Dimensions of Storytelling in German Literature and Beyond
Dimensions of Storytelling in German Literature and Beyond

Author: Jennifer William

Publisher: Camden House (NY)

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1640140409

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Explores the storytelling of Anna Seghers and other 20th-century writers who faced the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, between conformity and resistance. While Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay "The Storyteller" (1936), lamented the decline of the storytelling tradition in the age of the modernist novel, Anna Seghers and other twentieth-century German writers went on to chronicle the century's darkest days in creative and compelling ways. This volume is at its heart a tribute to Germanist Helen Fehervary, whose work, particularly on the prose of Anna Seghers, continues to inspire scholars who examine narration and storytelling. The subtitle quotation, "for once, telling it all from the beginning," is a translation of the phrase "einmal alles von Anfang an erzählen," from Seghers's exile novel Transit, in which she told notonly her own story but that of countless others who faced existential challenges in their attempts to escape the Nazi regime. This volume examines a number of such writers, exploring the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, as well as individual struggles involving conformity and resistance in a totalitarian state. Contributors: Peter Beicken, Hunter Bivens, Kristy R. Boney, Ute Brandes, Stephen Brockmann, Sylvia Fischer, Jost Hermand, Kristen Hetrick, Robert C. Holub, Weijia Li, Elizabeth Loentz, Michaela Peroutková, Benjamin Robinson, Christiane Zehl Romero, Marc Silberman, Andy Spencer, Luke Springman, Amy Kepple Strawser, Jennifer Marston William. Kristy R. Boney is Associate Professor of German at the University of Central Missouri. Jennifer Marston William is Professor of German and Head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University.

Anna Seghers
Anna Seghers

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-11-11

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9004409815

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Anna Seghers: The Challenge of History features essays by leading scholars devoted to this most important German writer whose novels and stories have been read by millions worldwide. The volume is intended for teachers and students of literature and for general readers. The contributions address facets of Seghers’s large body of work which is characterized by reflections on political events shaping world history and written in a highly imaginative array of narrative styles. The first section focuses on the author’s famous novel The Seventh Cross. Articles in the next two sections analyze her reactions to crises that marked the twentieth century and her connections to other relevant thinkers of her time. The last section features new translations of Seghers’s works.

The Political Uses of Literature
The Political Uses of Literature

Author: Benjamin Kohlmann

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-01-11

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1501399314

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Drawing on a global history of politicized writing, this book explores literature's utility as a mode of activism and aesthetic engagement with the political challenges of the current moment. The question of literature's 'uses' has recently become a key topic of academic and public debate. Paradoxically, however, these conversations often tend to bypass the rich history of engagements with literature's distinctly political uses that form such a powerful current of 20th- and 21st-century artistic production and critical-theoretical reflection. The Political Uses of Literature reopens discussion of literature's political and activist genealogies along several interrelated lines: As a foundational moment, it draws attention to the important body of interwar politicized literature and to debates about literature's ability to intervene in social reality. It then traces the mobilization of related conversations and artistic practices across several historical conjunctures, most notably the committed literature of the 1960s and our own present. In mapping out these geographically and artistically diverse traditions – including case studies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, India and Russia – contributors advance critical discussions in the field, making questions pertaining to politicized art newly compelling to a broader and more diverse readership. Most importantly, this volume insists on the need to think about literature's political uses today – at a time when it has become increasingly difficult to imagine any kind of political efficacy for art, even as the need to do so is growing more and more acute. Literature may not proffer easy answers to our political problems, but as this collection suggests, the writing of the 20th century holds out aesthetic resources for a renewed engagement with the dilemmas that face us now.

Beyond Borders
Beyond Borders

Author: Paloma Fresno-Calleja

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-29

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1000702979

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This book examines the global/local intersections and tensions at play in the literary production from Aotearoa New Zealand through its engagement in the global marketplace. Combining postcolonial and world literature methodologies contributors chart the global relocation of national culture from the nineteenth century to the present exploring what "New Zealand literature" means in different creative, teaching, and publishing contexts. They identify ongoing global entanglements with local identities and tensions between national and post-national literary discourses, considering Aotearoa New Zealand’s history as a white settler colony and its status as a bicultural nation and a key player in the Asia-Pacific region, active on the global stage. Topics and authors include: Stefanie Herades on colonial New Zealand literature and the global marketplace; Claudia Marquis on David Hare’s "Aotearoa series" as exotic reading for adolescents; Paloma Fresno-Calleja on the exoticizing landscape novels of Sarah Lark; James Wenley on Indian Ink Theatre company as hybrid export; Janet M. Wilson on the globalization of the New Zealand short story; Chris Prentice on pedagogic articulations of New Zealand literature; Leonie John on the challenges of teaching Māori literature in Germany; Dieter Riemenschneider on New Zealand literature at the Frankfurt Book Fair; Paula Morris on Commonwealth writers and the Booker Prize; Selina Tusitala Marsh on contemporary Pasifika poetry; and Chris Miller on the afterlife of Allen Curnow. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

New Germans, New Dutch
New Germans, New Dutch

Author: Liesbeth Minnaard

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9089640282

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In today’s globalized world, traditions of a national Self and a national Other no longer hold. This timely volume considers the stakes in our changing definitions of national boundaries in light of the unmistakable transformation of German and Dutch societies. Examining how the literature of migration intervenes in public discourses on multiculturality and including detailed analysis of works by the Turkish-German writers Emine Sevgi Özdamer and Feridun Zaimoglu and the Moroccan-Dutch writers Abdelkader Benali and Hafid Bouazza, New Germans, New Dutch offers crucial insights into the ways in which literature negotiates both difference and the national context of its writing.

Storytelling and Ethics
Storytelling and Ethics

Author: Hanna Meretoja

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-18

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1351965778

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In recent years there has been a huge amount of both popular and academic interest in storytelling as something that is an essential part of not only literature and art but also our everyday lives as well as our dreams, fantasies, aspirations, historical self-understanding, and political actions. The question of the ethics of storytelling always, inevitably, lurks behind these discussions, though most frequently it remains implicit rather than explicit. This volume explores the ethical potential and risks of storytelling from an interdisciplinary perspective. It stages a dialogue between contemporary literature and visual arts across media (film, photography, performative arts), interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives (debates in narrative studies, trauma studies, cultural memory studies, ethical criticism), and history (traumatic histories of violence, cultural history). The collection analyses ethical issues involved in different strategies employed in literature and art to narrate experiences that resist telling and imagining, such as traumatic historical events, including war and political conflicts. The chapters explore the multiple ways in which the ethics of storytelling relates to the contemporary arts as they work with, draw on, and contribute to historical imagination. The book foregrounds the connection between remembering and imagining and explores the ambiguous role of narrative in the configuration of selves, communities, and the relation to the non-human. While discussing the ethical aspects of storytelling, it also reflects on the relevance of artistic storytelling practices for our understanding of ethics. Making an original contribution to interdisciplinary narrative studies and narrative ethics, this book both articulates a complex understanding of how artistic storytelling practices enable critical distance from culturally dominant narrative practices, and analyzes the limitations and potential pitfalls of storytelling. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture
Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture

Author: Gabriele Duerbeck

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-10-16

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 1498514936

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The volume offers a survey of the contribution of German literature and culture to the evolution of ecological thought. As the field of ecocritical theory and practice is rapidly expanding towards transnational and global dimensions, it seems nevertheless necessary to consider the distinct manifestations of ecological thought in various cultures. In this sense, the volume demonstrates in twenty-six essays from different disciplines how German literature, philosophy, art, and science have contributed in unique ways to the emergence of ecological thought on national and transnational scale. The volume maps the most important and characteristic of these developments both on a theoretical and on a textual-analytical level. It is structured in five parts ranging from proto-ecological thought since early modern times (part I) to major theoretical approaches (part II), environmental history (part III), and ecocritical case studies (part IV), to ecological visions in different media and art forms (part V). The four editors have widely published and are actively involved in ecocritical literary and cultural studies. The group of editors consists of two scholars of German literature and cultural studies, Gabriele Duerbeck and Urte Stobbe (both University of Vechta), a scholar in German and comparative literature, Evi Zemanek (University of Freiburg), as well as a scholar of Anglo-American ecoliterature and ecocriticism, Hubert Zapf. All of them are involved in various projects and research networks on ecology and literature. The contributors of the individual chapters likewise are all experts in their respective fields, ranging from German literature, history, environmental studies, art history, music and art. The book is a unique and readily accessible collection of essays that is of relevance not only for a German and continental European but for a worldwide audience.

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

Author: Peter Handke

Publisher: Pushkin Press

Published: 2013-03-26

Total Pages: 60

ISBN-13: 1782270302

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"My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks: I had better go to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the nerves of her suicide." So begins Peter Handke's extraordinary confrontation with his mother's death. In a painful and courageous attempt to deal with the almost intolerable horror of her suicide, he sets out to piece together the facts of her life, as he perceives them. What emerges is a loving portrait of inconsolable grief, a woman whose lively spirit has been crushed not once but over and over again by the miseries of her place and time. Yet well into middle age, living in the Austrian village of her birth, she still remains haunted by her dreams.

The Return of Storytelling in Contemporary German Literature and Film
The Return of Storytelling in Contemporary German Literature and Film

Author: David N. Coury

Publisher: Edwin Mellen Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13:

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German literature and film have kept to the true path all this time, according to Coury's (German and humanistic studies, U. of Wisconsin-Green Bay) construction, and it is storytelling that went wayward for a while but is now returning home. He begins by discussing the origins and definitions of the art of storytelling, and looking at contemporary

Cosmic Miniatures and the Future Sense
Cosmic Miniatures and the Future Sense

Author: Leslie Adelson

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-04-10

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 311052564X

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Alexander Kluge’s revolutionary storytelling for the 21st-century pivots on the production of anti-realist hope under conditions of real catastrophe. Rather than relying on possibility alone, his experimental miniatures engender counterfactual horizons of futurity that are made incrementally accessible to lived experience through narrative form. Innovative close readings and theoretical reflection alike illuminate the dimensional quality of future time in Kluge’s radical prose, where off-worldly orientation and unnatural narrative together yield new sensory perspectives on associative networks, futurity, scale, and perspective itself. This study also affords new perspectives on the importance of Kluge’s creative writing for critical studies of German thought (including Kant, Marx, Benjamin, and especially Adorno), Holocaust memory, contemporary globalization, literary miniatures, and narrative studies of futurity as form. Cosmic Miniatures contributes an experiential but non-empirical sense of hope to future studies, a scholarly field of pressing public interest in endangered times.