Wearied by his life as an administrator at the Duke's court in Weimar, in 1786 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe departed unannounced in the middle of the night for what had been the destination of his imagination since childhood: Italy. His extended stay there dramatically affected his views of art, architecture, prose, poetry, and science. When he returned to Germany and Weimar, Goethe's experiences translated into his life and work in ways that influenced countless others as they developed Germany's own brand of high culture. ""The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction of Goethe"" tracks the peculiar space Italy occupies in the cultural consciousness of German writers by reconsidering the Italian journeys of Goethe and Winckelmann and the legacy of those journeys in the works of Heine, Nietzsche, Freud, Mann, Carossa, and Bachmann. Author Richard Block contests previous assumptions about Italy as a place to encounter classical culture and creative rebirth. His study examines the degree to which Germany's literary and cultural traditions appropriated a phantasmic Italy, showing how Winckelmann's art history and Goethe's Italian journey predisposed later writers to search for an aesthetic ideal in Italy that did not exist, and how their search for this absent ideal eventually resulted in disillusionment and deception. Building on previous work on Goethe, literary theory, and cultural history, ""The Spell of Italy"" offers compelling new ways of understanding Germany's fascination with Italy from the eighteenth century to its troubled political history of the twentieth century.

Presents over 250 visual illusions gathered from around the world to explore the psychology of vision. Discusses the phenomenon of human perception and the use of illusions in society.

New essays from leading Goethe scholars providing testimony to the continuing, even renewed, relevance of Goethe for literary studies today. Invoking Goethe's name has become fashionable again. With new methods and technologies of reading threatening to render literature virtual and insubstantial, we have the sense that "Goethe's ghosts" - the otherwise neglected voices and traditions that, finding their most trenchant expression in Goethe, inform the Western storehouse of literature - can show us long-forgotten dimensions of literature. Inspired by the distinguished Goethe scholar Jane Brown,whose life's work has called attention to the allegorical modes haunting the mimetic forms that dominate modern literature, the contributors to this volume take a rich variety of approaches to Goethe: cultural studies, history ofthe book, semiotics, deconstruction, colonial studies, feminism, childhood studies, and eco-criticism. The persistence, omnipresence, and modalities of the "ghosts" they find suggest that more than influence or standards is at issue here. The stubborn reappearance of these revenants testifies to more fundamental issues concerning the status of literature and the task of the reader. As the contributors demonstrate, these questions acquire renewed urgency inwriters as diverse as Hegel, Adorno, Benn, Droste-Hulshoff, and Nietzsche. Each of the essays testifies to the enduring salience and presence of Goethe. Contributors: Helmut Ammerlahn, Benjamin Bennett, Dieter Borchmeyer, Franz-Josef Deiters, Richard T. Gray, Martha B. Helfer, Meredith Lee, Clark Muenzer, Andrew Piper, Jurgen Schroeder, Peter J. Schwartz, Patricia Anne Simpson, Robert Deam Tobin, David E. Wellbery, Sabine Wilke. SimonRichter is Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Richard Block is Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington.

A Rabbi reflects on ultimate existential issues, questions, challenges, and mysteries: life, death, and eternity

Dad goes fishing and takes along his young son. Frustrated when his father tells him he's too young to fish, the boy begins to imagine all manner of fantastic, non-existent fish he will catch someday and the wild and fanciful places he'll catch them.