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Recent studies of German modernity have tended to approach the subject from either a uniquely masculine or uniquely feminine viewpoint. In this work however, Georgina Paul examines these two gendered perspectives side-by-side via a sequence of readings of major, thematically related German literary texts by both male and female authors.
A collection of essays offering a nuanced understanding of the complex question of identity in today's Germany. This collection of fifteen essays by scholars from the UK, the US, Germany, and Scandinavia revisits the question of German identity. Unlike previous books on this topic, however, the focus is not exclusively on national identityin the aftermath of Hitler. Instead, the concentration is upon the plurality of ethnic, sexual, political, geographical, and cultural identities in modern Germany, and on their often fragmentary nature as the country struggles with the challenges of unification and international developments such as globalization, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. The mu...
Experience is a multilayered, cumulative affair with transformation at its core. Its study, a necessary first step for its translation, requires an exploration of embodiment, the senses, and cultural and social environments. The second of two volumes, this book explores how artefacts, as outcomes of experience brought about by the “artistranslator” perform semiotic work. This semiotic work arises through the intervention of their makers but also through their viewers/audience, often through the latter’s direct participation in the artefacts’ creation, which we see as an open-ended process. Drawing on diverse examples from across the world, the chapters explore visual materiality, the...
This book investigates the hybrid, multiform nature of contemporary poetry with particular emphasis on recent Russian lyric and its translations into German and English. Poetry translation, thriving and obstinately open-ended, is not so much a defined process as a practice of ongoing transit across linguistic and national borders. The book’s innovative format invites contemporary poets into dialogue with literary translators, editors, publishers, and scholars; the conversations among their wide-ranging essays, poems, and exchanges both model and investigate the work of transcultural dialogue. As a kind of transition, poetry translation engages the composition and disintegration of forms, revises relations of producers to receivers, mixes and rethinks genres and media, translates itself as multilingual writing or language experiment. Multiple translations of a poem do not compete but interact, reshaping the putative gulf between source and target language. In the end this volume underscores the aesthetic productivity of poetry translation and the need to nurture it. A must-read for anyone interested in the dynamic interplay of poetry, language, and culture.
The life of Rilke’s work is in its words, and this book attends closely to the life unfolding in Rilke’s words over the course of his career. What is a poem, and how does it act upon us as we read? What does reading involve? These are questions of the greatest interest to Rilke, who addresses them in several poems and for whom the experience of reading affords an interaction with the world—a recalibration of our ways of attending to it—which sets it apart from other kinds of experience. Rilke’s work is often approached in periods—he is the author of the New Poems, or of Malte, or of the Duino Elegies, or of the Sonnets to Orpheus—as if its different phases had little to do with...
In her 2007 poem cycle Niemands Frau, Barbara Köhler returns to Homer’s Odyssey, not to retell it, but to take up some of the threads it has woven into the cultural tradition of the West – and to unravel them, just as Penelope, the wife of the hero who called himself Nobody, unravelled each night the web she re-wove by day. Köhler’s return to the Odyssey takes place under the sign of a grammatical shift, from ‘er’ to ‘sie’, from the singular hero to a plurality of female voices – Nausicaa, Circe, Calypso, Ino Leucothea, Helen and Penelope herself – with implications for thinking about identity, power and knowledge, about gender and relationality, but also about the corpor...
The first volume in English about the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a cultural phenomenon, with essays by leading scholars providing a chronological and genre-based overview along with close readings of individual works. It addresses the history and context of GDR culture, including the two decades since its decline.
The Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Summer 2018 The Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag, whose 2004 Selected Poems received the coveted Schlegel Tieck Prize, returns with All under One Roof. Once more, Karen Leeder's brilliant translations render a selection of Schlag's most recent poems into English. The book draws on two substantial German-language collections, Sprache von einem anderen Holz (2008) and verlangsamte raserei (2014). There is also a new essay by the author in which she discusses the sources, politics and strategies of her writing. Love remains a central theme for Schlag, but an associative inward journey with new diction, and new orthography, is underway. Rüdiger Görner in Die Presse responded to the vibrancy of what he called the 'Sprachpulsate' (pulses of language): 'Evelyn Schlag's poems have a kind of discreet presence; once spoken they have claimed their permanent place in the lyric cosmos.' Leeder's selection traces a uniquely Austrian imagination at the heart of contemporary European poetry.
Brecht and Death addresses fundamental issues in Brecht's relationship to death: from his own personal approach to death to the complex ways that death is addressed or evaded in his major literary and theatrical works, as well as in his theoretical writings. Brecht's status as a revenant (a Wiedergänger) in contemporary society is explored: the various ways in which "Brecht" as a cultural signifier continues to exist over five decades after the death of Brecht as a person. Essays ask how a materialist and atheist like Brecht was or was not able to find consolation in aesthetic-political theories and practices that, for him, replaced religious beliefs and rituals that he rejected. The volume includes essays by some of the leading figures in international Brecht scholarship--among others, Jost Hermand, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Marc Silberman, Karen Leeder, and Tom Kuhn.