Pavol Strauss – a Genius Outsider
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The Total Work of Art in European Modernism Series Editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University
The Total Work of Art in European Modernism Series editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought publishes new English- language books in literary studies, criticism, cultural studies, and intellectual history pertaining to the German-speaking world, as well as translations of im- portant German-language works. Signale construes “modern” in the broadest terms: the series covers topics ranging from the early modern period to the present. Signale books are published under a joint imprint of Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library in electronic and print formats. Please see http://signale.cornell.edu/. The Total Work of Art in European Modernism David Roberts A Signale Book Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Ithaca, New York Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library gratefully acknowledge the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the publication of this volume. Copyright © 2011 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writ- ing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2011 by Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roberts, David, 1937– The total work of art in European modernism / David Roberts. p. cm. — (Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5023-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Modernism (Aesthetics) 2. -
Modernist Permabulations Through Time and Space
Journal of the British Academy, 4, 197–219. DOI 10.5871/jba/004.197 Posted 18 October 2016. © The British Academy 2016 Modernist perambulations through time and space: From Enlightened walking to crawling, stalking, modelling and street-walking Lecture in Modern Languages read 19 May 2016 ANNE FUCHS Fellow of the Academy Abstract: Analysing diverse modes of walking across a wide range of texts from the Enlightenment period and beyond, this article explores how the practice of walking was discovered by philosophers, educators and writers as a rich discursive trope that stood for competing notions of the morally good life. The discussion proceeds to then investigate how psychological, philosophical and moral interpretations of bad prac- tices of walking in particular resurface in texts by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and the interwar writer Irmgard Keun. It is argued that literary modernism transformed walking from an Enlightenment trope signifying progress into the embodiment of moral and epistemological ambivalence. In this process, walking becomes an expression of the disconcerting experience of modernity. The paper concludes with a discussion of walking as a gendered performance: while the male walkers in the modernist texts under discussion suffer from a bad gait that leads to ruination, the new figure of the flâneuse manages to engage in pleasurable walking by abandoning the Enlightenment legacy of the good gait. Keywords: modes of walking, discursive trope, Enlightenment discourse, modernism, modernity, moral and epistemological ambivalence, gender, flâneuse. Walking on one’s two legs is an essential but ordinary skill that, unlike cycling, skate-boarding, roller-skating or ballroom dancing, does not require special proficiency, aptitude or thought—unless, of course, we are physically impaired. -
Questionnaire Summary of the Main Activities of a Research Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences
Questionnaire Summary of the main activities of a research institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences Period: January 1, 2012 - December 31, 2015 1. Basic information on the institute: 1.1. Legal name and address: Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences Konventná 13, 811 03 Bratislava 1.2. URL of the institute web site: http://usvl.sav.sk 1.3. Executive body of the institute and its composition Directoriat Name Age Years in the position Director prof. Adam Bžoch, CSc. 50 9 Deputy director Dr. Dobrota Pucherová, D.PhilOxon 39 2 doc. Mgr. Róbert Gáfrik, PhD. 39 2 Scientific secretary doc. Mgr. Róbert Gáfrik, PhD. 39 2 Mgr. Eva Bubnášová, PhD. 31 1 PhDr. Jana Cviková, PhD. 53 1 1.4. Head of the Scientific Board: Mgr. Judit Görözdi, PhD. 1.5. Basic information on the research personnel 1.5.1. Number of employees with university degrees (PhD students included) engaged in research projects, their full time equivalent work capacity (FTE) in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and average number of employees in the assessment period 1 2012 2013 2014 2015 total FTE FTE FTE FTE number number number number number averaged averaged averaged FTE averaged numberyear per Number of employees with 21,0 15,070 23,0 17,070 22,0 15,570 20,0 14,220 86,0 21,5 15,483 university degrees Number of PhD students 6,0 6,000 9,0 9,000 9,0 9,000 11,0 11,000 35,0 8,8 8,750 Total number 27,0 21,070 32,0 26,070 31,0 24,570 31,0 25,220 121,0 30,3 24,233 1.5.2. -
The Essay As a Form of Expressing an Active Personality
Personal Ethos in the Literature of Slovak and Czech Dissidents: The Essay as a Form of Expressing an Active Personality Mária Bátorová Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Konventná 13, SK-813 64 Bratislava [email protected] This article discusses texts by selected authors from the period of »consolidation« in Czechoslovakia. The first part briefly outlines the sociohistorical context of dissident writing. Keywords: literature and ethics/ Czech literature / Slovak literature / dissidence / dissident writers / social role / essay Introduction Twentieth-century art cannot do without reflection on significant social problems, without artists’ focus on man and his diverse, varied existence. However, it is important to distinguish whether this is done only through the prism of a subjective view of artists with an emphasis on descriptions of their own maladies and experience, without any concentration on any abstract meaning and scope, without great conceptions and transpersonal goals. Such “talking about oneself” has reduced art to a trivial level of common everyday conversations. Few writers have been able to grasp the trivial authenticity that mod- ernism allowed in art at the beginning of the twentieth century, in a way that made it art with propositions of the fundamental problems of life. For the outstanding personalities living under the totalitarian conditions of the Warsaw Pact countries after the Second World War, it was the essay that became their genre of narration, through which they were most capable of reflecting reality. Faced with the diversity and ambiguity of the current of modern movements, as well as their postmodern continuations, entropy became entrenched in thinking about literature and art. -
Klirnt and Schiele Stephan Kleinschuster May 6, 1997 AR592
The Evolution of Expressionism In Turn-of-the-Century Vienna: Klirnt and Schiele Stephan Kleinschuster May 6, 1997 AR592 1 1 Until 1897, Classicism in Viennese high art had served as a mimetic construct of the elite society who were both art's staunchest supporters and the purveyors of moral and philosophical values that served as it's staple of judgment. In the following years, from 1898 to 1918, were revolutions of both natures, political and philosophical. The artistic transformation from the Classicism of the Habsburg Monarchy to the expressionism of the Cafe "Nihilism" could be seen most obviously in two of Vienna's foremost artists of the time, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. This paper seeks to compare and contrast the works of these two artists who seem to crystallize the moral, social, political, and artistic upheaval of early Twentieth Century Vienna. It lS fitting that Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele died six months from one another, both of the Spanish influenza, and both in 1918. It is important to note that even though stylistic variables call for their ultimate contrast, they loved and admired one another, and they both stood for the values that defined Secessionism. Their proximity in philosophy makes it all the more profound to discover their differences. In Klimt came classical objectivity housed in a contemporary conceptual framework. In Schiele came the shift to brutal subjectivity that pushed the limits of this framework. Even though, as will be discussed, the similarity of the subject matter seems to remain a constant, the execution becomes the variable upon which the change becomes dependent. -
Introduction
Guston, Philip Guston 9/8/10 6:04 PM Page 1 INTRODUCTION DORE ASHTON “Create, artist! Don’t talk!” the aging Goethe counseled his contemporaries in 1815. The painter Degas seconded the old sage when he told the young poet Paul Valéry that when the muses finished their day’s work they didn’t talk, they danced. But then, as Valéry vividly recalled, Degas went on to talk of his own art for hours on end. Painters have always talked, and some, such as Delacroix, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Motherwell, also wrote. Certain painters, Goya, for example, also deftly used language to augment their imagery. Like Degas, who liked to talk with poets and even engaged the inscrutable Mallarmé, Guston liked talking with poets, and they with him. Among his most attentive listeners was his friend the poet Clark Coolidge, whose ear was well attuned to Guston’s sometimes arcane utterances and who has selected some of the painter’s most eloquent sessions of writing and talking, resulting in a mosaic of a life - time of thought. I was also one of Guston’s interlocutors for almost thirty years. I recognize with pleasure Coolidge’s unfurling of Guston’s cycles of talk and non-talk; his amusing feints and dodges when confronted with obtuse questioners, his wondrous bursts of language when he felt inspired, his sometimes playful contrariness, his satisfaction in being a provocateur, and his consistent preoccupation with serious aesthetic ques - tions through out his working life as a painter. Above all, I recognize Guston’s funda - mental rebelliousness, which manifested itself not only in his artistic preferences but in his politics, his choice of artistic battlefields, and his intimate studio life. -
Kafka and the Postmodern Divide: Hebrew and German in Aharon Appelfeld’S the Age of Wonders (Tor Ha-Pela’Ot)
THE GERMANIC REVlEW Kafka and the Postmodern Divide: Hebrew and German in Aharon Appelfeld’s The Age of Wonders (Tor Ha-pela’ot) DAVID SUCHOFF uch recent cultural criticism has argued that postmodern culture can be di- M agnosed as an unworked-through period of mourning, unable to come to terms with the Holocaust and the definitive break with modernist categories that it represents.’ Aharon Appelfeld’s Hebrew novella The Age of Wonders (1978) portrays the story of an assimilated Jewish writer and his family in Austria be- fore the Holocaust, and the story of his son Bruno, who returns to Austria from Jerusalem after the war in search of his past. The text’s very structure seems to affirm the traditional categories of the modedpostmodern divide. Bruno’s father seems to represent the formalism of modernist fiction and its paradigmatic eth- nic self-denial. As the Holocaust draws near in the first half of the novella, Jew- ish history is truly the nightmare from which the writer, as the “father” of Bruno’s apparently rootless, postmodern fate, unsuccessfully tries to awaken. “Father” (his only consistent name in the novella) constantly seeks to become an “Austrian writer,” with German as his “only language” and “mother tongue,” while critics constantly racialize him as a Jew and compare his writing to Kafka’s “parasitism” and unhealthy Jewish style.2 “Father” seems to represent classical modernism, struggling to break with the mass and enter elite culture, only to con- front the question of Jewish culture in its own terms, and those of its enemies, everywhere he turns. -
Kafka's Anti-Wagnerian Philosophy Of
53 (2/2019), pp. 109–123 The Polish Journal DOI: 10.19205/53.19.6 of Aesthetics Ido Lewit* “He Couldn’t Tell the Difference between The Merry Widow and Tristan and Isolde”: Kafka’s Anti-Wagnerian Philosophy of Music Abstract This essay exposes an anti-Wagnerian philosophy of music in Franz Kafka’s “Researches of a Dog” and “The Silence of the Sirens.” Themes of music, sound, and silence are over- whelmingly powerful in these stories and cannot be divorced from corporeal and visual aspects. These aspects are articulated in the selected texts in a manner that stands in stark opposition to Richard Wagner’s philosophy of music as presented in the composer’s sem- inal 1870 “Beethoven” essay. Keywords Richard Wagner, Franz Kafka, Philosophy of Music, Transcendence, Acousmatic Sound, Silence Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s close friend and literary executor, recalls in his bi- ography of the author that Kafka once said that “he couldn’t tell the differ- ence between The Merry Widow and Tristan and Isolde” (1995, 115). Brod evokes this memory in order to exemplify Kafka’s supposed lack of musi- cality. Indeed, for a German-speaking intellectual such as Kafka, not being able to differentiate Franz Lehár’s light operetta from Richard Wagner’s solemn, monumental music-drama would not simply be an example of unmusicality, but a symptom of cultural autism. While Brod’s recollection is sssssssssssss * Yale University Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Program in Film and Media Studies Email: [email protected] 110 I d o L e w i t __________________________________________________________________________________________________ the only documented reference by Kafka to Wagner or his works,1 it does not necessarily follow that Kafka was unaware of Wagner’s views of music and its effects. -
Mass Culture and Individuality in Hermann Broch’S Late Works
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Sunderland University Institutional Repository MASS CULTURE AND INDIVIDUALITY IN HERMANN BROCH’S LATE WORKS JANET PEARSON A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Sunderland for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. APRIL 2015 i Abstract Mass Culture and Individuality in Hermann Broch’s Late Works Janet Pearson This thesis explores Hermann Broch’s thought regarding the relationship between the individual and the mass, in an age of mass-culture. Broch, an Austrian-Jewish intellectual, who emigrated to America in 1938, discussed ideas upon this theme in theoretical essays, including a theory of mass hysteria (Massenwahntheorie) as well as his fictional The Death of Virgil (Der Tod des Vergil). In the study, the analysis of his theoretical work shows that Broch’s views regarding the masses differ from those of other theorists contemporary to him (Le Bon, Freud and Canetti), in that they are closely linked to his theory of value. It also establishes that his ideas about individuality reach back to the earliest philosophers, and that he perceived this dimension of human existence to be changing, through the development of ‘ego- consciousness’. Building upon this, the textual analysis of the Virgil demonstrates that Broch finds similarities between his own era and the age of Augustus, but also indicates that the concept of individuality portrayed in the work goes beyond that discussed in his theoretical writing and points towards a new role for art in the post-industrial age. -
Franz Kafka's Transformations
Franz Kafka’s Transformations Andrew Barker ALONE amongst the contributions to the volume, this essay does not address a Scandinavian topic. The theme of transformation in Franz Kafka’s work and life does, however, allow us to recall that Peter Graves is himself a notable example of a changeling, having begun his career at Aberdeen University as a student of German under the venerable Professor Wilhelm (Willy) Witte. What is presented here may thus serve as a reminder of a world Peter inhabited long ago, before he morphed into the Scandinavian polymath we know and honour today. The impetus for the present contribution came from reading James Hawes’ exhilarating study Excavating Kafka (2008).1 This work was promptly written off by Klaus Wagenbach, the doyen of Kafka studies in Germany, who is quoted as saying: ‘Irgendein Dämel kommt daher, weiß nix und schreibt über Kafka’ (Jungen 2008).2 In defence of Wagenbach’s po-faced dismissal of a much younger, non-German scholar’s work, one might plead that his grasp of English was insufficient for him to grasp the book’s satirical and polemical intentions. In fact, Excavating Kafka is the work of a scholar who knows a great deal about Kafka, and writes about him with panache and insight. I can match Hawes neither in my knowledge of Kafka nor the secondary literature, but I share with him a mounting frustration with the commonly-peddled myths about Kafka’s life and work, and it is some of these which I shall address in this short paper. Looking at the work first, I shall concentrate on what is probably Kafka’s most iconic story, Die Verwandlung (1912; ‘Metamorphosis’), the English translation of whose title I find particularly problematic. -
ICLA 2016 – Abstracts Group Session Panels Content Computational Comparative Literature
ICLA 2016 – Abstracts Group Session Panels, July 17th, 2016 ICLA 2016 – Abstracts Group Session Panels Content Computational Comparative Literature. Corpus-based Methodologies ................................................. 5 16082 - Assia Djebar et la transgression des limites linguistiques, littéraires et culturelles .................. 7 16284 - Pictures for Everybody! Postcards and Literature/ Bilder für alle! Postkarten und Literatur . 11 16309 - Talking About Literature, Scientifically..................................................................................... 14 16377 - Sprache & Rache ...................................................................................................................... 16 16416 - Translational Literature - Theory, History, Perspectives .......................................................... 18 16445 - Langage scientifique, langage littéraire : quelles médiations ? ............................................... 24 16447 - PANEL Digital Humanities in Comparative Literature, World Literature(s), and Comparative Cultural Studies ..................................................................................................................................... 26 16460 - Kolonialismus, Globalisierung(en) und (Neue) Weltliteratur ................................................... 31 16499 - Science et littérature : une question de langage? ................................................................... 40 16603 - Rhizomorphe Identität? Motivgeschichte und kulturelles Gedächtnis im -
Czech Language and Literature Peter Zusi
chapter 17 Czech Language and Literature Peter Zusi Recent years have seen a certain tendency to refer to Kafka as a ‘Czech’ author – a curious designation for a writer whose literary works, without exception, are composed in German. As the preceding chapter describes, Kafka indeed lived most of his life in a city where Czech language and society gradually came to predominate over the German-speaking minor- ity, and Kafka – a native German-speaker – adapted deftly to this changing social landscape. Referring to Kafka as Czech, however, is inaccurate, explicable perhaps only as an attempt to counterbalance a contrasting simplification of his complicated biography: the marked tendency within Kafka scholarship to investigate his work exclusively in the context of German, Austrian or Prague-German literary history. The Czech socio-cultural impulses that surrounded Kafka in his native Prague have primarily figured in Kafka scholarship through sociological sketches portraying ethnic animosity, lack of communication and, at times, open violence between the two largest lin- guistic communities in the city. These historical realities have given rise to the persistent image of a ‘dividing wall’ between the Czech- and German- speaking inhabitants of Prague, with the two populations reading different newspapers, attending separate cultural institutions and congregating in segregated social venues. This image of mutual indifference or antagonism has often made the question of Kafka’s relation to Czech language and cul- ture appear peripheral. Yet confronting the perplexing blend of proximity and distance, famil- iarity and resentment which characterized inter-linguistic and inter- cultural contact in Kafka’s Prague is a necessary challenge.