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One of the principal dilemmas Holocaust survivors have faced is how to voice the traumatic memories that haunt them. Although in his seminal Language and Silence George Steiner once claimed that "the world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason", the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi was an obvious exception in having been able to voice his trauma throughout his life by writing about it and analysing what happened to him. He has left us an oeuvre in which he unceasingly found ways to express his memories of the eleven months he spent in Auschwitz, from February 1944 until his liberation by the Russian Army in January 1945. This article demonstrates how Levi was able to express himself about the trauma he had experienced specifically by employing language and imagery derived from myths such as Tantalus and Homer's Odyssey, but primarily also through the use of metaphor. Close attention is paid to the role of chemistry in Levi's life, his philosophy of chemistry, how it influenced his literary career, and how in the face of persistent silence about the Holocaust the use of chemical metaphors in The Periodic Table (1975) provided Levi with a means to translate to himself and the world his harrowing memories of his year in Auschwitz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a selection of literary texts featuring cockroaches in the wake of Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis (1915): Clarice Lispector's A paixão segundo G.H. (1964; The Passion According to G.H., 1988), Marc Estrin's Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa (2002), Scholastique Mukasonga's Inyenzi ou les Cafards (2006; Cockroaches, 2016), and Rawi Hage's Cockroach (2008), this article shows how these authors politicize the cockroach as bestia sacra between trauma and resilience. These literary works are exemplary in demonstrating how Anthropocene fiction resists and destabilizes biopolitically charged species metaphors with their dehumanizing agency. How do these authors, in writing beyond Kafka's doomed human cockroach, liberate the species blattodae from its aura of dehumanization and draw on the resilience of this ancient species in the face of adversity and as a model for human agency?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the concept of randomness as the absence of goal-oriented movement in literary walks. The literature of walking displays the happenstance of adventure as one of the great antidotes to our inane, highly technologized, digitalized twenty-first-century lifestyle. In the end, however, such randomness may reveal itself as not so random after all, as the purpose of the journey, its inherent telos, discloses itself while travelling or in hindsight. This article provides brief glimpses into the history of literary walks to examine this tension between apparent randomness and the non-random. By drawing on a range of cultural theories and theorizations of travel and especially of walking, I look at literary foot travel in the nineteenth century, the Romantics and American Transcendentalists, some great adventure hikes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the urban and rural flâneur. In doing so the article does not lose sight of the question of how we can instrumentalize the literature of walking for life during the current pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how the politics of dewilding and rewilding interact with biodiversity, cultural diversity, and cultural production. Although dewilding – stripping nature of healthy ecosystems and its various species – is still a widespread practice around the globe, it has a particular relationship with the colonial period. Dewilding under colonialism implies the suppression of the resistance of the colonized as well as the extermination of species, especially of those standing in as metaphors for the resistance of those to be colonized. As a case study, this article analyses the metaphorical perception of the wolf from the colonial period in Britain, Ireland, and the US until today to demonstrate how literature has supported both the extermination and the reinstitution of wolves, and how the trajectory from "dewolfing" to "rewolfing" can potentially benefit both nature and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Grass was working on Die Blechtrommel in Paris, Paul Celan recommended he read Gottlob Regis' translation of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel. By drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnival this article analyses Grass's indebtedness to the French author for the purpose of attacking the political climate of his time. The focus is on body images, Grass's criticism of the state and the church, instances of misogyny, the human/animal divide, questions of genre and parody, as well as Grass's critical stance vis à vis post-war political avowals of reason as a stratagem of self-distancing from the irrationalism of the Third Reich. The article demonstrates that hybridity relates to more than the Bakhtinian grotesque body of the protagonist, but is closely linked to mimicry, mockery, and ultimately subversion as key feature of human / animal liminality in the postmodern satirical novel with its roots in the European picaresque. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) are increasingly using digital technologies for storytelling and creating mobile applications (apps) for cultural heritage content, but how apps are used in practice to communicate information to users has not been widely studied. A team of people from a heritage organisation, a university, and mobile app development group plan to create a bespoke heritage trail app for Ireland, but to date design conventions/recommendations for this genre are lacking. This article applies a systematic approach to digital narrative content analysis to better understand how apps are being used specifically for heritage trails with the aim of identifying what the common features are, which modalities and narrative techniques are used. The selected corpus included 55 apps downloaded from the Google Play Store. The results of this content analysis—based on the App Walkthrough Method (Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S. (2018). The walkthrough method: An approach to the study of apps. New Media & Society, 20(3), 881–900)—show that there is a gap between academic research themes/trends and how digital narrative is actually being communicated in the current market, and it aims to inform the future development of heritage trail apps by including a list of design and content features common to this genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rushdie's Midnight's Children is a work of pastiche. As such it is typically postmodern, literature patched together from other literary texts. Using Grass's Tin Drum and the German postwar cultural-political situation as a model, Rushdie copies Grass in re-enchanting a secularized country grappling with the memory of genocide through a set of mythological paradigms. By drawing on postcolonial theory and the biopolitical concept of the homo sacer this essay analyses Rushdie's particular brand of what I have termed as mythical realism in view of its close amalgamation of hybridity with mimicry, subversive mockery, and liminality between the human and the animal, typical features of the postmodern novel trying to come to terms with war and genocide. It is the aim of this study to examine the functions of these key features for Rushdie's Midnight's Children for lifting the corks of forgetting and disclosing the concealment of India's past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Little Red Riding Hood my article examines the cultural and biopolitical links between the absent mother and her evil doppelgänger/counterpart, the wolf. As a figure that was demonised from the middle ages on and referred to undesirables abandoned by the community, specifically in the Germanic context, the wolf is caught between fruition and perdition, between nurturing and devouring, reflecting the dual archetype of the mother, the good one and the bad one. Drawing on the homo sacer as the individual cursed and expelled by the community (Agamben), the essay discusses what the initiation rite in the folktale has to do with the early medieval expulsion of culprits known in Germanic Northern Europe as the vargr as both 'wolf' and 'outlaw'. What are the structural and metaphorical links between the three women and the wolf, and can we detect the mother's untold story in this constellation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on critical theory such as Giorgio Agamben's homo sacer and Heidegger's thoughts on dwelling and lethe, this article follows the biopolitical movement of destruction in Franz Kafka's Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis) to reveal some of the challenges this contextualization poses to its English translation. Stanley Corngold's translation serves as an example for the intricacies that pertain specifically to Kafka's language of abjection, words such as the famous Ungeziefer of the first sentence. These difficulties for the translator result from the fact that Gregor's transformation into Ungeziefer and his family's uncaring treatment of him as such foreshadow the genocidal practices of the 1930s and 40s. By highlighting a selection of passages in which Kafka's writing becomes a harbinger of these crimes against humanity the article demonstrates the subtle discrepancies between the original and Corngold's translation, what gets lost, where at times the translator amplifies the biopolitical message of the original, but also what completely defies translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By way of Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo ( If this is a Man) this article discusses the challenges in translating Holocaust literature. On the one hand, the translation of witnessing 'limit events' such as the Holocaust into testimony is propelled by attempts to find forms of representation which push their own limits. Here myth often appears as a vehicle of representation, as is the case with Levi's use of the Tantalus myth and of Dante's Inferno. On the other hand, this article shows how the challenges of translating Holocaust literature into other languages can be facilitated by an acute awareness of debates and cultural theories surrounding genocide, such as Giorgio Agamben's theory of the homo sacer and of nuda vita. Such translation into other languages may reveal dimensions of the original that would remain dormant, buried, if the original were not translated. It is especially in the comparison of two or more translations that these deeper layers of the original are revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the use of fairy tales in the books 'Die Blechtrommel,' by Günter Grass and 'Der Nazi & der Friseur,' by Edgar Hilsenrath in the context of Nazi atrocities. Issues concerning the fairy tale representations in the context of the Holocaust period; Status of fairy tale writing in Germany during the 20th century; Comparison between the approaches used by Grass and Hilsenrath in writing fairy tales in the context of the Holocaust; Activities of the Nazis which were addressed in the two books.

After elaborating on the theory on revisionary mythmaking the essay tries to relate this theory to Christa Wolf's re-vision of the Medea myth. How does Wolf delegitimize Medea's traditional roles as developed by Euripides, what does she displace through her version, and to what extent does she emphasize what Euripides and many after him merely hint at? Wolf displaces Euripides's view of Medea as a monster and shifts the recipient's attention from her individual conflict with Jason to two wider conflicts: the irreconcilability of the two cultures Colchis and Corinth, and, in connection with this, the conflict between the sexes, a central theme already in Kassandra. This essay shows further how the clash between Colchis and Corinth can be related to East and West Germany and to what extent Wolf translates the patriarchal myth into a matriarchal one. Euripides's version of Medea already contains some moments in which the traditional patriarchal gender concept is challenged and questioned. Christa Wolf builds on these early adumbrations of feminist thought, enlarges them substantially and works them into a contemporary context. Once again, after Die Günderode and Kassandra, her Medea is an alternative albeit doomed projection to the enlightened and – according to Horckheimer/Adorno – therefore destructive patriarchal hero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]