|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
Focuses on the cultural, philosophical, political, and scholarly
uses of "orientalism" in the German-speaking and Central and
Eastern European worlds from the late eighteenth century to the
present day. The concept and study of orientalism in Western
culture gained a changed understanding from Edward Said's now
iconic 1978 book Orientalism. However, recent debate has moved
beyond Said's definition of the phenomenon, highlighting the
multiple forms of orientalism within the "West," the manifold
presence of the "East" in the Western world, indeed the
epistemological fragility of the ideas of "Occident" and "Orient"
as such. This volume focuses on the deployment -- here the
cultural, philosophical, political, and scholarly uses -- of
"orientalism" in the German-speaking and Central and Eastern
European worlds from the late eighteenth century to the present
day. Its interdisciplinary approach combines distinguished
contributions by Indian scholars, who approach the topic of
orientalism through the prism of German studies as practiced in
Asia, with representative chapters by senior German, Austrian,and
English-speaking scholars working at the intersection of German and
oriental studies. Contributors: Anil Bhatti, Michael Dusche,
Johannes Feichtinger, Johann Heiss, James Hodkinson, Kerstin Jobst,
Jon Keune, Todd Kontje, Margit Koeves, Sarah Lemmen, Shaswati
Mazumdar, Jyoti Sabarwal, Ulrike Stamm, John Walker. James
Hodkinson is Associate Professor in German Studies at Warwick
University. John Walker is Senior Lecturer in EuropeanCultures and
Languages at Birkbeck College, University of London. Shaswati
Mazumdar is Professor in German at the University of Delhi.
Johannes Feichtinger is a Researcher at the OEsterreichische
Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Weighs the value of Germanophone culture, and its study, in an age
of globalization, transnationalism, and academic change. The study
of German-language culture has been rapidly diversifying to express
the vibrant multiplicity of what it is now possible to research,
and teach, under the rubric of "German Studies." Responding to
these developments, German in the World explores what happens when
the geographic, linguistic, and temporal boundaries that have
traditionally been used to define German-language culture are
questioned, and are placed alongside more global perspectives.
Chapters consider the transformation of the German-language
cultural canon through its engagement with the world, trace the
value of German Studies as an interdisciplinary subject practiced
across different global locations, and investigate the impact of
both on the work of organizations and practitioners entirely beyond
the academy. In questioning where German-language culture can be
found across these different "worlds," German in the World thus
uncovers the continued value of German Studies as a field of
critical cultural discourse within a globalized public sphere,
placing that culture at the heart of debates on Transnational and
World Literature. Ultimately, the contributions to this innovative
volume demonstrate how attempts to locate German Studies in its
wider geographic and social contexts result not in a discipline
undone, but in a discipline reinvigorated and transformed.
German-language writings about Islam not only reveal much about
Islamic culture but also about the European "home" culture. Islam
has been a rich topic in German-language literature since the
middle ages, and the writings about it not only reveal much about
Islamic culture but also about the European "home" culture. Many of
the early essays in this chronologically arranged volume uncover
fresh evidence of how German writers used images of Islam-as-other
to define their individual subject positions as well as to define
the German nation and the Christian religion. The perspectives of
many contemporary writers are, however, far removed from such a
polar opposition of cultures. Their experience of the
German-Islamic encounter is complicated by a crucial factor: many
of them emerge from Muslim migrant communities such as the
German-Turkish community. The culturally hybrid origins of these
writers and their expression of experiences and ideologies that
cross boundaries of East and West, Christendom and Islam, strongly
affect the findings of the essays as the volume moves toward the
present. The texts discussed include travelogues and other
firsthand encounters with Islam; reports for colonial authorities;
aesthetic treatises on Islamic art; literary, essayistic, and
theological writing on Islamic religious practice; the
incorporation of characters, situations, and settings from the
Islamic world into fiction or drama; and fictional and
autobiographical writing by Muslims in German. Contributors: Cyril
Edwards, Silke Falkner, James Hodkinson, Timothy R. Jackson,
Margaret Littler, Rachel MagShamrain, Frauke Matthes, Yomb May,
Jeffrey Morrison, Kate Roy, Monika Shafi, Edwin Wieringa, W. Daniel
Wilson,Karin E. Yesilada. James Hodkinson is Assistant Professor of
German at Warwick University; Jeffrey Morrison is Senior Lecturer
at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
A balanced study of gender in Novalis as expressed in his literary,
political, and scientific writings and in his letters. The great
poet and polymath Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis, was
long seen as representing a particular brand of German Romanticism,
embodying a predilection for the mystical and the irrational and a
longing for death.Yet 20th-century scholars debunked that myth and
arrived at a view of the poet as one who produced a unified,
precociously modern body of work in which human systems of
individual and collective being as well as knowledge and
itsdisciplines exist as fictional structures, as represented
possibility rather than fixed truth. As such, all being and
knowledge could and should be subjected to the ironic play of
Romantic poetry, which sought to renew the individual and the world
it inhabited. Hardenberg's work has come in for particular
criticism for idealizing women, thus denying the living, expressive
female subject; the conservative social roles it ascribes to women
are also cited. Although more recent critics have discerned an
empowered female subject in Novalis, this is the first balanced,
book-length study of gender in Novalis in English. It concludes
that Hardenberg's Romantic writing began to be successful in
reinventing the "fiction" of female identity, and goes further to
reveal his extensive interaction with women as intellectual equals.
James R. Hodkinson is Assistant Professor of German at the
University of Warwick, UK.
|
|