Bøger i Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies serien

Written at the crossroads of aesthetics and politics, Reproducing Enlightenment: Paradoxes of the Body Politic interrogates the abstraction of the bearer of rights in Enlightenment thought by exploring contradictions between reproductive labor and political representation in the ideal of democratic citizenship.Drawing parallels between new definitions of biological form in Kant's Critique of Judgment and his popular writings on Enlightenment, Reese's study reveals connections between naturalist inquiry and the political category of self-evidence around the turn of the 19th century. Pursuing this connection into Weimar-Classical era aesthetics, Reese's scholarship sets the backdrop against which she proposes to read the formal literary innovations of Mary Shelley and Heinrich von Kleist. The careful comparison of textual compositions by Shelley and Kleist shows how these two authors refuse organicist metaphor and excavate the paradoxes of Enlightenment attempts to theorize the equality of a disembodied subject. Reproducing Enlightenment traces two anti-classical poetics that arc beyond the concept of juridical and biological self-evidence to touch the dialectics and dilemmas of recognition at the foundation of social being.

This volume examines the politics of history and memory in Germany today. From different perspectives, the collected essays analyze the topic of German suffering, from expulsion, bombings, and rape during World War II - as well as the Holocaust. Themes include the generational shift in memory; German, Jewish, and Austrian identity;

Memory Matters juxtaposes in tripartite structure texts by a child of German bystanders (Wolf), an Austrian-Jewish child-survivor (Kluger), a daughter of Jewish emigres (Honigmann), a daughter of an officer involved in the German resistance (Bruhns), a granddaughter of a baptized Polish Jew (Maron), and a granddaughter of German refuges from East Prussia (Duckers). Placed outside of the distorting victim-perpetrator, Jewish-German, man-woman, and war-postwar binary, it becomes visible that the texts neither complete nor contradict each other, but respond to one another by means of inspiration, reverberation, refraction, incongruity, and ambiguity. Focusing on genealogies of women, the book delineates a different cultural memory than the counting of (male-inflected) generations and a male-dominated Holocaust and postwar literature canon. It examines intergenerational conflicts and the negotiation of memories against the backdrop of a complicated mother-daughter relationship that follows unpredictable patterns and provokes both discord and empathy. Schaumann's approach questions the assumption that German-gentile and German-Jewish postwar experiences are necessarily diametrically opposed (i.e. respond to a "e;negative symbiosis"e;) and uncovers intersections and continuities in addition to conflicts.

Kafka's work has been attributed a universal significance and is often regarded as the ultimate witness of the human condition in the twentieth century. Yet his work is also considered paradigmatic for the expression of the singular that cannot be subsumed under any generalization. This paradox engenders questions not only concerning the meaning of the universal as it manifests itself in (and is transformed by) Kafka's writings but also about the expression of the singular in literary fiction as it challenges the opposition between the universal and the singular. The contributions in this volume approach these questions from a variety of perspectives. They are structured according to the following issues: ambiguity as a tool of deconstructing the pre-established philosophical meanings of the universal; the concept of the law as a major symbol for the universal meaning of Kafka's writings; the presence of animals in Kafka's texts; the modernist mode of writing as challenge of philosophical concepts of the universal; and the meaning and relevance of the universal in contemporary Kafka reception. This volume examines central aspects of the interplay between philosophy and literature.

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.