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The question of 'the postcolonial' is viewed from the perspective of psychoanalysis, using Lacan, Hannah Arendt and others to consider the way European whites' unconscious psychological reaction (and role of the maternal) to those they encountered as they purveyed their version of "the Good" to those they colonized.

This essay1 revisits J. M. Coetzee's representation of Friday's body in his 1986 novel Foe in the context of his long-standing interest in the idea of grace. Through a reading of Friday's dancing in Foe, I argue that Coetzee's representation of Friday consistently invokes grace as a physical and aesthetic concept, rather than the theological emphasis that has prevailed in critical discussions to date. The reading is amplified by evidence from the Coetzee Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, which points towards Coetzee's engagement in the early 1980s with the work of German writer Heinrich von Kleist and his 'On the Puppet Theatre'. I draw on contemporary scholarship that revisits aesthetic theory, the backdrop for Kleist's dialogue, in the context of the transatlantic slave trade in order to understand the implications of Coetzee's use of the figure of the puppet and the significance of grace as an aesthetic concept for his novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the translation of Kleist's punctuation in the context of his novella The Marquise of O ... in which one em-dash in particular is, by tradition, burdened with particular significance, and argues that the six main English translations to date have not read Kleist's punctuation within the text as a system of punctuation that draws together relevant passages of the text, creating a network of non-verbal insinuations about the paternity of the protagonist's child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of 'the postcolonial' is viewed from the perspective of psychoanalysis, using Lacan, Hannah Arendt and others to consider the way European whites' unconscious psychological reaction (and role of the maternal) to those they encountered as they purveyed their version of "the Good" to those they colonized.

Starting from the eighteenth-century discourse inaugurated by Leibniz’s Theodizee on evil and its consequences for the idea of human guilt and responsibility, the article provides a reading of Kleist’s drama Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (1808) as a response to Goethe’s Faust. Ein Fragment (1790). It points out some parallels between Gretchen and Käthchen and their opposite fates in the trial they have to face before God and the humans, concluding that Kleist’s drama is conceived as a sort of litotes of Goethe’s Fragment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to present some thought on Heinrich von Kleist's Marionettentheatre-Essay, a very strange dialogue in which the German author reflects on grace and the destiny of mankind. After a brief introduction, I will discuss Kleist's philosophical background by mentioning influences by Rousseau and Kant in order to show why he lost hope and faith and why, at a certain point, he changed his mind in favor of nihilism. The dilemmatic situation presented in his Marionettentheatre-Essay is the result of this evolution of thought, in which man is depicted with his desire to search for Heaven but damned to live his life by knowing that it is impossible to gain grace again. We exist in a place between the earth and the sky, where a purely material world or God, or even technology cannot save us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Age of Goethe major legal reforms occurred, which are reflected in the works of numerous writers. One of these authors is Heinrich von Kleist, who brings together different legal concepts in his novella Michael Kohlhaas (1810) and sets them in a conflicting relationship. Kleist, who is usually seen as being ahead of his time, not only reflects on the procedural reforms of the Age of Goethe but also anticipates reforms that will soon follow. What is often overlooked in discussions of Michael Kohlhaas is that the protagonist of the novella is not a typical avenger; he does not ignore current law in order to take the law into his own hands, rather he tries to draw attention to a corrupted juridical system in need of reform. As "one of the most righteous individuals of his time," Kohlhaas insists on a fair legal procedure and even accepts a death sentence as its consequence. It is not by chance that Kleist chooses the genre of the novella for his adaption of a historical case story: in German, Novelle can name the literary genre, as well as a revision of current law (Gesetzesnovelle). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The motif of the Vehmic Court—a medieval "secret tribunal"—enjoyed remarkable popularity in German literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This paper analyzes the structure and function of Secret Tribunal scenes in two canonical plays of the time: Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen (1773), which served as a template for the development of the motif, and one of its most prominent literary echoes, Heinrich von Kleist's Käthchen of Heilbronn (1810). By defining how both texts handle, elaborate and transform the historical subject, the paper examines to what degree Goethe and Kleist functionalized Vehmic trial scenes in order to comment on contemporary legal debates. In both dramas, such scenes are embedded in a multi-layered discourse on legal practices, which places a particular focus on the divide between customary and positive law, though from different angles: whereas the young Goethe offers a negative picture of instituted justice based on Roman law, and praises Germanic customary law as a form of justice that balances the power of absolutist rulers over the people, Kleist offers a parody of Vehmic Court proceedings and advocates instead for modern forms of codified justice that are meant to gradually displace outdated judicial systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Kohlhaas is one of Heinrich von Kleist's most studied texts. While students may find the dense and complex narrative challenging to understand and interpret, the tale lends itself well to train critical thinking, a key skill in the study of Modern Languages. In a close reading, I argue that engaging with literature from the more distant past, including Kleist's tale, not only builds bridges to other centuries, but also helps generate an awareness of this bridge-building process. Scrutinizing linguistic and narrative detail, considering and reconsidering different points of view, and acknowledging the historical variability of certain concepts and ideas encourages a dialogue between unfamiliar (fictional) worlds and one's own world of thought and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

O artigo apresenta e explora o texto de Heinrich von Kleist intitulado “Sobre a fabricação gradativa dos pensamentos enquanto se fala” (1805-1806). A tese central do ensaio articula oralidade, corpo e produção de pensamento: apartando-se da tradição metafísica, Kleist investiga a imbricação entre a fala, os estados atmosféricos do corpo e o ato de pensar, salientando as dimensões temporais necessárias à fabricação de ideias, não na mente, mas na prática viva dos falantes, em seus intercâmbios presenciais. O ensaio fornece pistas para que se vislumbrem possíveis efeitos sobre o pensamento no contexto de comunicações tecnologicamente mediadas por conta da pandemia da Covid-19, dissociando o falar da presença direta dos corpos. A metodologia adotada concerne à análise detalhada desse texto (pouco conhecido entre nós), remetendo a alguns conceitos de Deleuze e Guattari e visando a levantar possíveis problemas que o pensamento enfrenta na atual situação de distância entre os corpos.

Kleist's early prose tale begins with the announcement of the Marquise's unusual circumstances in the local intelligence gazettes. The Marquise's announcement calls on readers to reflect on the function of honesty and sincerity in public texts. The presentation of something unsettling in this opening scene quickly demonstrates that honesty is always more than mere adherence to truth. By paying close attention to the announcement made in Kleist's text, this article seeks to revise an important perspective found in scholarship on Kleist by viewing his emphasis on privacy, transgression, and individual honesty not as a retreat from emerging public discourse but instead as performative acts of and reflections on disclosure. To do so, this article considers Kleist's novella in the context of ongoing work in critical theory on the way disclosure informs our understanding of aesthetics in public culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Como resultado de la problemática recepción internacional de Heinrich von Kleist durante buena parte del siglo XX, la primera adaptación al cine de Michael Kohlhaas producida fuera de Alemania no llegaría hasta 1999, con el western Sin Piedad (The Jack Bull). No obstante, en los últimos años esta larga sequía se ha visto interrumpida con el estreno casi simultáneo de dos versiones del relato: la franco-alemana Michael Kohlhaas (2003) y la rusa Leviatán (2014). El objetivo de este artículo es el de abordar la relación entre estas películas y el proceso de revalorización de la obra kleistiana a nivel mundial. Para ilustrar dicho fenómeno, se propondrá además un diálogo entre el texto original y estas dos adaptaciones con el fin de examinar las implicaciones narrativas y estéticas de trasladar la historia a un medio y un contexto histórico y geográfico tan distintos.

A pedagogia iluminista procurou debater os meios de se educar o ser humano para o bem e para a independência intelectual, fundando os pressupostos dessa formação nas leis morais do bem supremo. Para tanto, a filosofia da época usou como parâmetro de sua pedagogia a total responsabilidade do ser humano por seus atos, o que acarretou na imprescindibilidade de uma formação que operasse na natureza humana uma transformação positiva, pautada na máxima do bem moral. Inicialmente adepto a esta proposta, Heinrich von Kleist, logo após sua famosa “crise kantiana”, passou a contestar o modelo de educação iluminista a partir de um viés cético, pois, para o autor, a nova visão de realidade aberta pelo criticismo kantiano evidenciou os fracassos dessa pedagogia. Sob este novo ponto de vista, as noções de liberdade e de moralidade ganharam uma nova caracterização, já que se tornou impossível para Kleist determinar quais seriam os resultados desses projetos educacionais na conduta humana. Diante deste cenário, analisaremos, neste artigo, dois textos exemplares de como esta discussão foi transposta pelo autor para a literatura: em Allerneuster Erziehungsplan, Kleist inverte a lógica desta educação ao propor uma “escola de vícios”, enquanto que, em Der Findling (1811), o autor contesta os valores morais burgueses da família e do bem supremo, desembocando em um texto repleto de violência e de maldade.

Przedmiotem artykułu jest refleksja nad polskim przekładem sztuki Heinricha von Kleista Pentesilea, dokonanym w latach trzydziestych XX wieku przez wybitnego tłumacza literatury niemieckiej Witolda Hulewicza. Dramat opublikowany przez Kleista w roku 1808 – bardzo swobodnie nawiązujący do wątków antycznych i niezwykły pod względem stylistyki – budził z początku wiele kontrowersji. Popularność zdobył w XX wieku, a postać wewnętrznie rozdartej, nieokiełznanej królowej Amazonek szybko zyskała grono wielbicieli wśród niemieckich elit twórczych. Specyficzny język Kleista sprawia, że tekst sztuki stanowi ogromne wyzwanie dla tłumacza. Omawiany w artykule przekład podzielił krytyków. Jest jednak bez wątpienia wielkim dokonaniem translatorskim i ostatnim opublikowanym tłumaczeniem Witolda Hulewicza, poety i patrioty rozstrzelanego przez Niemców w Palmirach w 1941 roku.

Copyright of eHumanista is the property of Professor Antonio Cortijo-Ocana 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.)

The anti-humanism of Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater — wherein the ideal of grace is supposed to make visible mechanical forces devoid of human self-consciousness — takes the form of a temptation. The text nevertheless has a poetological function inasmuch as temptation lies at the genesis of aesthetic experience for Kleist. The paper examines the potentialities of a form of agonistic reading in response to the challenges posed by Kleist's aesthetics of temptation, and concludes by considering Die Marquise von O.... as an elaborate ritualistic manipulation designed to integrate transgressive desire into the ethics of civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconstructs and contextualizes the development of the Vehmic Court motif in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German literature by examining both canonical texts, such as Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen and Kleist's Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, and works commonly classified as Trivialliteratur. As a popular subset of Ritter- and Geheimbundliteratur, Secret Tribunal fiction from the Age of Goethe has generally been considered by critics as a merely entertaining genre. A more probing inquiry, however, reveals that the historical material was used to add to historical and political knowledge, to sensitize readers to questions of law and legal process, and to reflect on the problematic nature of human justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Filología Alemana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid 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.)

Ekphrasis is a text genre based on the intertwining of visual and verbal features, involving the processes of both reading, and priming a visual image or a related action. We argue in this study that this genre, which has been object of many disputes and critical claims over the times, is a powerful tool in order to stimulate a particularly intense activation of the reader/listener’s emotions and imagination. This because of the double nature of the inputs triggering more powerfully the embodied simulation by mixing the regime of perception, affection and thought. Ekphrasis is characterized by a “paradoxical nature”, i.e. the fact that the fictional visible qualities of the described artwork disavow the process of visualization by facing the reader/listener with the need of “creating” his own images, by activating a kind of “guided imagination act”. The intertwining of codes determines also a substitution of the description by actions, as described by ancient rhetoricians. The description of actions solicits more powerfully the embodied simulation of the reader/listener. This creates an “in-between” space where what was unthinkable becomes thinkable. Since the afforded cognitive process is overwhelming for the reader/listener, he/she is driven to overcome his/her own cognitive limitations thanks to processes of the imagination that “fills in the gaps” between the known and unknown. We argue that in modern times, starting with Romantics, this process is particularly amplified and ekphrasis becomes a metacritical commentary about the act of imagining, since it induces the reader to complete the description by simulating a personal experience triggered by the rhetorical “vividness” of ekphrasis. This hypothesis will be elucidated by investigating as case-study an ekphrastic text by German author Heinrich von Kleist, who wrote about the revolutionary painting The Monk at the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich. In Kleist’s text Feelings about a Seascape by Friedrich (Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft, 1810), the author does not describe or represent the painting, according to the traditional ekphrastic praxis, but the aesthetic, perceptive, emotional and imaginative experience of seeing the picture, i.e. the dynamical affective processes engaged by the reader/observer in front of the painting, which in Friedrich’s intention represents “the act of seeing itself”. This act involves a strong embodied simulation which finally amplifies the process of the imagination of the reader, whom is guided to bodily experience the imagined sublime space of the picture.

Copyright of Brünner Hefte zu Deutsch als Fremdsprache is the property of Masaryk University, Faculty of Education 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.)

Der Aufsatz untersucht einen kurzen Text aus Heinrich von Kleists Zeitschrift Berliner Abendblätter. Seinen Anspielungsreichtum zeigt dieses Stück Prosa erst durch eine detaillierte Untersuchung, die ihn als literarisches Gebilde begreift und damit sowohl den Anspielungsraum seiner Semantik als auch die Beziehungsdichte seiner Syntax entfaltet. Die Zeitungsmeldung entpuppt sich als subversive Anekdote.

Deviating from Oliver Grau’s notion of the panorama’s immersive features, this article will discuss the receptive impact of virtual travel media of the 19th century in a more ambivalent and nuanced manner by employing two theoretical texts by Walter Benjamin, Clemens Brentano and Heinrich von Kleist. In Berlin Childhood around 1900 Benjamin draws on and reflects his childhood experience of the Kaiserpanorama in Berlin. Brentano and Kleist’s text elucidates the authors’ ‘strange feeling’ towards Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Monk by the Sea. What both texts share is a fundamental experience of ambivalence regarding the topographies depicted in both media. Other than merely being ‘enchanted’ and taken into a far distant land, it is precisely the mediality of the Kaiserpanorama and the Friedrich painting that provides a more complex experience, oscillating between distance and familiar terrain, between immersion and media reflexivity, between past, present and future. After introducing and discussing both theoretical accounts, I will apply their receptive principles to the analysis of the virtual travel media panorama and early cinema.

This article aims to compare the Victor Hugo’s presentation, in his preface to Cromwell, on the grotesque element with Heinrich von Kleist’s ideas developed in Über das Marionettentheater (1810), emphasizing evidence of a transgression concerning the classical view of art, mainly highlighting Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetic theories. In addition, we propose a brief analysis of Kleist’s pieces Penthesilea and Die Hermannsschlacht, published in 1801, based on this dissolution of the classical ideal and the establishment of intertextuality among with the proposals of the Über das Marionettentheater.

The German painter Caspar David Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea (1808-10), a picture that has played an important role in accounts of the prehistory of twentieth-century abstract art, is significant among other reasons because it bravely refused painting's narrative vocation and in so doing radicalized the optics characteristic of the contemporary aesthetics of the sublime. Friedrich's contemporary, the novelist and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist, intuited precisely this in his scintillating comments on the painting at the time it appeared. Invoking the shocking idea that looking at The Monk by the Sea is like seeing through eyes whose lids have been cut off, he recognized that Friedrich had transformed the canvas into the locus not so much of narration and signification as of sensation. This article leans on the terms devised by Gilles Deleuze to explain the paintings of Francis Bacon in order to explore the seminal shift in the relationship between spectator and composition that Friedrich's canvas dramatizes with such compelling power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Monk by the Sea stands alone in the oeuvre of Caspar David Friedrich. Unlike the majority of his works, which are generally overburdened with meaning, making them easy to understand from a Romantic, Christian or nationalist perspective, this painting remained resistant to interpretation by almost all of his contemporaries - even by the artist himself - because the reduction and "minimalism" in the work was so unprecedented and extreme that it would take several generations before it became common practice. This was also the first work to feature Friedrich's famous innovation, the Rückenfigur, the picture's internal spectator, who forms a close and subjective bond with the external spectator, while the subject of the spectacle itself, for the very first time in the history of painting, is "nothing". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the aesthetic and political debates around two of the three historic theatrical productions of Heinrich von Kleist’s Die Hermannsschlacht in the GDR, in Thale in 1957 and in Leipzig in 1988. The stagings can be seen to represent the two opposing extremes of GDR cultural appropriation, and the shift from political propaganda in the 1950s to Marxist critical theatre of the 1980s. In this context, Kleist’s oeuvre provides an ideal analytical tool to identify how political pragmatism in many cases replaced both ideological and Marxist cultural approaches in the nation-building years, and how dialectical culture from the 1970s onwards eventually achieved the critical appropriation of Kleist’s works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads Kleist’s narrative dialogue essay ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ (1810) as a text that is instructive for scholars examining the culture of classical education and the disciplines of knowing, interpreting and reading around 1800. This means mobilizing Kleist as a disruptive guide to emblematic tropes of disciplinary enquiry and pedagogy, especially those glossed on the Platonic desire for knowledge. What Földényi called a drama of ‘disturbed erotics’ is thus also a drama of ‘disturbed philology’. It is, at the same time, a reminder that the structures of artistic and literary classicism around 1800 are closely bound up with the structures of classical knowledge and its increasingly professionalized practices, especially in light of their emphasis on teaching, understanding and ‘Bildung’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article scrutinises the aporetic confrontation of different ultimate values in Kleist’s infamous Die Hermannsschlacht, namely nationalism and a basic notion of ‘human rights’. Kleist’s play does not settle for one of these priorities, but conceptualizes the nation as a facilitator, promulgator, and protector of rights and — at the very same time — as an inexorable principle of selection which ties the notions of exclusion and elimination closely to those of inclusion and participation. In this respect, Die Hermannsschlacht not only prepares and anticipates elements of Carl Schmitt’s political theory, but also comes very close to Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty and the production of politically qualified life in his Homo Sacer series. However, it does so without completely abandoning the universal ideas of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the question of how to interpret Heinrich von Kleist's short story "Die Verlobung in St. Domingo". While Kleist specialists have tended to insufficiently relate the story to the developing field of Haitian studies, scholars more attuned to the literary history of the Haitian revolution have only inadequately understood the characteristic textual ambivalences of Kleist's style and politics. In trying to bridge the gap between these two reading modes, the article discusses Kleist and his short story in a double context of Prussian and Caribbean politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heinrich von Kleist’s “Über das Marionettentheater” is a yet overlooked intertext in David Foster Wallace’sInfinite Jest. A comparison of the two texts shows direct textual echoes of the 1810 German essay inInfinite Jest. Infinite Jesttransposes Kleist’s theme of the loss of grace through self-consciousness to its criticism of postmodern irony. Fulfilling the solution proposed in Kleist’s essay,Infinite Jestuses its structural features to create an infinite loop that, like the history of graceless man in Kleist’s essay, can be ended only by a fundamental readjustment of projections. In changing their perspective from a Euclidean, postmodern point of view to a non-Euclidean, hopeful perspective, readers can redeem themselves from the self-conscious cycles of irony. ThusIJ’s structure creates a text that is longer than its page numbers, oscillating between, and thus including, the postmodern and the sincere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars typically single out race to understand how inequality is enacted in Heinrich von Kleist's Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (1811). As an alternative, this article proposes that an intersectional approach helps us analyze the complicated configurations of power at work in Kleist's novella. The characters in this work are constituted by complex categories, identifications, and affiliations that mutually inform each other. By investigating how social standing, national origin, sexuality, and age permeate understandings of racialized male gender, female solidarity, and whiteness, this interpretation suggests that intersectional analysis more adequately captures how dominance and resistance are depicted in Kleist's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ekphrasis is a text genre based on the intertwining of visual and verbal features, involving the processes of both reading, and priming a visual image or a related action. We argue in this study that this genre, which has been object of many disputes and critical claims over the times, is a powerful tool in order to stimulate a particularly intense activation of the reader/listener's emotions and imagination. This because of the double nature of the inputs triggering more powerfully the embodied simulation by mixing the regime of perception, affection and thought. Ekphrasis is characterized by a "paradoxical nature", i.e. the fact that the fictional visible qualities of the described artwork disavow the process of visualization by facing the reader/listener with the need of "creating" his own images, by activating a kind of "guided imagination act". The intertwining of codes determines also a substitution of the description by actions, as described by ancient rhetoricians. The description of actions solicits more powerfully the embodied simulation of the reader/listener. This creates an "in-between" space where what was unthinkable becomes thinkable. Since the afforded cognitive process is overwhelming for the reader/listener, he/she is driven to overcome his/her own cognitive limitations thanks to processes of the imagination that "fills in the gaps" between the known and unknown. We argue that in modern times, starting with Romantics, this process is particularly amplified and ekphrasis becomes a metacritical commentary about the act of imagining, since it induces the reader to complete the description by simulating a personal experience triggered by the rhetorical "vividness" of ekphrasis. This hypothesis will be elucidated by investigating as case-study an ekphrastic text by German author Heinrich von Kleist, who wrote about the revolutionary painting The Monk at the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich. In Kleist's text Feelings about a Seascape by Friedrich (Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft, 1810), the author does not describe or represent the painting, according to the traditional ekphrastic praxis, but the aesthetic, perceptive, emotional and imaginative experience of seeing the picture, i.e. the dynamical affective processes engaged by the reader/observer in front of the painting, which in Friedrich's intention represents "the act of seeing itself". This act involves a strong embodied simulation which finally amplifies the process of the imagination of the reader, whom is guided to bodily experience the imagined sublime space of the picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of historical sources chronicle the devastating earthquake that shook the country and destroyed Santiago in 1647, during Chile’s colonial period. More than a century after, Heinrich Kleist published Das Erdbeben in Chili (1811), a fictional relation about the same cataclysm that describes the fatal destiny of two lovers. Surviving the disaster, they are lynched in a church by the fanatic faithful because of their irregular union, that would have caused the wrath and the punishment of God. Kleist’s story is cited also in 8. 8: el miedo en el espejo. Una crónica del terremoto en Chile, an eyewitness account from Mexican writer Juan Villoro, who was in Santiago in 2010, when occurred a terrible earthquake that registered 8.8 on the Richter scale. The author not only describes the people’s reactions to event, but also finds in his experience the impetus for considering how someone who escapes death, having seen it up close, can continue to live. In this context uses the Kleist’s text as a springboard for philosophical reflection on man’s destiny. A apocalyptic disaster can have unexpected consequences depending on the time and place, but also by the interpreter of the facts: in the small and isolated environment of colonial Chile, the will to resist giving in to superstition and to struggle to go on living; in Kleist’s story, abandoning comforting illusions about nature and man’s destiny; in Villoro’s account, awareness that we cannot know how and when the end of the world will arrive, but it lies in wait for us.