800 Literatur und Rhetorik
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (296)
- Article (158)
- Part of Periodical (23)
- Working Paper (19)
- Book (18)
- Conference Proceeding (6)
- Review (6)
- Report (5)
- Doctoral Thesis (2)
- Preprint (2)
Language
- English (537) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (537)
Keywords
- Rezeption (33)
- Dante Alighieri (23)
- Literatur (22)
- Erzähltheorie (21)
- Benjamin, Walter (19)
- Geschichte (18)
- Productive reception (18)
- Pasolini, Pier Paolo (17)
- Reenactment (17)
- Digital Humanities (16)
Institute
- Neuere Philologien (26)
- Extern (16)
- MPI für empirische Ästhetik (2)
- Biowissenschaften (1)
- Medizin (1)
- Psychologie (1)
- Sprachwissenschaften (1)
Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture has been exposed by some learned voices of 'the Muslim world' as alluding, by the means of one particular quotation, to age-old stereotypes about Islam being an essentially violent creed in which moderation through reason has no legitimate place, and of representing Muhammadas an evil and inhuman man who preached that Islam should be spread by the sword. While none of these presumably 'Muslim' voices deny that the Pope has the right to express his opinions, even when they are plainly wrong in the face of historic facts that show how Islam and Christianity were spread (or were made to spread) across the world, he is criticised for a host of omissions in terms of intellectual honesty and factual accuracy. These omissions, it is argued here, cast an unfortunate light on the compatibility of scientific and religious rationality much advocated by the Pope in his 12 September 2006 lecture. This flagrant 'performative contradiction' (Habermas) leaves room for speculation about the true aim of the speech. Is Benedict XVI's appeal to theology as a legitimate academic discipline a credible attempt to explicate Roman Catholicism's rightful place in a modern world governed by liberal democracy and ethical-political pluralism, or is it a reflection of a move to restore the age-old, intolerant, anti-scientific, and anti-democratic legacy of the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church?
Vsevolod Garshin's "Four Days" is the story of a wounded soldier left for dead on a deserted battlefield: During four days of physical and mental agony, he reassesses his formerly idealistic attitude towards war and ends up condemning it as something far from glorious and noble. However, the importance of Garshin's short story in literary history is not so much its anti-war message as the innovative nature of the form used to convey that message. Garshin was the first to explore the potential of direct interior monologue (hereinafter: DIM): a technique which seeks to create the artistic illusion that the reader is eavesdropping on a character's inner discourse without any mediation on the part of a narrator [...]. Because Garshin's text anticipated many of the devices later used by such masters of the genre as James Joyce and William Faulkner, the form of "Four Days" merits close analysis.
Early in his life Pasolini showed interest in Dante: in a letter sent to Luciano Serra in 1945, he declared that 'la questione di Dante è importantissima'. He later reaffirmed his interest in Dante in two attempts to rewrite the "Commedia": "La Mortaccia" and "La Divina Mimesis". [...] In 1963 he mentioned "La Divina Mimesis" for the first time. [...] Critics have mostly focused on the work's unfinished condition as a sign of the poetic crisis which Pasolini experienced at the end of his life. Scholarly interpretations of "La Divina Mimesis" can be divided into three main groups: the first strain can be primarily attributed to a 1979 essay by Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, four years after the publication of La Divina Mimesis. Bàrberi Squarotti attributes Pasolini's difficulty in completing his rewriting of the "Divine Comedy" to the author's ideology. The work's intermittent irony and its unfinished state are good indicators of the impossibility of recreating Dante's achievement, in particular the Dantean ideology. [...] The second strain of interpretation stresses the work's linguistic dimensions. The period when Pasolini conceives of the project of "La Divina Mimesis" corresponds, according to his repeated declarations, to a time of dramatic change in the Italian linguistic context. [...] Finally, the third type of interpretation locates "La Divina Mimesis" in the theoretical context of Pasolini's final conception of poetry. Here critics stress in particular the difference between the poet's intentions and the final result.[...] These three interpretative strains share the conviction that, in comparison with its model, Pasolini's project ends in failure. It is a failure in at least three senses: on the level of its ideology (not as strong as Dante's), on the level of reality (because of the linguistic standardization of Italian society), and on the level of aesthetics (even though the author pretends that his failure possesses an aesthetic value). This paper would like to question this conclusion: by redefining the object of mimesis and its conditions Davide Luglio tries to understand the reason why the author decided to print his work in a form that at first sight appears ill-defined and fragmentary.
Italy has experienced a high number of earthquakes. However, the identity of "the Italians" has not yet been defined by their "landscape of wounds." Referring to an earthquake in central Italy (Amatrice) in August 2016, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published a controversial caricature of two wounded Italians standing alongside the "Lasagnes," a pile of bodies layered like the well- known Italian pasta dish. By analysing the caricature's text, intertext, and context, while drawing on imagology and geopoetics, this article aims to show how earthquakes are linked to Italian cultural stereotypes and national identity.
On the one side there is book culture, centered on the printed book as a material object; on the other digital culture, centered on what is displayed on a screen, by now more often than not that of a mobile phone. In the cultural imaginary, the two practices are separated by far more than just media technology. The girl in Delevingne's picture, in choosing to read a book rather than participate in the social media arena, opts (as the black-and-white blocking of the caption neatly reflects) for a commendable type of media use: She sharpens her intellect and exercises her imagination, she digs deep rather than staying on the surface, and she engages – in a seemingly disinterested manner – with valuable content rather than obsessing over how to present herself in the best light. Her absorption is a badge of honor, much different from the 'bad' absorption of digital media users, a recurring trope that is artistically represented, for example, in the much-acclaimed surrealist photo series "SURFAKE" by the French photographer Antoine Geiger, which represents mobile phone users whose faces are sucked into their devices.
This article contributes to the European history of musical nationalism with regard to operatic debates in the eighteenth century. The investigation reveals that within operatic debates national categories were used for all levels of the multimedia genre of opera: music, text, composer, and actor. Moreover, the relationship between national character and national taste was a highly critical point: there was general agreement that only outstanding aesthetic abilities enable composers to go beyond their own particular national character. Only in this respect could aesthetic abilities stand above national taste, which was said to be shaped by national character.
Taking her cue from Margo de Mello's "Teaching the Animal", Maria Moss employs a hands-on, didactic approach to teaching human-animal studies (THAS), introducing texts that she has used in her seminars in the past - from philosophical background materials and sociological surveys to novels, short stories, and poems. In her article, "'The skin and fur on your shoulders': Teaching the Animal Turn in Literature," Moss uses texts that "look at the animals from inside out," ending with a discussion of SF and chimp fiction. From James Lever's "Me Cheetah" to George Saunders's story "Fox 8", she focuses on animal agency within the narrative form, presenting texts that feature animals as narrators. Once we acknowledge that notions of language, cognition, and thinking about the future are no longer limited to human narrators and that "storying" is no longer specific to humans, Moss writes, interspecies storied imaginings mark one possible alternative to the long history of human dominance and exceptionalism - not just in life, but in literature, too.
As a postmodern detective novel, "City of Glass" circles around its genre, deconstructing topical notions such as the 'case' and citing the commonplace language of hardboiled detectives as well as Poe's archetypical Dupin. Furthermore, the novel also refers to completely different texts and genres: Milton's Christian epic "Paradise Lost", for example, is allotted an important position in the 6th chapter with its speculations about a regaining of the Adamic language. The allusions to the puritan poet Milton exemplifies how Auster synthesizes a postmodern inquiry into genre and language with references to "premodern moral questions", highlighting interesting analogies between post- and premodern practices of reading and writing. An even more astonishing example are the subtle references to Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe", the best-selling puritan "spiritual autobiography" about the survival of a castaway on a remote Caribbean island, which have not yet been accorded scholarly attention. Although they don't seem to be of much significance at first sight, they, too, build on the relationship between puritan and postmodern reading and writing. In this paper, Joachim Harst unfolds the many parallels between Auster's and Defoe's first novels and shows how Auster reads "Robinson Crusoe" as an exemplary figure for existential solitude and artistic creativity. Auster's postmodern view on Defoe's novel also helps to highlight fissures in Robinson's seemingly complete "selfcomposure" via autobiography, while the colonial aspects of Defoe's novel resonate with Auster's postcolonial critique of America's puritan origins. Harst concludes with a glance at Auster's references to "Robinson Crusoe" in his other early works, especially his autofictional text "Invention of Solitude", in which he depicts the artist as "shipwreck[ed] in the heart of the city" and uses "Robinson Crusoe" to construct a biographical mythology aiming at creative authorship.
To explicate what distinguishes pain, Benjamin elaborates: "Of all corporeal feelings, pain alone is like a navigable river which never dries up and which leads man down to the sea. [...] Pain [...] is a link between worlds. This is why organic pleasure is intermittent, whereas pain can be permanent. This comparison of pleasure and pain explains why the cause of pain is irrelevant for the understanding of man's nature, whereas the source of his greatest pleasure is extremely important. For every pain, even the most trivial one, can lead upward to the highest religious suffering, whereas pleasure is not capable of any enhancement, and owes any nobility it possesses to the grace of its birth - that is to say, its source. (SW I, 397)" In these important lines, pain's unique strength is linked not to its origin (this is reserved for pleasure), but rather to the way that its strenuous flow throughout the suffering body has the power to lead it to infinite heights. In contrast to pleasure, which is forever seeking out its sources, pain manifests itself most consummately when it is intensified; it fulfills itself most deeply by gradually reenforcing its own fortitude. To make sense of pain, therefore, we must understand the nature of its 'movement': and in Benjamin's metaphor of the "navigable river" - its flow. In what follows, I develop Benjamin's idea of the nature of pain as manifested in the internal law of its ,ow in two other of Benjamin's texts: 'Berlin Childhood Around 1900' (1934) and 'Thought Figures' (1933).
In "'Preventing Malicious and Wanton Cruelty to Animals': Historical Animal Welfare and Animal Rights Education," Andreas Hübner outlines future historical animal welfare and animal rights education, sketching concepts and themes such as animal agency and historicity as well as the relational, spatial, and material practices employed between humans and animals. Hübner then historicizes present-day attitudes toward anthropocentricism and discusses educational and learning processes that (can) help to overcome human-animal dichotomies in the history classroom. Hübner presents subject-specific recommendations for critically integrating topics into future curricula and shows that it is possible to teach in a way that acknowledges the role of nonhuman actors. He thereby challenges conventional human-centered narratives of historical learning.