Bøger i German Linguistic and Cultural Studies serien

This volume, composed mainly of papers given at the 1999 conferences of the Forum for German Language Studies (FGLS) at Kent and the Conference of University Teachers of German (CUTG) at Keele, is devoted to differential yet synergetic treatments of the German language. It includes corpus-lexicographical, computational, rigorously phonological, historical/dialectal, comparative, semiotic, acquisitional and pedagogical contributions. In all, a variety of approaches from the rigorously ¿pure¿ and formal to the applied, often feeding off each other to focus on various aspects of the German language.

This book provides guidance for teaching staff in Modern Languages in preparing students for using their language skills in and out of the classroom. Drawing on pedagogical, psychological and language-specific concepts of learning, the book offers ways of helping students transition from school to university to residence abroad, and beyond.

The present volume contains 14 articles on the notion of Intercultural Understanding, both inside and outside the foreign language class-room. Since this area is highly controversial in language teaching in general and in German as a Foreign Language in particular, the editors have tried to unfold as comprehensive a picture as possible with regard to the diversity of the present debate. Thus the contributions range from very personal accounts of experiencing otherness and practical considerations concerning the implementation of adequate measures in language curricula to psychological and philosophical questions about the possibility or impossibility to achieve Intercultural Understanding.

The One-Eyed Man asks what value literary sources may have for the social historian, who is accustomed to work with factual evidence. After a survey of the possible approaches and the work of previous scholars such as Kohn-Bramstedt and Auerbach, the author argues that the social novel, based on the novelist¿s observation and written to propagate his views, can aid historical knowledge particularly in the fields of mentality and the everyday. Studies of eighteen novels which deal with German life between 1848 and 1968 support and develop this thesis. Some novelists are concerned to propagate controversial philosophical or political views, some use peculiar theories of society to structure their work, yet there is still reason to assume that a writer of high literary quality will present details of everyday life fairly. Novels both are historical evidence in themselves, as showing an intelligent contemporary¿s opinions, and provide historical evidence in the mentalities and lifestyles depicted. Only writers who have a Utopian aim, or who are subject to interference from some kind of censorship, form an exception. The scholar¿s sensitivity is required to determine whether a particular novel gives good evidence or not.

This book explores the interplay between global and local influences in theatre festivals in the German-speaking border region around Lake Constance. Whilst opening up a fascinating yet under-researched theatre region to academic study, it also provides much-needed empirical grounding for often vague theories of place, globalisation and culture. Do we really live in a ¿shrinking world¿ dominated by a homogenising global culture industry, or are we experiencing the revival of ¿local particularism¿? To what extent is an apparently place-dependent cultural form such as theatre affected by the processes of cultural globalisation? Through detailed analysis of theatrical case studies from Lake Constance and the application of an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, this book begins to answer such important questions. The empirical focus is on the defining features of the Lake Constance region: the beautiful and often romanticised natural landscape of lake and mountains, and the presence of the nation-state borders which make this the crossroads of the German-speaking world. The author thus examines both open-air summer theatre festivals, such as the internationally renowned Bregenzer Festspiele, and politically focused cross-border theatre festivals, such as the youth festival TRIANGEL.

From 1937 to 1944 the National Socialist regime organized a series of high-profile art exhibitions at the purpose-built Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich. Boasting huge numbers of participants and visitors and high sales figures, the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung became the most important showcase of National Socialist art. Adolf Hitler played a crucial role in determining all aspects of the exhibition, most notably the selection of artworks. His vast purchases from the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung contributed to the inflation in the market for contemporary art and led to the establishment of a group of favoured painters and sculptors which can be compared to the court artists of early modern times. This book traces the history of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, characterizes the artists and artworks shown and investigates how the local Munich tradition of displaying art was reinvented for national purposes. It examines the social policies for artists in the Third Reich, highlights Hitler¿s role as a patron for the exhibition and points out some of the contradictions and inconsistencies in National Socialist art policies.

This book examines the responses of visual artists, including architects, designers and photographers, to the technological and social modernisation of Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It investigates how these aspects of the modernising process inform both the subject matter and formal innovations of their work. The study analyses how these visual practices were not just the concerns of isolated and enclosed art worlds but had wider social resonances, ranging from the debates concerning the reformist objectives of the Deutscher Werkbund (1907) to the National Socialist ideological onslaught on modernist culture culminating in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibitions of 1937. Many of the artists encountered here were radicalised by the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the November 1918 Revolution in Germany, experiences which effected change in their conceptualising of cultural production and its social function: their modes of working, however, would also set challenging markers for what forms art might take for the twentieth century. The book is, therefore, both a study of art in complex political and sociocultural contexts and a reflection on how engagement with a social imagination can challenge a tradition based on the assumptions of individual imaginings.

Arising from a colloquium held in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, in March 2004, this volume offers fresh insights into Swiss culture and literature from an Irish perspective. It brings together articles by writers and scholars from various academic fields including cultural studies, linguistics and literature. The book is a reflection of the multifaceted interests of Irish academics in Switzerland as a cultural space in the heart of Europe. Ireland as a vantage point, situated at the western margin of the European continent, offers new perspectives from which differences as well as surprising parallels between the two cultures become visible and from which Switzerland appears in a different light. The volume critically addresses questions of identity in Swiss literature and culture and discusses them from various angles ¿ by analysing the representation of minority cultures in Swiss literary and media discourse, by reading Swiss literature in an intercultural context, but also through accounts of Irish visitors in Switzerland and Swiss writers travelling to or living in Ireland.

This volume contains selected papers from an international conference held at Queen Mary, University of London, on 10-11 November 2010. Interdisciplinary perspectives are provided on nationalism and anti-Semitism in English- and German-language contexts from the beginning of the German Second Reich (1871) to the end of World War II (1945).

The book addresses the question of whether, in an age of internationalisation and globalisation, cultural differences are still relevant to German-Irish corporate relationships? The first three chapters establish the theoretical framework for the analysis by exploring the notion of culture, profiling the business cultures of both countries, and examining existing approaches to the study of parent company-foreign subsidiary relationships. In the following three chapters, using interviews carried out with two sample groups (fifteen German parent companies and fourteen of their Irish operations; seven Irish parent companies and nine of their German operations), the parent companies in both groups are examined to see whether they demonstrate characteristics which are in keeping with their national business cultures. Their foreign operations are then analysed as is the parent company-foreign subsidiary relationship to determine whether any parent company influences are visible. The general approaches adopted by the two groups of parent companies to their foreign operations are compared and contrasted. Finally differences in national attitudes and values are identified and their impact assessed.

Translation of fiction is always interpretation. This book discusses the challenges facing translators of fictional works from German into English using as examples English translations of canonical German novellas by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theodor Storm, Gerhart Hauptmann, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. The author addresses the difficulties of translating in the poststructuralist era, when every fictional work potentially has a large number of interpretations and, therefore, at least the same number of possible translations. Considering interpretations of the original text in detail not only improves the reader's understanding and ability to criticize the translated text, but it will also provide valuable insight into the possible intentions of the writer. An initial linguistic observation of a target text can therefore lead to a fruitful connection between the linguistic and literary analysis of translated works. This book offers new perspectives on the delicate negotiation of translating source texts for a contemporary audience while maintaining the values, ideas and hidden meanings from the source in relation to its original epoque.

The contentious relationship between modernism and totalitarianism is a key element in the architectural history of the twentieth century. Post-war historiography refused to admit any overlap between the high modernism of the 1920s and the architecture of National Socialism, as it contradicted the definition of modernism as the essential architectural expression of liberal democracy. However, National Socialist architectural history cannot be fully explored without the broader historical context of modernity. Similarly, a true understanding of modernism in architecture must acknowledge its authoritarian aspects. This book clarifies the architectural discourse in which the Greater Berlin Project of the Third Reich was produced. The association of monumentality with National Socialist architecture in the 1930s created a polarization between the classical tradition and radical modernism that provoked vigorous and acrimonious debate that lasted into the 1980s. In the attempt to reconcile the paradoxical and competing aspirations for monumentality and historicity on one hand, and for technological advance on the other, the planning of Berlin is shown to reflect the wider paradoxes of National Socialist ideology.

Evidentiality and Perception Verbs in English and German