Of Poetry and Song


Book Description

Interdisciplinary studies of some of the greatest examples of German art song by major scholars in musicology and German literature.




From Classicism to Modernism


Book Description

This title was first published in 2001. The last century has witnessed the ascendancy of the avant-garde in music. From Schoenberg to Boulez to Stockhausen, the avant-garde has defined the modern conception of musical creativity. Contemporary serious music demands the "new" in terms of style, form and ways of listening and hearing. Implicit in this approach is the rejection of the "old", from the baroque to the music of the later 19th-century symphonists. Paradoxically, however, it is this "old" repertoire which contiues to dominate concert programmes. An exploration of this dichotomy lies at the heart of this book. Drawing on a wealth of European philosophical and musical texts, the author examines the origins of the avant-garde and its relation to modernity in tandem with the history of the tonal tradition.




Popular Revenants


Book Description

There is growing interest in the internationality of the literary Gothic, which is well established in English Studies. Gothic fiction is seen as transgressive, especially in the way it crosses borders, often illicitly. In the 1790s, when the English Gothic novel was emerging, the real or ostensible source of many of these uncanny texts was Germany. This first book in English dedicated to the German Gothic in over thirty years redresses deficiencies in existing English-language sources, which are outdated, piecemeal, or not sufficiently grounded in German Studies.




Animal Acts


Book Description

Animal Acts records the history of the fluctuating boundary between animals and humans as expressed in literary, philosophical and scientific texts, as well as visual arts and historical practices such as dissection, circus acts, the hunt and zoos. The essays document a persistent return of animality, a becoming animal that has always existed within and at the margins of Western Culture from the Middle Ages to the present.







What the Ballad Knows


Book Description

"The German ballad was an unusual poetic genre: supposedly inspired by a treasure trove of authorless poems that had for centuries circulated among the common people, the ballad attained popularity in the form of deeply ironic poems written by some of Germany's most canonic authors. Supposedly a celebration of the oral culture of the German Volk, the ballad instead circulated through the emerging channels of nineteenth century culture industry: from anthologies and picture books via the exploding market for song settings, from the opera house to the vaudeville stage, the ballad hewed to its medieval pretence while sounding surprisingly modern. This book traces the strange trajectory of this poetic genre from its origins in the late 18th century to its political appropriations in the 20th. Throughout, the ballad and its path across a wide variety of milieus and media told a surprising and contradictory story of the German nation. What The Ballad Knows shows that, even though the ballad arrived in Germany as a literary genre, it very quickly came to make its home in between different genres and even different media - to the point that laypeople were as likely to encounter it in a concert hall, a classroom, an art museum or a choral rehearsal as they were to encounter it in a book. When cultural conservatives in the early 20th century sought to claim the ballad as a straightforward and serious vehicle of German nationalism, they ignored just how complex the ballad's relationship to the nation had been, and what complexities within nationalism the form had managed to highlight through the decades"--




Shadow Lines


Book Description

Intellectual culture in early twentieth-century Austria reached levels of originality and excellence that have rarely been equalled before or since. Shadow Lines examines works by major novelists, dramatists, poets, and intellectuals of that extraordinary era-among them, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Franz Kafka. Lorna Martens considers how each of these authors contributed to a decisive transformation in Austrian culture, involving a shift away from the dialectical syntheses of much nineteenth-century German thought and culture to potent, unresolvable dualisms of known and unknown-orderly and chaotic-features of human experience: consciousness and the unconscious, reason and the irrational, language and the inexpressible. In most of these writers, according to Martens, all that is knowable, reasonable, and orderly is grounded in that which is dark, irrational, chaotic. What Martens calls "the dark area" emerges variously "as the unconscious (Freud), the sexual drive (Freud, Schnitzler, Musil), the death instinct (Freud, Schnitzler), the dangerous chaos below the surface of things (Rilke), the inaccessible totality (von Hofmannsthal), or the unsayable (Mauthner, von Hofmannsthal, Musil, Wittgenstein)." The essential yet enigmatic relation between the known and the unknown leads to much that is unsettling-and strangely fascinating-in these writers' works. A book that shrewdly relates the works of these authors to the intellectual and political turmoil of the times, Shadow Lines is a new critical appraisal of Austrian literature and intellectual culture at the dawn of the century. Lorna Martens is anassociate professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Diary Novel.




Italy in the German Literary Imagination


Book Description

The German fascination with Italy, as seen in Goethe's Italian Journey and in a number of literary reactions to it. Italy has long exerted a particular fascination on the Germans, and this has been reflected in German literature, most prominently in Goethe's Italienische Reise but also by numerous other writers who have returned to the topic. This book is concerned with two inextricably linked images - those of the German traveler in Italy and of Italy in German literature in the first third of the 19th century. Goethe's publication of his account nearly three decades after his actual journey was in some measure a vehicle to resist the challenge of a new generation of writers, who in turn would confront what they found to be a questionable, if not altogether false, representation. Hachmeister emphasizes the consequences of the disparity between the reality of Goethe's journey and his depiction of it, taking into consideration also his occasional discomfort with Italy's classical past. She shows how the German predilection for Italy is unique in the larger European cultural context of the Grand Tour, before moving on to chapters that contain readings of Italienische Reise and Goethe's Römische Elegien. Individual chapters follow on Eichendorff's Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, Platen's Sonette aus Venedig, and Heine's three Italian Reisebilder, each of which is to some degree a reaction to Goethe's work. These chapters investigatehow the individual's reaction to Italy reflects his view of Germany and the author's role in early 19th-century German society. The conclusion offers a short glance at the continued evolution of the German fascination with Italyin the mid- and late nineteenth century. Gretchen Hachmeister received her Ph.D. in German literature from Yale University.




Exotic Spaces in German Modernism


Book Description

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei demonstrates that the exotic, as reflected in major works of German literature and in the philosophy and art that inspires it, provokes central questions about the modern self and the spaces it inhabits. Exotic spaces in the writings of such authors as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gottfried Benn, and Bertold Brecht, along with the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Simmel and the art ofGerman Expressionism, are shown to present alternatives to the landscape and experience of modernity. In an examination of the concept of the exotic and of spatial experience in their cultural, subjective, and philosophical contingencies, Gosetti-Ferencei shows that exotic spaces may contest andreconfigure the relationship between the familiar and the foreign, the self and the other. Exotic spaces may serve not only to affirm the subject in a symbolic conquering of territory, as emphasized in post-colonial interpretations, or project the fantasy of escapism to a lost paradise, as utopian readings suggest, but condition moral, aesthetic, or imaginative transformation. Such transformation, while risking disaster or dissolution of the self as well as endangerment of the other, maypromote new possibilities of perceiving or being, and reconfigure the boundaries of a familiar world. As exotic spaces are conceived as mystical, liberating, erotic, infectious, frightening or mysterious, several possibilities for transformation emerge in their exposure: re-enchantment through epiphany;the collapse of the rational self; liberation of the imagination from the confines of the familiar world; and aesthetic transformation, revealing the paradoxically 'primitive' nature of modern experience. In strikingly original readings of canonical authors and compelling rediscoveries of forgotten ones, this study establishes that exotic experience can evidence the fragility of the European or Germanic self as depicted in modernist literature, revealing the usually unconsidered boundaries ofthe subject's own familiar world.




Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom


Book Description

Shows the relevance of Schiller’s thought for contemporary philosophy, particularly aesthetics, ethics, and politics. This book seeks to draw attention to Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) as a philosophical thinker in his own right. For too long, his philosophical contribution has been neglected in favor of his much-deserved reputation as a political playwright. The essays in this collection make two arguments. First, Schiller presents a robust philosophical program that can be favorably compared to those of his age, including Rousseau, Kant, Schelling, and Hegel, and he proves to be their equal in his thinking on morality, aesthetics, and politics. Second, Schiller can also guide us in our more contemporary philosophical concerns and approaches, such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and politics. Here, Schiller instructs us in our engagement with figures such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Roberto Esposito, and others.