Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Since When Is Steve Urkel White?” – Vocal Blackface In The German Dubbing Landscape, Patrick Ploschnitzki

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Dubbed (i.e., lip-synchronized audiovisual translation of) movies and television are ubiquitous in German-speaking countries and often consumed without active reflection of their production. Due to this inattention, the domestication / replacement of cultural references in US media translated into German often goes unnoticed. Translational decision-making becomes highly problematic, however, when entire cultures are replaced or disregarded as a result. In 2004, applied linguist Robin Queen demonstrated that Black actors were dubbed by white voice actors with German dialects and sociolects traditionally read as “blue collar.” There has not been any follow-up research to her crucial contribution that remains topical: the …

Karin Baumgartner And Monika Shafi, Editors. Anxious Journeys: Twenty-First-Century Travel Writing In German. Camden House, 2019., Doris Mcgonagill

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Karin Baumgartner and Monika Shafi, editors. Anxious Journeys: Twenty-First-Century Travel Writing in German. Camden House, 2019. viii + 276 pp.

Biopolitical Education: The Edukators And The Politics Of The Immanent Outside, Roland Vegso, Marco Abel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The article examines the relationship of biopower and cinema through the analysis of a specific film, Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators (2004). It argues that in the age of biopower, resistance to power cannot be conceived of in terms of a radical outside to power. Rather, biopolitical resistance must take place on the terrain of this power itself, that is, within the field of life. Therefore, what we call the “viral” politics of The Edukators must be interpreted precisely in this context. The film argues that the exhaustion of political paradigms inherited from the past century forces us to take the …

Berlin Heinrichplatz: The Novels Of Ulrich Peltzer, Christian Jäger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

For at least a decade Germans have been waiting—waiting for literature, waiting for the great Berlin novel, waiting for the great novel of reunification…

Hermann Hesse's Hegelianism: The Progress Of Consciousness Towards Freedom In The Glass Bead Game , John Krapp

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Hermann Hesse's novels commonly represent characters' struggles through ideological opposition and conflict towards resolution. The majority of his critics attribute Hesse's interest in, and expression of, this struggle to his lifelong study of Eastern philosophy. However, Hesse's interest in things Eastern need not be taken as the exclusive determinant of the theme of individuation represented in his fiction. This essay argues that Hesse's predilection for elaborating the ideological crises and resolutions of his characters may also be interpreted as reflecting the Western, Hegelian concept of an Absolute Spirit that proceeds through exhaustive dialectical permutations before it becomes conscious of its …

The Ghosts Of Sigmaringen, Phillip Watts

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

There seem to be two ways to write about Sigmaringen, the German town where an incapacitated Vichy government landed in September 1944…

"A Myth Becomes Reality": Kaspar Hauser As Messianic Wild Child , Ulrich Struve

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The topos of the "Wild Child" occupies an important place in the mythic and literary imagination of the West. The European climax of a long line of wild children, Kaspar Hauser was a nineteenth-century German foundling whose fate has inspired a host of novels, dramas, novellas, poems, songs, and movies, even an opera and a ballet. It has been treated by Paul Verlaine, R. M. Rilke, and Klaus Mann, by the Dada poet Hans Arp, by the dramatist Peter Handke, and by the filmmaker Werner Herzog. This article offers a brief historical sketch of Hauser's life before discussing a key …

Korsakoff's Syndrome And Modern German Literature: Alfred Döblin's Medical Dissertation , Roland Dollinger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay deals with the historical and cultural interrelationships between the medical and psychiatric discourses on memory and memory disorders at the end of the nineteenth century and the invention of an abstract and highly dissociated literary style in modern German literature. An historical reading of Alfred Döblin's medical dissertation (1905) on Korsakoff's syndrome, an amnestic disorder, shows the confluence of both his psychiatric and aesthetic interests in human memory and its failures. The essay analyzes Döblin's medical dissertation less as the contribution of a young psychiatrist to his discipline but rather as an historical text that challenges us to …

New Poems, Günter Kunert

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

New poems. Translated by Leonard Olschner

"An Affair On Uncertain Ground": Sarah Kirsch's Poetry Volume Erlking 'S Daughter In The Context Of Her Prose After The Wende, Christine Cosentino

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Translated by James Rolleston.

Sarah Kirsch, who in the wake of the Biermann scandal moved from East to West Germany in 1977, is arguably the most talented living German lyric poet. But she is also a prose writer. It seems that since her break with the GDR in 1977 and the breakup of the GDR in 1989, this particular genre has gained importance in her literary output. Her diary-like prose records and blends intense reactions to events of change or collapse, "German brouhaha": political, historical, environmental, existential, and personal. Critics have called Kirsch's prose "lyrical prose" and her latest poetry …

Introduction To The Special Issue, James Rolleston

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Two seemingly superficial questions prompted the initiation of the present extensive survey of contemporary German poetry: what difference has 1989 made to lyrical voices both East and West…

Jewish Writers In Contemporary Germany: The Dead Author Speaks, Sander L. Gilman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The question I wish to address in this essay is really quite simple: Given the fact that there are "Jews" who seem to play a major role in contemporary German "Kultur" (at least that narrower definition of culture, meaning the production of cultural artifacts, such as books—a field which, at least for Englemann, was one of the certain indicators of a Jewish component in prewar German culture)—what happened to these "Jews" (or at least the category of the "Jewish writer") in postwar discussions of culture? Or more simply: who lulled the remaining Jews in contemporary German culture and why? Why …

Literature And Propaganda: The Structure Of Conversion In Schenzinger's Hitlerjunge Quex, John Daniel Stahl

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Propaganda literature as a genre can profitably be analyzed by means of a structuralist approach, as Susan R. Suleiman has shown in her study of the French ideological novel. Extending her discussion of the "structure of confrontation" and the "structure of apprenticeship," this study postulates the "structure of conversion" as a fundamental form of propaganda literature. Through loss of self to a greater entity, the central character in fiction exemplifying this form finds a new identity in self-submergence. A once-popular novel by the German pro-fascist author Karl Aloys Schenzinger, Hitlerjunge Quex ( 1932), serves as a model for investigation into …

Anamnesis: Paul Celan's Translations Of Poetry, Leonard Olschner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Paul Celan's significance as a poet has long been undisputed, and increasingly outside German-speaking countries, but his translations of poetry have remained at the periphery of critical attention and are only gradually becoming recognized as an integral and indeed major part of his poetry and poetics. The present essay attempts to elucidate specific aspects of the biographical, linguistic, literary and historical background at work in Celan's translating and offers analytic interpretations of texts by Mandel'stam, Apollinaire and Shakespeare in Celan's translation.

Ambiguities Of Interpretation: Translating The Late Celan, Nicholas J. Meyerhofer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Celan's later poems are seen as increasingly problematic because of their inherent tension between speaking and not speaking, because of their formalization (semantic and syntactic) of this tension, and also because of Celan's poetic intentionality. The latter, described as a poetics of ambiguity, is the focus of this article. Particular attention is given to the implications such a poetics has for the task of the (English) translator. To illustrate in the concrete this poetics, and to show how its intentional integration of thematic and etymological ambiguity must be taken into account by the translator, two late lyrics ("Einkanter: Rembrandt" and …

Paul Celan In Translation: "Du Sei Wie Du", John Felstiner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Translating the lyric poetry of Paul Celan, especially his later poems, carries not only the endemic challenge and difficulty of any verse translation, but the added incentive of doing justice to a writer whose whole recourse after the Holocaust—whose sanctuary, if he was to have any at all—he sought in language itself, specifically in the Muttersprache, the mother tongue that was as well the tongue of those who murdered his mother and father. This essay exposes a process of translating "Du sei wie du" (1970), which perhaps more than any other poem by Celan, at once solicits and defies …

Paul Celan In English: A Bibliography Of Primary And Secondary Literature, Jerry Glenn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Literature of Paul Celan

"German Culture Is Where I Am": Thomas Mann In Exile, Helmut Koopmann

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Thomas Mann in exile reacted like many writers expelled from Germany: totally irritated he tried to defend his own identity by claiming that he was still the leading representative of Germany. But about 1938 a process of dissociation from Germany started which led to sharp remarks on Germany in his The Beloved Returns, to his conviction that German culture was where he lived and to the acknowledgement of America as his new home. Traces of his experience of exile, and a late answer on his separation from Germany in 1933, however, are to be found even in his incompleted …

«Quotation And Literary Echo As Structural Principles In Gabriele Wohmann's Frühherbst In Badenweiler.», Walter H. Sokel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her novel of 1978, Wohmann uses the montage technique—quotations, literary echoes, erudite allusions—of the «classics of modernism» to put the contemporary West German phenomenon of «New Inwardness» in an ironic light. Her protagonist, the composer Hubert Frey, retreats from the stresses of contemporary life to the Black Forest spa of Badenweiler. New Inwardness in him appears allied to New Conservatism which, in reaction to the New Left of the sixties, revives the old German ideal of the «A-Political Man.» Echoing a work of restaurative mentality, Stifter's Nachsommer, Frey's Frühherbst looks back nostalgically on Goethe's classicist phase. As Goethe …

Avant-Garde: The Convulsions Of A Concept, Michael T. Jones

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The current status of the «avant-garde» provokes many questions, which include both inner-artistic matters and matters of history and society commonly associated with Marxist or reception-oriented thinkers. The convolution of questions cannot be disentangled; efforts to confront the dilemmas of the avant-garde cannot abstract from matters of commodification, recent reception, or the complex dialectic of «classical» and «modern.» The essay deals with the most recent manifestations of avant-garde aesthetic impulses. It emphasizes the historical and social aspects of German theorizing in contrast to purely formalist or ahistorical conceptions commonly found elsewhere. It insists that such «materialist» theory does greater justice …

Nontraditional Features Of Heinrich Böll's War Books: Innovations Of A Pacifist, W. Lee Nahrgang

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Heinrich Böll, recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1972, has treated the theme of war throughout his literary career; and in some ways his war books and stories differ considerably from those of other contemporary German writers. In fact, some authorities argue that none of his works are true war books in the traditional sense. Perhaps the most significant difference between Böll's works and the war books of most other authors is that he equates World War II with previous military conflicts, whereas they consider it uniquely evil because of the various crimes of the National Socialists. This …

When Sports Conquered The Republic: A Forgotten Chapter From The «Roaring Twenties.» , Wolfgang Rothe

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

After the First World War, sport experienced an astonishing growth in the successor states to the two empires of central Europe, a growth which can only be explained sociologically in terms of the general character of the twentieth century as a «physical century.» Furthermore, the intellectual climate of the times as well as the psychic state of the freshly-hatched Republicans plays a special role. That is, the enormous fascination with the «Moloch of sport» can be explained on the one hand by a non-intellectual worshipping of purely physical, measurable maximum achievements (record-mania), on the other by the America-cult that arose …