830 Literaturen germanischer Sprachen; Deutsche Literatur
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"Che tempo, che tempo": Geology and Environment in Max Frisch’s 'Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän'
(2016)
Critical readings of Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän [Man in the Holocene] have tended to read its heterogeneous and inter-medial form as a code for the mental disintegration of its protagonist. This paper argues instead that this feature can be seen as a poetological engagement with geological and climatic timescales. Due to its hybrid form, the incorporation of a multiplicity of textual fragments and pictorial representations, the text undermines both conventional definitions of narrative and representations of nature. Holozän’s non-linear structure establishes an aesthetic of slowness that ushers in an awareness of the utterly different time schemes of geological and climatic processes. Furthermore, the importance of the material features, such as an interplay between text and image and the disconnected, paratactical arrangement of sentences mirrors the novel’s focus on natural phenomena. Frisch’s narrative establishes a poetics that tries to reach beyond the confinements of an anthropocentric perspective and thereby subverts the borders between culture and environment.
In German children’s literature around 1900, the representation of childhood in pseudo-colonial realms participates in a construction of racial identities based on transcultural play. Acts of reading and scenes of instruction intersect with material objects to convey a pedagogy of race dominated by learned whiteness. This article asks: How does German children’s fiction around 1900 reconfigure national identity as imperial experience? An analysis of a noncanonical though exemplary fictional text about a jungle adventure demonstrates strategies used to include the child in the colonial experience. Imagining this ›play world‹ replicates for the child reader a sense of agency and citizenship through encounters with an indigenous mediator, an impish primate and imaginary landscapes – each represented through the lens of European epistemologies. These tropes produce tension between historical fact and imaginative fiction, working together to map a colonial geography of German identity on to a model transatlantic German childhood. Framed by theories of material objects and toys, and supported by the work of literary scholars and cultural historians, I examine the brief story »Die kleine Urwälderin« [The Little Jungle Girl] from Auerbachs Deutscher Kinder-Kalender auf das Jahr 1902 [Auerbach’s Almanac for German Children, 1902]. In it, the Amazonian setting aspires to historically factual representation, which, however, cedes considerable territory to the realm of fantasy. The projection of a German forest adventure on to a Brazilian geography elides historical truths, such as centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, and instead inserts imperial signifiers into an established syntax of the European child at play. The resulting national ideology of childhood identity in this German language story imposes colonial order on a reimagined play world.
There is a curious gap in the scholarship on texts for young people: while series fiction has been an important stream of publishing for children and adolescents at least since the last decades of the nineteenth century, the scholarship on these texts has not been central to the development of theories on and criticism of texts for young people. The focus of scholarship is much more likely to be on stand-alone, high-quality texts of literary fiction. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), for example, has occupied critics in the field far more often and more significantly than all of the 46 popular novels about schoolgirls with similar plots that were published by Grahame’s contemporary, Angela Brazil (beginning in 1904 with A Terrible Tomboy). Literary fiction such as Grahame’s tends to be defined in terms of its singularity – the unique voice of the narrator, unusual resolutions to narrative dilemmas, intricate formal designs, and complicated themes – often specifically as distinct from the formulaic patterns of series fiction. Yet, curiously, scholars typically use examples from literary fiction to illustrate the common characteristics of books directed to young readers: it was Grahame’s book, and not Brazil’s books, that appeared in the Children’s Literature Association’s list Touchstones as one of the "distinguished children’s books" the study of which "will allow us to better understand children’s literature in general," according to Perry Nodelman, who chaired the committee that produced the list. (Nodelman 1985, p. 2) ...
The rebellious spirit of 1968 was characterised, among other things, by a strong aversion to authority of any form. In Dutch children’s literature, this spirit is personified by the author Miep Diekmann. From the end of the 1950s until the end of the 1980s, Diekmann contested all kinds of social injustice, both in her children’s books and in her critical work. This article discusses how she challenged the status quo in Dutch children’s literature, firstly through her efforts to improve the cultural status of children’s literature, and secondly through writing books with a different view of the world than the one with which children were then familiar. In interviews, reviews, and discussions with politicians, she successfully appealed for more academic and critical attention for books for young readers. With her children’s books she wanted to make her readers think independently about all kinds of social injustice. Whereas in her first books a tension can be observed between her ambition to make children aware of forms of inequality and her intention to let her reading audience judge for themselves, in her later novels, in particular in De dagen van olim, [The Days of Yore] (1971), she presents social injustice in a way that leaves more to the imagination of her readers.
This article, based on extensive source material from Denmark, Sweden and Norway, is about the changing norms for children’s media, childhood and art in Scandinavia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The analysis demonstrates how changes within welfare state institutions converged with the youth rebellion’s wider criticism of children’s low status in traditional power hierarchies, and contributed to new definitions of the role of media in children’s lives. After establishing a wider historical contextualisation, the article moves on to show how the criticism of existing norms in the realm of children’s literature in the mid-1960s grew into a critique of the prevailing ideologies and existing narratives in all children’s media (including film, theatre and television) at the end of the decade. A key figure in the redefinition of norms for children’s media was the Swede, Gunilla Ambjörnsson. Her 1968 book, Trash Culture for Children, led to discussions about the role of media in children’s lives all over Scandinavia. Her core belief in the innate social and political interests of children had a great impact on the ways in which the possibilities for an explicit political agenda in children’s media were conceptualised in Scandinavia at large.
The years around May ’68 (c. 1965 – c. late-1970s) are widely understood to represent a watershed moment for children’s books in France. An important factor was the influence of a new fringe of avant-garde publishers that attracted attention across their trade in and beyond France. Using archives and interviews and accounts of some of the books produced and their reception, this article presents case studies of the most influential publishing houses as a series of three snapshots of the areas of movement in the field. At the same time, it evaluates the extent to which the social, cultural and political upheavals in France in the wake of May ’68 helped to alter the shape of book production for children and to bring about a ›radical revolution‹ in the children’s publishing trade.
Editorial [2020, english]
(2020)
Editorial [2019, english]
(2019)
Editorial [2021, english]
(2021)
Spain is a gateway to Europe and has long been a destination for migrants and refugees from Africa and Latin America. In the last decades, the country has received a significant number of people from the Saharawi tribe in the Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony today occupied by Morocco and Algeria. Like other European countries it has also received individuals and families fleeing from the conflicts in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring. Spain has a history of its people crossing the borders during and after the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Despite these experiences, exiles and asylum seekers are seldom depicted in its children’s books. When they address such topics, most stories in recent books are about forced displacements of people during World War II or conflicts in regions far from Spain such as Nepal, the Middle East, or Afghanistan. A few Spanish books addressed to young adults, or recommended for readers between nine and eleven, deal with Saharawi refugees but they are usually set in African refugee camps. They seldom depict the refugee as a migrant who might come and establish a life in Europe. ...