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Copyright of Cuadernos de Estudios del Siglo XVIII is the property of Instituto Feijoo de Estudios del Siglo XVIII (Universidad de Oviedo) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article deals with the problem of teaching the history of literature, specifically with regard to Polish (and Czech) literary history in the context of foreign study, namely in Germany. The authors are concerned with the question of whether it is possible to teach the history of literature to foreign students according to the standards set for Polish (and Czech) students, i.e. through a historical and literary perspective, division into epochs and, above all, with regard to the canon. In view of the fact that undergraduate curricula in Germany provide only a few hours of instruction in literary history, and that German students are not taught the literary canon at school but rather learn to question the normative value of every author or text, the teaching of 'traditional' literary history in Germany is problematic. Drawing on their own biographical experience as part of the 'twilight of the canon generation', the authors argue that the didactic process requires an awareness both of the need for a canon -- as a kind of 'map' to navigate the territory of literature -- and of its constant questioning, deconstruction, rewriting, and expansion. In the next part of the article, the authors discuss the 'poststructuralist turn' in literary historiography and examine selected poststructuralist textbooks on the history of national literatures, especially those that do not abandon the basic assumptions of literary synthesis in their ambition to give new order to the material. Another part of the article discusses the textbook Polnische Literatur im langen 19. Jahrhundert. Grundkonzepte -- Author:innen -- Textinterpretationen, created by the Leipzig Institute of Slavic Studies in cooperation with the Polish Academy of Sciences, a textbook that aims to present the history of Polish literature 1822--1939 as a history of Polish attitudes towards both cultivating and questioning the Polish canon. The handbook was conceived on the basis of the programs of the B.A. Polish literary courses in Leipzig and its preparation involved the participation of the students as translators and commentators on chapters written in Polish. The conclusion of the article is a plea for a hermeneutical consideration of the didactic relevance of canons as interpretationalcommunicational tools giving students and others the possibility to mediate between the orientation skills a tradition can provide and its critical inquiring, as well as to make different point of views intelligible to one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary studies on the simulacrum generally adopt a thematic perspective aimed at examining the presence of simulacra in specific genres, authors or literary traditions. This contribution proposes a less common approach by investigating those cases in which literature itself acquires a simulacral nature, rather than being a means of representation of simulacra. After a brief historical recognition of the aesthetic of automation, the research focuses on stochastic and algorithmic poetry produced in Germany since the second half of the 20th century. The analysis of computer-generated poems offers the opportunity to reflect upon theoretical and aesthetical matters concerning e.g. the concept of authorship, the referentiality of literary texts, the role of creativity in art as well as the mechanical component involved in every act of artistic creation. In this context, the present contribution shows how the discussion on this form of “artificial poetry” (Max Bense) can contribute to the debate about posthumanism from a purely aesthetic point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern literary criticism, the concept and so-called genre 'migration literature' is commonly associated with the experience of exile, often for political reasons; by contrast, writers who have left their country for reasons other than political are labelled as 'migrant-writers', 'writers abroad', or 'diaspora writers'. The use of such a different terminology to categorise authors and their writings highlight the fact that there are some distinctive characteristics distinguishing them. While I do share this perspective to a certain degree, I also would like to draw attention to a major literary trend of the last two decades: the appearance of writers who expatriate voluntarily without being persecuting politically but yet are in a situation which I define as 'self-exile' or 'voluntary exile'. Despite their different languages and countries of origin and residence, an analysis of their texts demonstrates that these authors are united by two common features: 1) a reflection on the tragic past of their compatriots, who have experienced forced mass emigration, and an attempt to find echoes of this experience in everyday life; and 2) an awareness of their own position (that is, the situation of self-exile) as a productive process and creative basis for their writing work. The hypothesis I suggest in this paper is that the texts written by 'writers who are in self-exile' are characterised by certain writing strategies and themes typical of migrant writers yet they also have some unique features, which are related to the voluntary experience of leaving their home country. Home is to be understood broadly, not in terms of a certain geopolitical location, but as belonging to one single culture, community, and language. The aim of this article is to examine these very features. This article focuses on the novels by two famous contemporary authors: Aleksej Makušinskij (Russia/Germany) and Winfried Sebald (Germany/United Kingdom). In their works, the representation of the condition of self-exile has led the authors to develop a multilingual discourse and recreate the new transitory literary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the early writings of Samuel Cocceji (1679–1755) on the foundations of natural law. A key focus of this study is his criticism of the 'principle of sociality' (principium socialitatis). It situates Cocceji in a debate about sociality that took place in the 1690s and early years of the 1700s throughout various German universities. This was a debate with its own language and integrity. Reconstructing this language and explaining the key terms of contention is central to this enquiry. This aspect of the argument is pursued by focusing on Cocceji's inaugural dissertation and rebuilding his case against sociality. I present an analytical framework drawn from these discussions to understand the principle of sociality in a new light. As an incisive critic of sociality, Cocceji provides an ideal flashlight to examine the use of this principle in debates surrounding the foundations of natural law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to analyse Polish-German literature transfer that was embedded in the heteronomous field of foreign cultural policies in the years 1960-1970. The primary data derives from the Political Archive of the Foreign Office (Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts in Berlin). In particular, the focus of the paper is on the reports of the Trade Representatives of FGR in Warsaw, the correspondence of the individual cultural intermediaries (Karl Dedecius and Hermann Buddensieg among others), publishing houses and organisations operated and financed by the West German Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Inter Nationes, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, Martin-Behaim-Gesellschaft). The stance of the government institutions is confronted with the policy of private publishers. Such a comparison has been enabled through an investigation into the material collected in the course of archival research in Siegfried Unseld Archiv preserved in Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach. The archival material has enabled employing the so-called policontextural methodological perspective (Niklas Luhmann). The perspective underlines the multiplicity of vantage points that in turn affect the current multiple definitions of literature, the latter functioning in parallel. The framework allows asking the question as to the ways in which the political circles defined the function of literature and how the literary system responded to these external influences. A policontextural analysis of the archival data yields two new research outcomes. Firstly, the historiographic aspect of research results proposes a correction of the periodisation of the entire cultural policy of FRG and Polish-West German cultural relations. The second finding is of a methodological nature and pertains to the rule of hierarchical ordering of the cultural field (autonomy vs. heteronomy). In the light of the study, the military rhetoric of conflict (Bourdieu) should be broadened to include versatile forms of cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature is the property of Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co.KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper argues that German literary studies was, from its inception, an entirely nationalist and nation‐building endeavor, perhaps the quintessential nationalist project. Among the discipline's foundational premises are its belief in and commitment to a diversity of culturally individuated national communities (rather than one uniform humanity), a non‐hierarchical plurality of vernaculars (rather than classical languages), and historically inflected and culturally expressive aesthetic forms (rather than transhistorically and transregionally valid templates of excellence). Three disciplinary activities of early Germanistik—Germanic historical linguistics, vernacular canon formation, and national literary history—are introduced as key instruments of nationalization. In conclusion, the paper claims that contemporary German Studies in the US, thankfully a reflective and critical enterprise, nonetheless remains institutionally completely dependent on the paradigm of the linguistically and culturally defined nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper considers Joseph Conrad's standing vis-à-vis the Germans as well as the reception of his works in the German-speaking area. The analysis focuses on the German policies of publication and the nature of germanophone reviews, research interests, and translation practices - accounting for relevant socio- and cultural-historical contexts. The study attempts to demonstrate the exemplary quality featured by the German appropriation of Conrad's canonical short novel Heart of Darkness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of the concept of Europe as a source of meaning and object of contested discursive battles during the fundamental transition towards modernity of the Sattelzeit (1750–1850) can hardly be overstated. The Weimar Classics (Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland) made important contributions both to Enlightenment debates about Europe before the French Revolution and to the discursive battles about the continent taking place in the aftermath of the French Revolution in a context of heightened epistemic uncertainty and ideological confrontation. The paper aims to investigate Goethe's representation of Europe as an almost millenarian civilisation endangered at the end of the eighteenth century by a double process of economic and political modernisation. Particular attention is paid to how Goethe rooted his perception of Europe as a civilisation in geographic and climatic assumptions and how he compared the continent to other civilisational entities such as America, China, India or Persia. Finally, the political implications Goethe derived from his perception of Europe as an ailing civilisation shall be contrasted with democratic, romantic and conservative discourses about the continent in the aftermath of the French Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Fabula is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Frederick the Great played a complex role in the emergent 'classical age' of German literature. He commanded adulation for his heroic stature, and opprobrium as an absolutist conqueror. He supported the collective effort to put German culture on the European map by making Berlin a centre of cultural life, while undermining the cause of German language and literature by promoting all things French. This paper argues that his importance for the development of German literature lies in the tensions generated by these paradoxes, which drew their energizing force from humanist ideals shared by his contemporaries. While he failed to provide German writers with material, political, or verbal support, his high profile ensured that his provocative treatise on German literature of 1780 stimulated a productive discourse on the status and potential of German literature, thereby contributing to the emergent aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining selected poems from Mariella Mehr's volumes Nachrichten aus dem Exil (1998) and Widerwelten (2001), this article explores the ways that the Swiss writer Mehr refigures the notion of Heimat and its relationship to language. Tracing three key sources that supply the vocabulary and concepts within Mehr's lyrical treatment of Heimat—her own life experiences of persecution and rootlessness in postwar Switzerland, received notions of Heimat from Germanic culture, as well as the minority Yenish culture from which Mehr was forcibly estranged—this paper argues that Mehr turns to poetry to decouple Heimat from a geographically fixed, exclusionary concept, expanding it to capture complex intercultural experiences. Moreover, I attempt to unravel the paradox latent in Mehr's work, wherein the poetic subject's predominantly unsatisfied struggle for home must be reconciled with Mehr's own assertion of language's decisive role in achieving Heimat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on senses, emotions and cultural practices such as writing, reading and speaking in West Germany after 1945. The period immediately following the end of the Second World War – the so-called Stunde Null, or “zero hour” – has generally been seen as a time of new beginnings, also with regard to cleansing the German language and breaking the silences of the past. This historical examination of sensory-emotional and material contexts and related cultural practices takes as its source Hanns-Josef Ortheil’s autobiographical novel Die Erfindung des Lebens (The Invention of Life), published in 2009. Ortheil’s novel is about a child’s enormous struggle to learn how to feel, see, read, write and speak. This so-called “ego document”, told by a first-person narrator, focuses on the links between things, objects, senses, emotions, and the acquisition of cultural skills and techniques while at the same time providing subtle commentary on post-war West German society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article challenges four persistent assumptions in German-language postwar literary histories on crime and detective fiction that have led scholars to conclude that no literary tradition existed between 1900 and 1933 in the German-speaking world. These assumptions were that little German-language crime and detective fiction existed, that authors should still be well known today, that only works of high literature should constitute a tradition, and that crime and detective fiction should conform to Golden Age generic rules. By problematizing these assumptions, I provide an alternative perspective on the literature that existed and suggest approaches to understanding this invisible tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Space historians have predominantly identified Weimar Germany (1919-1933) as the starting period of German debates over the possibility of spaceflight. However, spaceflight and the utopian potential of outer space were already topics of popular discussion in the late nineteenth century, when calls by German astronomers for speculative restraint were challenged in popular science accounts and fantasy literature. Mass-produced fiction in the first decade of the twentieth century increasingly depicted spaceflight as a technological vision, imagining the spaceship as the successor to the airship. While exploring the historical processes behind this ascent of plausibility of futuristic design, the article shows how popular science media gave public voice to both established and new professional elites and fostered interprofessional exchange. In the 1900s spaceflight developed into a popular theme and boundaries between fiction and popular science blurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the appreciation of the poetry of American poet Emily Dickinson in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Topics discussed include Toni Harten-Hoencke, Rosey Eva Poole, Maria Mathi as female translators of Dickinson, impact of appreciation of her poetry in the U.S. and German American studies on her standing in Europe, German criticism of Dickinson considering her as part of a European literary tradition.

The article presents a response to Samuel Z. Klausner's article that appeared in the volume 16 of July 1998 issue of the journal "Sociological Theory." Klausner's essay is a thinly veiled attack on a late colleague, one that has no feel for sociologist Digby Baltzell's work and no appreciation of its place in the history of social thought. The author first points out a few factual errors in Klausner's essay. Baltzell was born in 1915, not 1916 as reported. No doubt religiosity and social status figure prominently in a scholar's work, but what Klausner chose not mention is just as, if not more, salient. Baltzell was a part of a generation stunned by the ease with which human freedom was eradicated in both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Baltzell's strategic use of concrete individuals to convey conceptual issues at once moral and analytical is more soundly grounded. Baltzell devoted his scholarly life to examining the dynamics of leadership in relation to human freedom. His concepts "elite" and "upper class" were the operational tools through which he carried out his task. Upper classes are communities composed of consanguine families having a consciousness of kind and bound together by a rich ritualistic life.

The article explores German classical composer Johann Sebastian Bach's music compositional practice. It examines the terminology used including colores, figurae, motet style, and varietas. It defines Bach's preambula and inventions and discusses the importance of style in music making such as in the High Baroque music.