We describe people who are “consumed” or “devoured” by ambition as if by a predator or an out-of-control inferno. Thinkers since deepest antiquity have raised these questions, approaching the subject of ambition with ambivalence and often trepidation—as when the ancient Greek poet Hesiod proposed a differentiation between the good and the bad goddess Eris. Indeed, ambition as a longing for immortal fame seems to be one of the unique hallmarks of the human species. While philosophy has touched only occasionally on the problem of burning ambition, sociology, psychoanalysis, and world literature have provided rich and more revealing descriptions and examples of its shaping role in human history. Drawing on a long and varied tradition of writing on this topic, ranging from the works of Homer through Shakespeare, Freud, and Kafka and from the history of ancient Greece and Rome to the Italian Renaissance and up to the present day (to modernity and the current neoliberal era), Eckart Goebel explores our driving passion for recognition — that insatiable hunter in the mirror — and power.

After 1933, New York City gave shelter to many leading German and German-Jewish intellectuals. Stripped of their German citizenship by the Nazi-regime, these public figures either stayed in the New York area or moved on to California and other places. This compendium, adopting the title of a famous volume published by Klaus and Erika Mann in 1939, explores the impact the US, and NYC in particular, had on these authors as well as the influence they in turn exerted on US intellectual life. Moreover, it addresses the transformations that took place in the exiled intellectuals' thinking when it was translated into another language and addressed to an American audience. Among the individuals presented in this volume, are such prominent names as T.W. Adorno, H. Arendt, W. Benjamin, E. Bloch, B. Brecht, S. Kracauer, the Mann family, S. Morgenstern, and E. Panofsky. The authors of the essays in this compendium were free to choose the angle (biography, theory, politics) or aspect (a single work, a personal constellation) deemed best to illuminate the given intellectual's work. Acclaimed NYC photographer Fred Stein, a German-Jewish refugee from Dresden, produced numerous portraits of exiled intellectuals and artists. A selection of these compelling portraits is reproduced in this book for the first time.

An Biographien und am Schreibverhalten von Autoren zwischen der Mitte des 18. und der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts, der, klassischen' Epoche des auf sich gestellten "freien Schriftstellers," sind wiederkehrende Verhaltensmuster zu beobachten. Auf Regularien, denen auch die betonte Individualitat unterworfen bleibt, lenkt der Band den Blick, vielfach in Auseinandersetzung mit der Feldtheorie Bourdieus. Die Studien nehmen die Affinitat zwischen dem freien Kunstler und dem freien Unternehmer ernst. Sie analysieren den Hang zu aristokratischer Selbsteinschatzung, der haufig zum Ausloser einer nicht selten umfassenden Zeit- und Gesellschaftskritik wird, beschreiben die einsamkeitsgenerierende Exterritorialitat, die in Umbruchsituationen umgekehrt die Macht des Wortes auch im Schulterschluss mit der neuen Macht erprobt, die Sehnsucht des Einzelgangers, einmal auch die Stimme Vieler, womoglich eines ganzen Volkes zu sein. Und thematisieren folglich auch eine mogliche extreme Folge: das Exil. Sichtbar wird eine permanente Dialektik zwischen poesie pure und litterature engagee. Diese Dialektik und nicht etwa Fixierungen in der einen oder anderen Richtung sind der Epoche des "freien Schriftstellers" eigentumlich. Zugleich reflektieren die Studien das intensivierte Bewusstsein, dass gegenwartig eine Hegemonie der gelesenen oder unbegleitet vorgetragenen Literatur abgelost wird von einer Vielfalt literarisch-audiovisueller Darstellungsformen."

Die fortgesetzte gegenstandstheoretische Debatte in der Literaturwissenschaft fuhrte zu auch institutionell folgenreichen Grenzuberschreitungen hin zur Anthropologie, Semiotik, Medien-, Informations- und Kulturtheorie und damit zu einer Infragestellung traditioneller Verfahren, Inhalte und Aufgaben des Fachs. Der vorliegende Band gibt Auskunft zum state of the art im letzten Jahr des 20. Jahrhunderts. Die gesammelten Essays bieten einen fur Fachleute und Interessierte gleichermassen lohnenden Uberblick uber jungste Tendenzen und Transformationsprozesse, sie orientieren uber institutionelle, politische, wissenschaftsgeschichtliche und im engeren Sinne methodologische Aspekte gegenwartiger Literaturforschung. Die Herausgeber haben die Beitrage unter folgenden Fragestellungen gegliedert: Was ist Literatur? Kann man Texte verstehen? Hat Literatur Realitatsbezug? Was geschieht neben Literatur? Was kann Literaturforschung? Der funfundsiebzigste Geburtstag von Eberhard Lammert, dem Grundungsdirektor des Berliner Zentrums fur Literaturforschung, war den Autorinnen und Autoren Anlass zu diesem Resumee."

We describe people who are “consumed” or “devoured” by ambition as if by a predator or an out-of-control inferno. Thinkers since deepest antiquity have raised these questions, approaching the subject of ambition with ambivalence and often trepidation—as when the ancient Greek poet Hesiod proposed a differentiation between the good and the bad goddess Eris. Indeed, ambition as a longing for immortal fame seems to be one of the unique hallmarks of the human species. While philosophy has touched only occasionally on the problem of burning ambition, sociology, psychoanalysis, and world literature have provided rich and more revealing descriptions and examples of its shaping role in human history. Drawing on a long and varied tradition of writing on this topic, ranging from the works of Homer through Shakespeare, Freud, and Kafka and from the history of ancient Greece and Rome to the Italian Renaissance and up to the present day (to modernity and the current neoliberal era), Eckart Goebel explores our driving passion for recognition — that insatiable hunter in the mirror — and power.

According to Freud's later works, we do not really feel well or free within civilization. Our discontent never disappears, and we shall never become completely reliable members of society. Alcohol already suffices, Freud tells us, to ruin the fragile architecture of sublimations. Since 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ' sublimation seems to be nothing more than a euphemism for suppressing the drives. We sublimate because we did not get or were not allowed to have what we 'actually' wanted. Is sublimation a mere surrogate or perhaps even the name psychoanalysis found for 'theoria' in the twentieth century? With Freud as its pivot, Goebel provides an intellectual history of sublimation, which also serves as an introduction to other key ideas associated with the authors discussed, such as Schopenhauer's philosophy of music, the will to power in Nietzsche, the structure of Freudian psychoanalysis, Adorno's concept of modern art, or Lacanian ethics. In examining both its prehistory and reception, Goebel argues that sublimation can be reconsidered as the road toward an individual and social life beyond discontent.