter interdyscyplinarny. Czytelnicy znajdą w niej szkice anglistów, amerykanistów, polonistów, badaczy literatury postkolonialnej, tłumaczy i krytyków dotyczące przekładu oraz recepcji anglojęzycznej poezji i prozy, a także wzajemnych zależności między literaturą anglojęzyczną i polską. Konstrukcja książki jest otwarta, a jej tematyka szeroko zakrojona, dotycząca trzech względnie niezależnych, choć w niektórych ujęciach autorskich nakładających się na siebie bloków problemowych. Przestrzeń rozważań otwierają teksty poświęcone przekładowi literackiemu. W kolejnych artykułach autorzy podejmują zagadnienie recepcji poezji i prozy anglojęzycznej w Polsce. Na koniec ukazują zależności między literaturą anglojęzyczną a polską – zarówno powiązania intertekstualne, jak i wpływ przekazu wybranych wątków literatury anglojęzycznej na kształtowanie postaw ideologicznych.

Die literarische Kultur des 17. bis 19. Jahrhunderts war auf dem Gebiet der heutigen Republiken Estland und Lettland durch Auseinandersetzungen um Konfession, Stand und Nation geprägt und artikulierte sich zunächst weitgehend auf Deutsch, dann auch auf Estnisch und Lettisch. Einen Höhepunkt erlebte sie in den Epochen der Aufklärung und der nationalen Bewegungen, als die allgemeine bürgerliche Teilhabe immer dringender gefordert wurde. Nicht nur die Publizistik sowie die juristische und religiöse Gebrauchsliteratur, sondern auch die Dichtung hatten in der multikulturellen Gesellschaft des Baltikums eine politische Dimension.

After the Holocaust's near complete destruction of European Yiddish cultural centers, the Yiddish language was largely viewed as a remnant of the past, tragically eradicated in its prime. In Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust, Jan Schwarz reveals that, on the contrary, Yiddish culture in the two and a half decades after the Holocaust was in dynamic flux. Yiddish writers and cultural organizations maintained a staggering level of activity in fostering publications and performances, collecting archival and historical materials, and launching young literary talents. Schwarz traces the transition from the Old World to the New through the works of seven major Yiddish writers—including well-known figures (Isaac Bashevis Singer, Avrom Sutzkever, Yankev Glatshteyn, and Chaim Grade) and some who are less well known (Leib Rochman, Aaron Zeitlin, and Chava Rosenfarb). The first section, Ground Zero, presents writings forged by the crucible of ghettos and concentration camps in Vilna, Lodz, and Minsk-Mazowiecki. Subsequent sections, Transnational Ashkenaz and Yiddish Letters in New York, examine Yiddish culture behind the Iron Curtain, in Israel and the Americas. Two appendixes list Yiddish publications in the book series Dos poylishe yidntum (published in Buenos Aires, 1946–66) and offer transliterations of Yiddish quotes. Survivors and Exiles charts a transnational post-Holocaust network in which the conflicting trends of fragmentation and globalization provided a context for Yiddish literature and artworks of great originality. Schwarz includes a wealth of examples and illustrations from the works under discussion, as well as photographs of creators, making this volume not only a critical commentary on Yiddish culture but also an anthology of sorts. Readers interested in Yiddish studies, Holocaust studies, and modern Jewish studies will find Survivors and Exiles a compelling contribution to these fields.

The literary field and canon in the Nordic countries are under constant negotiation and transformation, with various alternative literatures having evolved alongside the majority literatures of these nations in recent decades. These new phenomena, constructed around perspectives regarding language, ethnicity, sexuality, gender and social class, have been categorised as migration, minority and queer literatures. Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia highlights these literatures and their histories, roles and impacts on both the literary establishment and (post)modern societies in the Nordic region. It also discusses how the constructions of national literary canons today are challenged by the influence of various critical perspectives, including postcolonial theories, and queer, indigenous, ethnic literary and gender studies. On a broader level, the book showcases the position literature has in the building of national identities in Nordic nation-states, and, in the process, demonstrates that the plurality of perspectives in literary studies has the potential to question the fundamentals of the literary canon, canon formations, national self-understanding, and identity.The book is composed of nine articles authored by literary scholars in Finland, Sápmi, Sweden, and Denmark. It addresses issues such as methodological nationalism in literary scholarship, the uses of concepts such as “transnational” and “immigrant” literature, the ways in which traditional Sámi features are employed in contemporary Sámi poetry, postcolonial representations in Nordic literature, and the ways that political processes of “Othering” are made visible in contemporary literature's uses of traditional Scandinavian folklore. Read together, these articles provide an overview of some of the challenges and changes in Nordic literature today.

In Mari Jungstedt's darkest mystery novel yet, police detective Knutas is confronted with a psychological drama where parents hurt children.

Justinus Kerner (1786–1862) was one of the most celebrated figures in nineteenth-century German culture. A physician by training, he was also a leading member of the Swabian Romantic circle of poets which included, among others, Ludwig Uhland and Gustav Schwab. Kerner's international fame rests primarily on his contributions to the investigation of paranormal phenomena. The most important of these was his exhaustive case study, Die Seherin von Prevorst (The Seeress of Prevorst, 1829). The book was translated into English in 1849 by the English writer, Catherine Crowe (1803–76). Until the present, this has been the only work of Kerner available in English.Apart from his many scientific publications and his poetry, Kerner was also the author of one of the more intriguing literary works of German Romanticism, Die Reiseschatten (Travel Shadows, 1811). Ostensibly an account of his travels through Germany and Austria following his graduation from the University of Tübingen, the book is a highly imaginative, almost surreal concoction of Romantic, sentimental, grotesque, satirical, and Old German folkloric elements. Attributed by Kerner to an itinerant “shadow performer” named Lux, Travel Shadows was inspired by the tradition of “Chinese Shadows” (ombres chinoises) and represents Kerner's attempt to create a travel narrative in the form of a grandiose shadow show.In the introduction to his translation of Travel Shadows – the first in English – Harold B. Segel situates Kerner's work in the context of the emergence of a German shadow show tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Literary biography of painter Munch, using his own letters and diaries and those of his contemporaries and friends, written as a novel.

Women Warriors in Romantic Drama examines a recurring figure that appears in French, British, and German drama between 1789 and 1830: the woman warrior. The term itself,'woman warrior,'refers to quasi-historical female soldiers or assassins. Women have long contributed to military campaigns as canteen women. Camp followers ranged from local citizenry to spouses and prostitutes, and on occasion, women assisted men in combat. However, the woman warrior is a romantic figure, meaning a fanciful ideal, despite the reality of women's participation in select scenes of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The central claim of this book is the woman warrior is a way for some women writers (Olympe de Gouges, Christine Westphalen, Karoline von Günderrode, and Mary Robinson) to explore the case for extending citizenship to women. This project focuses primarily on theater for the reason that the stage simulates the public world that female dramatists and their warriors seek to inhabit. Novels and poetry clearly belong to the realm of fiction, but when audiences see women fighting onstage, they confront concrete visions of impossible women. I examine dramas in the context of their performance and production histories in order to answer why so many serious dramas featuring women warriors fail to find applause, or fail to be staged at all. Dramas about women warriors seem to sometimes contribute to the argument for female citizenship when they take the form of tragedy, because the deaths of female protagonists in such plays often provoke consideration about women's place in society.Consequently, where we find women playing soldiers in various entertainment venues, farce and satire often seem to dominate, although this book points to some exceptions. Censorship and audience demand for comedies made producing tragedies difficult for female playwrights, who battled additional obstacles to fashioning their careers. I compare male (Edmund Eyre, Heinrich von Kleist) and female writers'dramatizations of the woman warrior. This analysis shows that the difficult project of getting audiences to take women warriors seriously resembles women writers'struggles to enter the ostensibly male domains of tragedy and the public sphere.

It all starts on the one-hundredth birthday of Allan Karlsson. Sitting quietly in his room in an old people's home, he is waiting for the party he-never-wanted-anyway to begin. The Mayor is going to be there. The press is going to be there. But

Die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit Christian Krachts Prosatrilogie „Faserland“ (1995), „1979“ (2001) und „Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten“ (2008) aus der Perspektive zeitgenössischer Subjektphilosophie. Die Arbeit zeigt, wie das Subjekt in Krachts Romanen auf den Prüfstand gehoben wird, sich zunehmend dem diagnostischen Blick entzieht, ja verschwindet und dadurch den Betrachter in seiner Sinn- und Ich-Suche auf sich selbst zurückweist. Diese subjektphilosophisch grundlegende Frage lässt sich ausgezeichnet an Krachts Romantrilogie erörtern, die schrittweise steigernd angelegt ist und, mit dem Schluss von „Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten“, in eine ethisch-poetische Rede mündet, die das Subjekt ganz in sich aufgenommen hat.

Die Einführung befasst sich aus linguistischer Perspektive mit der nominalen Sondergruppe der EigenNamen im Deutschen. Sie berücksichtigt die neueste Forschung und bietet auch Ausblicke auf die Namen anderer Sprachen und Kulturen. In einem ersten Teil wird synchron den spezifischen Funktionen und grammatischen Besonderheiten von Namen nachgegangen (phonologisch, morphologisch, syntaktisch, graphematisch), auch unter Berücksichtigung der Gebärdensprache. Des Weiteren werden ausführlich das Spannungsfeld zwischen Name und Appellativ sowie die diachronen Übergänge beleuchtet, die zwischen ihnen stattfinden. Ein zweiter Teil befasst sich eingehend mit den wichtigsten Namenklassen: neben neuen Perspektiven der Personen und OrtsNamenforschung werden auch die oft vernachlässigten TierNamen (Haus-, Nutz-, Zootiere), ObjektNamen (Produkt-, Unternehmens-, KunstwerkNamen) sowie die Namen historischer Ereignisse (der 11. September) sowie von Naturereignissen (Orkan Lothar) behandelt. Arbeitsaufgaben, Lösungen etc. auf www.narr-studienbuecher.de.

In this crime drama detective Varg Veum's adventures lead him into a dark world of privileged teenage girls who have been drawn into drugs and prostitution. The situation worsens when the local judge is discovered in a luxury hotel, dead and clad only in women's lingerie.

Is it possible to change a life by telling it? Jan Kjærstad explores the dark side of a rosy existence in this second volume of his celebrated Jonas Wergeland trilogy.

David Neal Miller's Fear of Fiction is the first book-length study that begins with the understanding that Singer is truly a Yiddish writer in language and culture. With the exception of a handful of articles, American critical examination of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work has been devoted to Singer's work in English—to those pieces he himself has selected for translation. This American Nobel laureate is part of a long tradition of Yiddish literature, and he still writes in that language.Working exclusively with Singer's Yiddish texts—many of the pieces discussed here are not available in English—Miller examines Singer's narrative strategies, his blurring of the distinctions between fiction and reportage. Fear of Fiction captures an intriguing paradox of Singer's writing: Singer fictionalizes the factual and historicizes the imaginative. Miller demonstrates that Singer is no “inspired innocent,” but that this blending of genres is the work of a craftsman who uses genre to mediate between the world and the imagination. The book is enriched by Miller's careful and sensitive translations of many illustrative Yiddish passages.Fear of Fiction is both erudite and entertaining. Miller not only examines Singer's skillful undermining of our expectations of different genres, but also draws the reader into Singer's work as a whole. This book will fascinate both the scholar and the sophisticated reader of Singer.David Neal Miller is Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Yiddish Studies at the Ohio State University.

A pioneering study of German and Japanese postwar fiction, providing a broad cultural basis for understanding a half-century of responses to World War II from within the two societies.The wartime and postwar cultural histories of Germany and Japan show similar experiences of defeat, occupation, and then the reconstruction of powerful societies. Little previous research has examined the literary works that reflect these contacts and parallelisms. For the first time, this book offers an extensive comparative study of German and Japanese narratives that serve as a form of'counter-memory,'in Foucault's phrase, for the two cultures. Rather than attempting to present objective or comprehensive views of history, these narratives draw upon personal memories to offer subjective, selective, and individualistic reports. They provide an alternative (or'counter-memory') to more official versions of World War II and its aftermath. Major writers such as Mishima Yukio, Ibuse Masuji, Oba Minako, Gunter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Christa Wolf, and the Nobel Prize winners Oe Kenzaburo and Heinrich Boll are set in the context of lesser-known writers, including a nine-year-old child, a medical doctor, a woman who served as a journalist, and a former prisoner, to provide a broad cultural basis for understanding responses to the war from within the two societies.This book combines a broad historical scope with detailed examinations of important individual texts, with both aspects securely set on a firm foundation of historical and literary scholarship. The rhythm of alternation between synthetic generalizations and close textual explication (yielding interpretive insights while providing lucid and economical exposition and summary) allows for carefully balanced and integrated comparisons.Reiko Tachibana is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Japanese at the Pennsylvania State University.

This first full-length study investigates the profound implications of the peculiarly original sense of humor found in Elias Canetti's single novel--a facetiousness, understood in a Nietzschean sense, as a revolutionary aesthetic.Now translated into more than twenty-two languages, Die Blendung, known in its English translation as either The Tower of Babel or Auto-da-Fe, has become something of a popular novel. Canetti and Nietzsche is the first full-length study of Canetti's novel to do justice to the profound implications of its peculiarly original sense of humor, one which typically finds its expression in facetiousness. It understands facetiousness, through Nietzsche, as a performance art--an art that equates truth with the wisdom that life should be about the effort we put into creative acts. Examining both the theory and practice of humor, Murphy relates her own theoretical insights to the international debates concerning the influence of political correctness and the liberal Left inside and outside the universities.Harriet Murphy teaches German and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, England.

Translation of: Oost-Indische Spiegel.