BDSL-Klassifikation: 17.00.00 20. Jahrhundert (1914-1945) > 17.18.00 Zu einzelnen Autoren
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There are many aspects of Haas' life and experiences in India which deserve greater attention. I would like to refer briefly only to his attempts as a litterateur to come to terms with 'India' as presented in his autobiographical recollection and to some comparative cultural reflections in his essays. Like all reconstructions his autobiographical recollection of India is also a construct in which the site of India as a place of exile is justified by an achieved awareness between conscious individual choice and inevitability. An individual acts out a personal history, the prefiguration of which he only becomes aware of in the form of a subsequent epiphanic realization. Given Haas' literary background, it is not surprising that this is articulated through a literary association.
The point of my explanation is simply that in its "deep-structure" even 'A Handful of Dust' (and 'a fortiori', as we shall see, other novels by Waugh) attaches itself to the mode of the historical novel, which is only in a very qualified way the descendant of the epic, as Lukacs would have us believe.
This chapter proposes the scar as a productive image to conceptualize the relation of speakers to the particular language otherwise called mother tongue, native or first language. Thinking of this relation in terms of a scar avoids the biopolitical implications of concepts derived from the context of family and birth that have, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, come to present language as basis of a nation state. The image of the scar also avoids the biographical normalization and linguistic hierarchization implied in the term first language, as both are equally important biopolitical strategies of forming individuals and communities. Thinking of the mother tongue in terms of a scar emphasizes the intensity of lasting formation and identification entailed by acquiring this particular language, and it highlights the violence inherent to these processes that tends to be covered up by the naturalizing and family-related imagery of native or mother tongue as well as by the favour implied in the term first language.
Resistance
(2019)
The term 'resistance', as it appears in the writings of Walter Benjamin, marks the attempt to think a politics that emerges out of a certain experience of history and time. This entry shows that 'Widerstand' is conceived here principally as a resistance against the course of a catastrophic history - a desire for time to cease its flow and come to a standstill.
In Carl Barks' 1963 comic strip "The Invisible Intruder", the bed becomes the main theme of the story. We get to know how Uncle Scrooge became a creative and successful entrepreneur. Since his parents were too poor to provide a proper sleeping place for their son, Scrooge had to sleep in a cabinet drawer. Therefore, Scrooge's only aim was to buy himself a bed. His capitalist creativity is, as he himself admits, driven by the "desire for a better bed." With the economic growth of his company, his bed becomes bigger too. But in the end, he throws out his enormous mattress because it is too sensitive to the vibrations caused by the money rammer in the money bin; and moreover, the investigation into the cause of the vibrations became far too expensive. Eventually, Scrooge is returning to his childhood bed: the cabinet drawer. What is striking about this story is not the idea that objects of everyday culture play a leading role within a narrative; it is the fact that the usual cultural function of furniture is altered in a significant way. The misapplication of the drawer draws attention to the object of everyday culture as signifier of the everyday experience in capitalist societies. The function of the bed is no longer defined by criteria of good sleep but of economic calculation. The bed thereby becomes an agency within the narrative that questions the stability of the cultural and linguistic semantics of the everyday. In the following, I will press the point that the representation of the bed in literary texts from Homer to Kafka can be read as an implicit linguistic theory of cultural signification.
Musil uses the word 'Dichter', 'poet', as a dignified title reserved for artists of great achievement (different from 'Schriftsteller', 'writer'). His use of the word emphasizes the importance of the specifically poetic qualities of literature (and of the poetic sensibility of criticism,) not as an idle objection to the contemporary merging of literary works with either pure sensation and feeling, or with other forms of discourse. Focusing on "Törless", as well as on Musil's notebooks and essays, this article shows how Musil understands the relationship between rational thinking and the latent ideas and thoughts that emerge within the poetic dimension (the 'other state of mind' or 'other condition.') This approach illuminates Musil's conception of "precision and soul" - the interlocking of sensitive perceptiveness and intellectual rigor - as a necessary pre-condition for valuable literature and valuable life.
A single mother and her grown children. A team now. The fathers have come and gone and are barely remembered. These are her children. By contrast, Matthew (27; 56) identifies an anonymous woman as "the mother of Zebedee's children." We'll talk about it, for what it may mean. More important is the fact that this group is headed by a dominant female. Let's see if it makes a difference. Demian, as you'll remember, was the product of matriarchy, as it were, and seemed to be none the worse for it. It wasn't even worth mentioning. Fifty years later, Edgar Wibeau of Plenzdorf's The New Sorrows of Young W. (1972), a modern version of Goethe's bestselling novel Werther written 200 years earlier, and one of the most brilliant pieces of theatre post-Brecht, does find it worth mentioning. He is "sick & tired" of being paraded as living proof that "a single mother can successfully raise a male."
At the beginning of The Judgment, we find Georg Bendemann, who has just finished a letter to his friend in Russia, reliving once more the agonizing decision to write the letter in the first place. The decision had not been easy. Like many of Kafka's characters, Georg Bendemann is obsessed with the idea of analysis, with the painstaking exploration of all sides of a given issue. "What could one write to such a man without hurting him?" had been the question. "On the other hand, by writing only casual gossip or not at all one would doubtless increase the friends isolation" had been the counter-argument. What follows now is an exercise in looking at alternatives that spawn new alternatives that leaves the reader dazzled. Each conclusion is in turn explored to its possible opposite implications, which are in turn qualified, which leads to more questions followed by more partial conclusions plus qualifications thereof. The process could continue ad infinitum, in fact, has gone on for years--we are merely presented with a condensed version of it.