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Research has contended youth is an "invention" of the 18th century. This thesis does not contest the fact that youth was already known and accepted as a stage in life even earlier. Certain basic anthropological patterns of youthfulness, for example nonchalance, instability, recklessness, exaggeration, bashfulness looking forward to the future and the ability to make friends have been rhetorically implied, repeated and cited as a matter of course since the time of Aristoteies. The pointed thesis that the concept of youth only arose in the 18th century accentuates that youth as an autonomous way of life is a characteristic of the Modern Age.
I shall take a look at a cluster of problems: the relation between fictional and actual worlds, between fictionality and narration, between action and rationality, between action and agent or subject, and between world, enunciation and subject in light of two important theoretical works, both from 1991. My choice of references is not entirely arbitrary: their basic approach shows certain similarities that underline the shortcomings of both in dealing with literature, in spite of the stimulating arguments they unfold. But they also show marked differences that allow us to develop their argument further. The books are Paisley Livingston's 'Literature and Rationality' and Marie-Laure Ryan's 'Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory'.
„Great writers,“ those who constitute our canon (at any given moment, one should add warily, since aesthetic canons fluctuate considerably over time), have invariably been the focus of reception studies, partly because they provide the most fertile ground for research, but partly also because literary scholars (and in particular the aspiring doctoral candidate: I myself graduated with an influence /reception study of this kind) need some justification for their endeavors, and what better ticket into the ivory rower - or onto the book market - than the study of the most seminal and widely accepted authors? James Joyce is just such a „great author.“ And „James Joyce and German Literature,“ the subject of this essay, must inevitably result in some form of reception study. But just what form should it take? Within the limited space of one article, it would be impossible to survey in toto Joyce's influence on German literature; that is, the multiple receptions of Joyce by some four or five generations of authors writing in German.
Whether minorities such as the Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand, the San across Southern Africa and the Métis in Canada, or native majority peoples such as the Aymara and Quechua in South America: indigenous peoples" lifeworlds have been transfigured by the difficulties originating from a history of conquest, settlement and suppression. The imperialist strife of European empires and the atrocities committed by their gang of "explorers" – including "this person Cook" in the South Pacific, Columbus in North America, Cortéz in Mexico, Gomes in West Africa, or van Riebeeck in South Africa – was aimed at enforcing European values and institutions, destroying, silencing or marginalizing indigenous cultures and societies as inferior "others." Unsurprisingly, the disruption of formal colonialism in the second half of the 20th century held no inherent improvement for the concerns of formerly colonized peoples. ...
European scholars, colonial administrators, missionaries, bibliophiles and others were the main collectors of Malay books in the nineteenth century, both in manuscript or printed form. Among these persons were many well-known names in the field of Malay literature and culture like Raffles, Marsden, Crawfurd, Klinkert, van der Tuuk, von Dewall, Roorda, Favre, Maxwell, Overbeck, Wilkinson and Skeat, to name only a few. Their collections were often handed over to public libraries where they form an important part of the relevant Oriental or Southeast Asian manuscript collections.
Therefore the knowledge of the intellectual culture of the Malay Peninsula and the Malay World in general depended very much on these manuscripts and printed books collected often by chance or in a rather unsystematic way. The collections reflect in a strong sense the interests of its administrative or philologist collectors: court histories, genealogies of aristocratic lineages, law collections (adat-istiadat as well as undangundang) or prose belles-lettres build a vast bulk of these collections, while Islamic religious texts and poetry forms popular in the 19th century (especially syair) are fairly underrepresented. Malay manuscripts and books located in religious institutions like mosques or pondok/pesantren schools have not been searched for; until today there are more or less no systematic studies of these collections. As in some statistics religious texts build about 20% of all existing Malay manuscripts, their neglect by Europeans scholars leads to a distorted view of the literary culture in the Malay language.
The flâneur has been depicted in several different ways in 19th as well as 20th and 21st century literature and criticism. The focus of this brief paper will be on the roles given him in English writings from or around the time of the 1848 revolutions in France and Germany, in which the flâneur comes to represent not only a street idler, but also a critical traveller to, and observer of, the continental city and its revolutionary activities.
The reason is not small
(2010)
"Don’t forget the sugar!" my husband called after our son who was already running down the road, hopping across puddles and skirting garbage mounds. He leaned back in his chair and sighed. The plastic covered wires were stretching to the point that they would break soon. We would get it restrung again. (...)
The essay provides a contrapuntal "parallactic" reading of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's "Bildungsroman" Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre - with its extensions Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre - and James Joyce's high modernist A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922). Derived from astronomy, the term parallax designates, transferred to literary history, a narrative stratagem, a metapoetical rationale, and an interpretive method. Joyce employs it as a key concept and narrative tool in Ulysses to denote a stereoscopic perspective applied to the protagonists’ actions and the world they live in. Leopold Bloom thus refl ects on it and the technique of Ulysses is determined by it. On a higher plane, literary critics, too, engage in literary historical parallax whenever they read texts intertextually — as exemplified in this essay. A parallactic reading of the novels’ protagonists Wilhelm Meister and Stephen Dedalus, as regards not just their identification with Shakespeare’s Hamlet but also the symbolic connotations embedded in their names and mythological pretexts, allows us to shed new light on the roles and significance of narrative irony, chance, and paternity in these novels.