The first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates. The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives, with their distinctive representations of identities, places, and cultures, respond to today's globalized, high-speed world characterized by the dual mass movements of tourism and migration. Yet a corresponding cutting-edge discussion of twenty-first-century travel writing in German has until now been missing. The fourteen essays in Anxious Journeys redress this situation. They analyze texts by leading authors such as Felicitas Hoppe, Christoph Ransmayr, Julie Zeh, Navid Kermani, Judith Schalansky, Ilija Trojanow, and others, as well as topics such as Turkish-German travelogues and the relationship of comics to travel writing. The volume examines how writers engage with classic tropes of travel writing and how they react to the current sense of crisis and belatedness. It also links travel to ongoing debates about the role of the nation, mass migration, and the European project, as well as to Germany's place in the larger world order. Contributors: Karin Baumgartner, Heather Merle Benbow, Anke S. Biendarra, John Blair and Muriel Cormican, Nicole Coleman, Carola Daffner, Christina Gerhardt, Nicole Grewling, Gundela Hachmann, Andrew Wright Hurley, Christina Kraenzle, Magda Tarnawaska Senel, Monika Shafi, Sunka Simon. Karin Baumgartner is Professor of German at the University of Utah. Monika Shafi is Elias Ahuja Professor of German at the University of Delaware.

Reveals and analyzes the current strong emphasis in German literature on the role of houses and homes in our constructions of selfhood and belonging. In life and in fiction, houses are compelling objects that shape an impressive range of personal and public affairs. A house embodies experiences often intensely emotional, and it also represents both a major financial investmentand a material reality embedded in architectural, aesthetic, and social traditions. The house, the place where we try to be at home, can be regarded -- as theorists from Gaston Bachelard to Edward S. Casey have argued -- as the key space for our constructions of selfhood and belonging. A host of contemporary German narratives featuring houses highlight this relationship between selfhood and domestic space. Beginning with a historical and theoretical overview of the house in German literature, Housebound analyzes the shelters -- often highly ambivalent spaces -- that writers such as Katharina Hacker, Arno Geiger, Walter Kappacher, Monika Maron, Jenny Erpenbeck, Judith Hermann, Barbara Honigmann, and Emine Sevgi OEzdamar build in their texts and what these reveal about contemporary selfhood in Germany and its relationship to the social world. The concluding comparative analysis of Katharina Hacker's Die Habenichtse and the English novelist Ian McEwan's Saturday reveals these developments in another national literature and makes a case for the global appeal of the domestic as a major site of identity politics. Monika Shafi is the Elias Ahuja Professor of German and Chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware.

The career of Gunter Grass began dramatically in 1959, with the publication of his first novel. The Tin Drum brought instant fame to the thirty-two-year-old author and led to his receiving the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. Translated into dozens of languages, the novel has sold over four million copies worldwide. Its status as a major text of postwar German literature, however, has not diminished its provocative nature. In both style and content, it continues to challenge scholars, teachers, and students.

This volume, like others in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature, is divided into two parts. Part 1, "Materials," provides the instructor with bibliographic information on the text, critical studies, and audiovisual and Internet resources. Part 2, "Approaches," contains eighteen essays on teaching The Tin Drum, including three that discuss Volker Schlondorff's 1979 film adaptation of the novel. Some of the topics covered are the historical context (Nazism, World War II, the Holocaust), Oskar Matzerath as an unreliable narrator, the imagery (e.g., eels, the Virgin Mary), the use of German fairy tales, and how Grass's satirical treatment of Germany speaks to postwar generations.

Der Band enthalt die Beitrage von vier Sektionen des Warschauer IVG-Kongresses. Die Beitrage der Sektion Erzahlte Geschichte - Erinnerte Literatur (betreut und bearbeitet von Ulrike Gleixner, Marianne Henn, Gabriele Kamper, Waltraud Maierhofer) rekonstruieren, wie sich Erinnerung in verschiedenen Epochen (von der Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart) und Textsorten (Memoiren, Biographien, Erzahlungen, Romanen) unterschiedlich literarisch gestaltet. Besonders werden Methoden der Fiktionalisierung des Erlebten und Mechanismen der Bildung von literarisch vermitteltem individuellem und kollektivem Gedachtnis hervorgehoben. Die Beitrage der Sektion Schreiben im Holocaust (betreut und bearbeitet von Joerg Riecke) befassen sich mit dem noch immer schwierigen Thema der Darstellung des Holocaust, d.h. mit Arbeiten (vor allem deutsch-judischer) Autoren, die versuchen, das Unsagbare des Traumas und des Todes zum Ausdruck zu bringen. Die Studien geben einen klaren Umriss des Spannungsfeldes zwischen UEberlebensstrategien (Bewaltigung des Unfassbaren) und Widerstand gegenuber der Gefahr einer AEsthetisierung des Grausamen. Die Beitrage der Sektion Geschlecht, Generation und Nation (betreut und bearbeitet von Monika Shafi) untersuchen Schreibweisen von AutorInnen, die Geschlechterbeziehungen aus einer Perspektive gestalten, die sich programmatisch als postnational (transkulturell) auffassen lasst, vor allem in Hinblick auf die politische Qualitat von ausgewahlten mannlich und weiblich kodierten Verweis- und Identifikationsmustern. Die Beitrage der Sektion Bilaterale Interkulturelle Kommunikation in der Globalisierung (betreut und bearbeitet von Xiaohu Feng) setzen sich mit verschiedenen Aspekten, Problemen und Konzepten der so genannten "interkulturellen Linguistik" nach dem cultural turn auseinander. Sie gehen auf eine Reihe von linguistischen, kulturlinguistischen und kulturwissenschaftlichen Fragestellungen (transkulturelle Werte, Identitatsbildung, Entwicklung von interkultureller Kompetenz, Kulturtransfer) ein, die in der Zeit der Globalisierung immer starker in den Vordergrund rucken.