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The reading of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" that I propose on the following pages is based on two assumptions that are derived from widely divergent approaches to Kafka's writings. The first is the offspring of psychological interpretation and recognizes that homologous unconscious strategies are operative in the "Letter to his father" and Kafka's tale. Josef Rattner, writing about the "Ur-Situationen", the "primal situations" that Kafka experienced as a child and which produced in him his most basic psychological attitudes (Rattner calls them Grundhaltungen), concludes: "Kafka's life is an incessant attempt to cope with his father-experience. His father is at the base of his anxiety of life and his crippling hypochondria. … Sadism and masochism are distinctive features of Kafka's works."
The argument proceeds from the documentary hypothesis in modern biblical studies. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that the 1st 5 books of the Old Testament were written by four different authors at different times. These authors are known as J, P, E and D. Their writing was joined in the 5th c. B.C.E. into what became the Pentateuch and the first part of the Old Testament. The result of this joining was a series of contradictions and redundancies in the final text as we have it today. Readers of the Bible who seek to read it as one coherent text try to naturalize these contradictions by what I call "stitching." Stitching involves putting coherence back into the Pentateuch by accounting for the contradictions and redundancies in terms of plausibility and common logic. Modern authors who write versions of Old Testament stories, such as Thomas Mann in his "Joseph and his brothers", also engage in stitching. I demonstrate how Mann stitches a number of important episodes from the Patriarch saga. I discuss the effect of this process on the story line. I compare that to two other recent instances of biblical stitching in modern fiction. And I conclude with the argument that stitching in modern biblical hypertexts stems from the need for coherence in the modern realistic novel. This post-enlightenment coherence impulse is contrasted with myth and the latter's tolerance for loose ends and less than coherent narrative.
The Book of Job from the Old Testament is juxtaposed in detail with its hypertext in Thomas Mann's novel: the chapter where Jacob mourns for his "dead" Joseph. An argument is made that Mann's awareness of rabbinical literature creates a connection with the Akedah tradition, i.e., different ways of dealing with the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham in Genesis. The notion that Abraham actually does kill Isaac, as suggested by a medieval rabbinical text, is interwoven into the analysis of Jacob's mourning for Joseph who appears as an Issaac-like sacrificial victim in Mann's novel. A connection is established between Abraham, Job and Jacob as figures whose children are claimed by God, and their reactions to this test are compared.
It is commonplace to assert that the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament is based on an androcentric position. Although critics have tried to introduce some sort of female empowerment by reassessing various biblical stories (cf. Savina Teubal, 1984), Genesis remains a man's realm with only a limited female perspective. The case of Dinah's rape by Shechem in Genesis 34 illustrates the marginality of womanhood in the biblical world and theology. The pericope tells us that, while the Israelites are settled near the Hivite city of Shechem in Canaan, Jacob's and Leah's daughter Dinah goes out of the Israelite camp. She is raped by Shechem, the prince of the eponymous city, who then abducts her and makes her one of his household. A deal is concluded by Jacob's sons and the Shechemites, according to which the situation can be made legitimate through marriage if the men of Shechem circumcise themselves. While the Shechemites are weak at er the surgery, the Israelites sack the city, kill all the males and take Dinah back.
This essay deals with two retellings of Genesis: Thomas Mann's "Joseph and his brothers" and Anita Diamant's "The red tent". Both authors note the presence of implicit pagan tendencies among the women of Jacob's clan (Gen 31:19; 35:2) and develop this subtext for their respective ideological purposes. Thomas Mann creates a dichotomy between the backwardness of the pagan female realm and the progressive nature of the monotheistically-oriented patriarchs. The path toward modern humanist values comes from the likes of Jacob and Joseph rather than Rachel and Leah in Mann's novel. Anita Diamant, on the other hand, adopts the opposite attitude, namely, that the paganism of Rachel, Leah, as well as other women in Jacob's family, is a humane and natural form of spirituality in contrast to the bloodthirsty Yahwism of Jacob and his sons. The latter point is illustrated by the sacking of Shechem. In order to question the patriarchal stance of the Old Testament Diamant reverses the key values informing the theology of the Bible. Thus, in "The red tent" Jacob's wives venerate the Ashera in particular. The latter constitutes a challenge to the stance of the Deuteronomic History where the cult of the Ashera is viewed as a key reason behind God's decision to let the Babylonians destroy the Southern Kingdom of Judah. And since Mann's novel upholds the patriarchal spirit of the biblical text, Diamant enters into debate with the continuity of female disempowerment which reaches all the way from Genesis to "Joseph and his brothers".
The tentative title of my presentation is GENDER AMBIVALENCE (AMBIGUITY?) and deals with Renaissance iconography in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. It will show that homosexual attraction, although obvious in the story (and Mann's life) is a secondary issue and that the main concern lies with the problem provided by an aesthetic principle. (Parallel narratives, the plot is not the real/only story).
Do you know what I think? asks Adrian Leverkuehn. "Musik ist die Zweideutigkeit als System." Music is Janus-faced by its very nature. It can move and paralyze. "What passion cannot music raise and quell," exclaims John Dryden in his Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687. Music is an expert in the use of opiates, asserts Settembrini in The Magic Mountain, and Nietzsche speaks of her dual, intoxicating and befogging, nature. Shakespeare's Desdemona "will sing the savageness out of a bear" (IV, i) and the merchants in Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen tell the story of another Orpheus whose song so charms a sea "monster" that it saves the singer's life and returns his treasure to him. John Dryden's Thimotheus "to his breathing flute and sounding lyre, could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire" (Alexander's Feast, 1697). "Musica Consolatrix" and "Musica Tremenda". She is the "Mysterium tremendum et fascinosum" in Kleist's novella about the power of music. While English late 17th and early 18th century literature offers a particularly rich harvest of poetry celebrating the contradictory qualities, or effects, of music, there is in fact testimony to this at all stages of our tradition.
Rezension zu Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours. A New Translation with Commentary. Translated by Susan Ranson. Edited with and Introduction and Notes by Ben Hutchinson. Camden House. Rochester New York. 2009. XLIV + 240 S.
If projection and transference represent similar terms that imply a fundamental form of ignorance, the aim of this investigation can not be to draw a sharp distinction between projection and transference. Of course, the dialectic of inside and outside doesn't play the central role in transference like it does in projection. In a certain way, the notion of projection concerns all forms of perception and seems to be wider than the notion of transference. But on the other hand, the notion of transference as a poetic act of creating metaphorical analogies seems to be wider than that of projection. My interest in the following lines lies not in the attempt to draw a valuable distinction between both terms, but to look at their interplay in a novel that discusses all forms of archaism, primitivism and regression, commonly linked with projection, a novel, that at the same time tries to give an explanation of the foundation of modern art. Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus offers an insight not only into the combination of projection and love, but also into ignorance as the common ground of projection and transference. I will therefore first try to determine the modernity of Thomas Mann's novel in regard to the abounding intertextual dimension that characterizes the text, and then closely examine the central scene of the novel, the confrontation between Adrian Leverkühn and the obscure figure of the devil.
On July 17, 1904, Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote in his notebook: "'Elektra' […] Die Verwandtschaft und der Gegensatz zu Hamlet waren mir auffallend". He reiterated the parallels in two letters to two different addressees, Christiane Thun-Salm (October 12, 1903) and Ernst Hladny (ca. 1909-1911), and in 1912 he wrote to Richard Strauss, whose opera based on the play had premiered in 1909, about the similarity between the two royal children: "[D]a sind alle Grundmotive identisch, und doch, wer denkt bei Elektra an Hamlet!" Indeed, comparing William Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" (ca. 1600) and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's "Elektra" (1903) may not seem to be the most obvious task to undertake. At first glance, the English Renaissance humanism of "Hamlet" may appear utterly incompatible with the Viennese fin-de-siècle modernism of "Elektra", but the parallels and similarities of the two plays far exceed the mere fact that both protagonists are children of murdered kings whose mothers pick their new lovers from among their relatives. In fact, I should like to suggest that "Elektra" is a direct response to "Hamlet", and should be read as the modernist continuation of the humanist Prince of Denmark and his "antic disposition".