Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
32,514
result(s) for
"German Literature"
Sort by:
Imperial fictions : German literature before and beyond the nation-state
\"Imperial Fictions explores ways in which writers from late antiquity to the present have imagined communities before and beyond the nation-state. It takes as its point of departure challenges to the discrete nation-state posed by globalization, migration, and European integration today, but then circles back to the beginnings of European history after the fall of the Roman Empire. Unlike nationalist literary historians of the nineteenth century, who sought the tribal roots of an allegedly homogeneous people, this study finds a distant mirror of analogous processes today in the fluid mixtures and movements of peoples. Imperial Fictions argues that it is time to stop thinking about today's multicultural present as a deviation from a culturally monolithic past. We should rather consider the various permutations of \"German\" identities that have been negotiated within local and imperial contexts from the early Middle Ages to the present\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Siegfried the Wrestler
Continually attacked by government officials and educators, installment or colportage novels fascinated their underprivileged readers.Melodrama and sensation were essential ingredients.The hurriedly written, rambling plots sought to electrify fantasies of women with new turn-of-the-century aspirations.
eBook
Translating the World
In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany's emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar. German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry, yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world. A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.
eBook
Beyond the Mother Tongue:The Postmonolingual Condition
Monolingualism-the idea that having just one language is the norm is only a recent invention, dating to late-eighteenth-century Europe. Yet it has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring principle of modernity. According to this monolingual paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. As a result of this view, writing in anything but one's \"mother tongue\" has come to be seen as an aberration. Beyond the Mother Tongue demonstrates the impact of this monolingual paradigm on literature and culture but also charts incipient moves beyond it. Because newer multilingual forms and practices exist in tension with the paradigm, which alternately obscures, pathologizes, or exoticizes them, this book argues that they can best be understood as \"postmonolingual\" that is, as marked by the continuing force of monolingualism. Focused on canonical and minority writers working in German in the twentieth century, Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned \"mother tongue\" about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); writing by literally translating from the \"mother tongue\" into another language (Emine Sevgi Ozdamar); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu). Through these analyses, Beyond the Mother Tongue suggests that the dimensions of gender, kinship, and affect encoded in the \"mother tongue\" are crucial to the persistence of monolingualism and the challenge of multilingualism
eBook
Träumen in Berlin
\"Wir haben Geschichten, die sind noch mehr wert als ein Bild von Vincent van Gogh\", sagte Muhammed, eines der Kinder, die hier zu Autoren und Autorinnen der eigenen Geschichte werden. Berliner Kinder entdeckten in einer Schreibwerkstatt ihre eigenen Stärken, erzählen ihre Geschichten, teilen die ureigenen Wünsche und Träume mit und formulieren ihre Zukunft. Berichteten von ihren Ideen, dem alltäglichen Leben und ihren Erlebnissen. Auch von solchen, die man ihnen lieber erspart hätte. Dachten über das Leben nach. Stellten sich die Zukunft als Erwachsene, als Fußballhelden, als cooler Mensch vor. Oder erfanden eine andere Welt mit Tieren und Dorfleben mitten in der Stadt, mit von Malereien übersäten Häusern und mit einem fliegenden Stuhl. Diese Sammlung zeigt: Die Kinder genießen die Begegnung mit der tausend(1001) fältigen Kunst des Schreibens. Auf sie als schreibende Künstler wie als Lebenskünstler ist Verlass. „Sie wünschen sich ein Haustier, und sie träumen davon, fliegen zu können. Das haben viele Kinder gemeinsam. Auch in Berlin-Kreuzberg, wo die Autoren Anja Tuckermann und Guntram Weber im Rahmen einer Schreibwerkstatt 47 Kinder und Jugendliche im Alter von sieben bis vierzehn Jahren baten, ihre Träume und Wünsche niederzuschreiben, ist das so. Aus dem 2005 durchgeführten Projekt ist ein Buch entstanden, das dieser Tage erschienen ist. Mal rührend realitätsgetreu und mal beeindruckend phantasievoll reihen die jungen Autoren und Autorinnen darin Satz an Satz. Poesie entsteht sowohl dort, wo die Sätze zusammenhanglos wirken und Rätsel aufgeben, als auch dort, wo die Worte nichts verfremden oder beschönigen, sondern klar benennen. Oft erschreckend klar\" (FAZ)
Gender, Canon and Literary History
It has been shown that the total number of women who published in German in the 18th and 19th centuries was approximately 3,500, but even by 1918 only a few of them were known. The reason for this lies in the selection processes to which the authors have been subjected, and it is this selection process that is the focus of the research here presented. The selection criteria have not simply been gender-based but have had much to do with the urgent quest for establishing a German Nation State in 1848 and beyond. Prutz, Gottschall, Kreyßig and others found it necessary to use literary historiography, which had been established by 1835, in order to construct an ideal of 'Germanness' at a time when a political unity remained absent, and they wove women writers into this plot. After unification in 1872, this kind of weaving seemed to have become less pressing, and other discourses came to the fore, especially those revolving round femininity vs. masculinity, and races. The study of the processes at work here will enhance current debates about the literary canon by tracing its evolution and identifying the factors which came to determine the visibility or obscurity of particular authors and texts. The focus will be on a number of case studies, but, instead of isolating questions of gender, Gender, Canon and Literary History will discuss the broader cultural context.
eBook
Formative Fictions
The Bildungsroman, or \"novel of formation,\" has long led a paradoxical life within literary studies, having been construed both as a peculiarly German genre, a marker of that country's cultural difference from Western Europe, and as a universal expression of modernity. In Formative Fictions, Tobias Boes argues that the dual status of the Bildungsroman renders this novelistic form an elegant way to negotiate the diverging critical discourses surrounding national and world literature. Since the late eighteenth century, authors have employed the story of a protagonist's journey into maturity as a powerful tool with which to facilitate the creation of national communities among their readers. Such attempts always stumble over what Boes calls \"cosmopolitan remainders,\" identity claims that resist nationalism's aim for closure in the normative regime of the nation-state. These cosmopolitan remainders are responsible for the curiously hesitant endings of so many novels of formation. In Formative Fictions, Boes presents readings of a number of novels—Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Karl Leberecht Immermann's The Epigones, Gustav Freytag's Debit and Credit, Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus among them—that have always been felt to be particularly \"German\" and compares them with novels by such authors as George Eliot and James Joyce to show that what seem to be markers of national particularity can productively be read as topics of world literature.
eBook