Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture

Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture
Author: John B. Lyon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2019-08-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501351028

Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture challenges a model of literary production that persists in literary studies: the so-called Geniekult or the idea of the solitary male author as genius that emerged around 1800 in German lands. A closer look at creative practices during this time indicates that collaborative creative endeavors, specifically joint ventures between women and men, were an important mode of literary production during this era. This volume surveys a variety of such collaborations and proves that male and female spheres of creation were not as distinct as has been previously thought. It demonstrates that the model of the male genius that dominated literary studies for centuries was not inevitable, that viable alternatives to it existed. Finally, it demands that we rethink definitions of an author and a literary work in ways that account for the complex modes of creation from which they arose.

Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture

Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture
Author: John B. Lyon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2021-02-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781501378331

Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture challenges a model of literary production that persists in literary studies: the so-called Geniekult or the idea of the solitary male author as genius that emerged around 1800 in German lands. A closer look at creative practices during this time indicates that collaborative creative endeavors, specifically joint ventures between women and men, were an important mode of literary production during this era. This volume surveys a variety of such collaborations and proves that male and female spheres of creation were not as distinct as has been previously thought. It demonstrates that the model of the male genius that dominated literary studies for centuries was not inevitable, that viable alternatives to it existed. Finally, it demands that we rethink definitions of an author and a literary work in ways that account for the complex modes of creation from which they arose.

Women Writers’ Philosophy of Love in German Romanticism

Women Writers’ Philosophy of Love in German Romanticism
Author: Renata T. Fuchs
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2024-06-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004702261

This monograph spotlights women writers’ contributions to the philosophy of German Romanticism. Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karoline von Günderrode, and Bettina Brentano von Arnim suggested a new vision for an emancipated community of women that develops through philosophical discourse of Progressive Universal Poetry. Their personal, fictionalized, and literary letters reinvent and retheorize the Romantic notions of sociability, symphilosophy, and sympoetry, as theorized by men, and retheorize the concepts of love. They provided a model for shaping intellectual and cultural life in the modern world while challenging rigid dichotomies of classs, gender, and ethnicity.

Writing the Self, Creating Community

Writing the Self, Creating Community
Author: Elisabeth Krimmer
Publisher: Women and Gender in German Stu
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 1640140786

This volume examines the world of German women writers who emerged in the burgeoning literary marketplace of eighteenth-century Europe.

Great Books by German Women in the Age of Emotion, 1770-1820

Great Books by German Women in the Age of Emotion, 1770-1820
Author: Margaretmary Daley
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2022
Genre: History
ISBN: 1640140972

"Literature written by women in German during the period long known patriarchally as the Age of Goethe was largely lumped in with other unserious or artistically unworthy works under the category Trivialliteratur, literally 'trivial literature.' Using insights from Gender Studies yet acknowledging the need for a literary canon, Great Books by German Women offers a critical interpretation of six canon-worthy German novels written by women in the period, for which it coins the term 'Age of Emotion.' The novels are chosen because they depict women's ordinary yet interesting lives and, equally, because each displays formal strengths that yield prose particularly able to express emotion. The first, Sophie von La Roche's Die Geschichte des Frèauleins von Sternheim (The History of Lady von Sternheim), draws on the tradition of the epistolary novel while also finding new ways to depict empathetic emotions. The second, Friederike Unger's Julchen Grèunthal, brings to the Frauenroman or women's novel the use of irony to portray a heroine's emotions during her coming of age. The next novels add lyricism to their prose to capture sensual emotions: Sophie Mereau's Blèutenalter der Empfindung (The Blossoming of Feeling) imagines women's affinity for the philosophical sublime, while Caroline Wolzogen depicts female desire in her Agnes von Lilien. The fifth novel, Die Honigmonathe (The Honeymoon), by Karoline Fischer, explores the agony that extreme emotions cause--not only for women but also for men. The last novel, Caroline Pichler's Frauenwèurde (The Dignity of Women) expands the focus from a young heroine to multiple mature characters while maintaining the centrality of women's talents and emotions. Finally, this study accords honorable mention to some other women's novels before concluding that the influence of these six works was in no way trivial, either in portraying women's lives and emotions or in the history of German literature"--

Writing the Mountains

Writing the Mountains
Author: Jens Klenner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2024-05-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Writing the Mountains reconsiders the role of mountains in German language fiction from 1800 to the present and argues that in a range of texts, from E.T.A. Hoffmann's “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” (1819) to Elfriede Jelinek's Die Kinder der Toten (1995) and beyond, mountains serve as dynamic spaces of material change that generate aesthetic and narrative innovation. In contrast to dominant critical approaches to the Alpine landscape in literature, in which mountain ranges often features as passive settings, or which trace the influence of geographical and geological sciences in literary productions, this study argues for the dynamic role in literature of presumably rigid mineral structures. In German-language fiction after 1800, the counter-intuitive topology of rocky mountain ranges and unfathomable subterranean depths of the Alpine imaginary functions as a space of exception which appears to reconfirm and radically challenge the foundations of Enlightenment thought. Writing the Mountains reads the mountain range as a rigid yet permeable liminal space. Within this zone, semiotic orders are unsettled, as is the division between organic and inorganic, between the human and the other.

Contested Selves

Contested Selves
Author: Katja Herges
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2021
Genre: Autobiography
ISBN: 1640141057

Investigates the field of German life writing, from Rahel Levin Varnhagen around 1800 to Carmen Sylva a century later, from Döblin, Becher, women's WWII diaries, German-Jewish memoirs, and East German women's interview literatureto the autofiction of Lena Gorelik.

The "German Illusion"

The
Author: Olivier Morel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2023-12-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Examines Jewish-German “tropes” in Hélène Cixous's oeuvre and life and their impact on her work as a feminist, poet, and playwright. Hélène Cixous is a poet, philosopher, and activist known worldwide for her manifesto on Écriture feminine (feminine writing) and for her influential literary texts, plays, and essays. While the themes were rarely present in her earlier writings, Germany and Jewish-German family figures and topics have significantly informed most of Cixous's late works. Born in Algeria in June 1937, she grew up with a mother who had escaped Germany after the rise of Nazism and a grandmother who fled the racial laws of the Third Reich in 1938. In her writing, Cixous refines the primitive scene of a “German” upbringing in French-occupied colonial, antisemitic Algeria. Scholar and filmmaker Olivier Morel delves into the signs and influences that “Germany,” “German,” and “Osnabrück” have exerted over Cixous's work. Featuring an exclusive interview with Hélène Cixous and stills from their travel together to Osnabrück in Morel's 2018 documentary, Ever, Rêve, Hélène Cixous, Morel's The “German Illusion” examines the unique literary meditation on the Holocaust sustained throughout her later texts. Morel helps us to understand an uncannily original oeuvre that embodies the complexities of modernity's genocidal history in a new way.

Germany from the Outside

Germany from the Outside
Author: Laurie Ruth Johnson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2022-09-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501375911

The nation-state is a European invention of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the case of the German nation in particular, this invention was tied closely to the idea of a homogeneous German culture with a strong normative function. As a consequence, histories of German culture and literature often are told from the inside-as the unfolding of a canon of works representing certain core values, with which every person who considers him or herself “German” necessarily must identify. But what happens if we describe German culture and its history from the outside? And as something heterogeneous, shaped by multiple and diverse sources, many of which are not obviously connected to things traditionally considered “German”? Emphasizing current issues of migration, displacement, systemic injustice, and belonging, Germany from the Outside explores new opportunities for understanding and shaping community at a time when many are questioning the ability of cultural practices to effect structural change. Located at the nexus of cultural, political, historiographical, and philosophical discourses, the essays in this volume inform discussions about next directions for German Studies and for the Humanities in a fraught era.

Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film

Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film
Author: Sophie Duvernoy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2023-10-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501391488

Using Germany as a national case study, this volume examines the historical genesis of precarity, its evolution from 19th-century industrial modernity to the present, and its reflections and reconfigurations in artistic production, in particular with relation to work, gender, and sexuality. “Precarity is everywhere now,” sociologist Pierre Bourdieu declared almost thirty years ago. Not only declining middle-class standards of living, but also debt, drug addiction, housing and food insecurity, depression, and “deaths of despair” are now being recognized as symptoms of the downward pull of social precarity. Although these and similar ills have been attributed to neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization, and willful neglect of the common good, precarization has accompanied the booms and busts of industrial modernity from its beginnings. Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film explores how German and Austrian literature, film, and social history have engaged with social precarity, from the period of Romanticism and early industrialization to the present. The chapters in this volume deal with precarity as both an objective phenomenon reflected in literary and filmic representations and as a subjective phenomenon that gives these representations their particular shape. Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film opens new critical perspectives on diverse forms of lived precarity and their creative manifestations by reflecting on the history of capitalist modernity from the vantage points of weakness, vulnerability, marginality, impoverishment, and otherness.