As German as Kafka
identity and singularity in German literature around 1900 and 2000
Countless literary endeavours by 'new Germans' have come into the spotlight of academic research since the turn of the 21st century. Yet 'minority writing' and its distinctive renegotiation of traditional concepts of cultural identity are far from a...
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Countless literary endeavours by 'new Germans' have come into the spotlight of academic research since the turn of the 21st century. Yet 'minority writing' and its distinctive renegotiation of traditional concepts of cultural identity are far from a recent phenomenon in German literature. More than a hundred years ago, German-Jewish writers put a clear stamp on German modernism and were intensely engaged in various cultural and political discourses on Jewish identity. This book is the first to unfold literary parallels between these two riveting periods in German cultural history. Drawing on the philosophical oeuvre of Jean-Luc Nancy, a comparative reading of texts by, amongst others, Beer-Hofmann, Kermani, Özdamar, Roth, Schnitzler, and Zaimoglu examines similar literary approaches to the thorny issue of cultural identity in either period, while developing an overarching perspective on the 'politics of literature'.
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As German as Kafka
identity and singularity in German literature around 1900 and 2000
Countless literary endeavours by 'new Germans' have come into the spotlight of academic research since the turn of the 21st century. Yet 'minority writing' and its distinctive renegotiation of traditional concepts of cultural identity are far from a...
mehr
|
Countless literary endeavours by 'new Germans' have come into the spotlight of academic research since the turn of the 21st century. Yet 'minority writing' and its distinctive renegotiation of traditional concepts of cultural identity are far from a recent phenomenon in German literature. More than a hundred years ago, German-Jewish writers put a clear stamp on German modernism and were intensely engaged in various cultural and political discourses on Jewish identity. This book is the first to unfold literary parallels between these two riveting periods in German cultural history. Drawing on the philosophical oeuvre of Jean-Luc Nancy, a comparative reading of texts by, amongst others, Beer-Hofmann, Kermani, Özdamar, Roth, Schnitzler, and Zaimoglu examines similar literary approaches to the thorny issue of cultural identity in either period, while developing an overarching perspective on the 'politics of literature'.
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The medieval German Lohengrin
narrative poetics in the story of the Swan Knight
Zusammenfassung: "The tale of the mysterious knight carried across the water by a swan to the woman he saves and marries is one of the great narrative traditions of the Middle Ages. The version in the German Lohengrin (ca. 1300) is perhaps the most...
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Zusammenfassung: "The tale of the mysterious knight carried across the water by a swan to the woman he saves and marries is one of the great narrative traditions of the Middle Ages. The version in the German Lohengrin (ca. 1300) is perhaps the most striking. It captures the imagination with the appearance of the epic poet Wolfram von Eschenbach as narrator, the changing forms of the swan, and Lohengrin's appearance as a warrior alongside Peter and Paul. In the past, however, Lohengrin has been dismissed as an awkward amalgamation of earlier sources - partly due to more recent retellings of the material, such as Wagner's opera. This first monograph on Lohengrin in English presents a new response to the challenges the text poses. It is a study of how we read narrative across temporal distance, and at its heart lies the question: if a story is not held together by the chronological and causal links characteristic of modern narratives, how does it cohere? Alastair Matthews analyzes both the invocations of Wolfram that frame the text and the story of the Swan Knight that they enclose, arguing that Lohengrin is defined by a web of connections in which questions of identity and recognition are crucial, and thus that the themes at the core of the tale govern how it is told."--(Provided by publisher.)
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