Böcker i New Directions in German Studi-serien

Since 2000, much attention has been paid to the increase in social precarity in Europe and the US. Phenomena of precarization (such as underemployment, indebtedness, deaths of despair) tend to be causally linked to the rise of neoliberalism as a strategy of governance that redistributes risk to the already vulnerable. Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film broadens the scope beyond this narrow definition of precarity, using Germany as a national case study, to examine the historical genesis of precarity, its evolution from 19th-century industrial modernity to the present, and its reflections and reconfigurations in artistic production, in particular with relation to work, gender, and sexuality. Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film probes the concept of "representation" in its full two senses, in the sense of "artistic depiction" and in the sense of "political proxy and advocacy." In linking economic discourses to cultural production, this volume shows how culture can reveal the gap between a society's narrative about itself and the ways in which precarity shapes experience and consciousness.

Authors and the World traces how four core 'modes of authorship' have developed and inflect one another in modern Germany through a series of twenty different case studies, including the work of Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Anna Seghers, Walter Höllerer, Felicitas Hoppe and Katja Petrowskaja, and original interview material with contemporary writers Ulrike Draesner, Olga Martynova and Ulrike Almut Sandig. 'Modes of authorship' are attitudes taken towards being an author that can be seen both in what an individual author does and in how a particular literary tradition or trend is perceived and mediated by others both within and beyond Pierre Bourdieu's literary field. Consequently, they deliberately straddle questions of literary production and reception. Rebecca Braun sets out how the commemorative, celebratory, utopian and satirical modes interact with one another to produce a number of models of authorship that carry either foundational or otherwise normative force for society. In varying combinations and with deep roots in 19th- and early 20th-century practices, the four modes of authorship create a remarkably (and at times troublingly) stable German literature network that to a large degree still determines the way contemporary German-speaking authors enact their cultural significance in their writing, engage with their local circumstances, and are more broadly received around the world. Authors and the World provides not just a radically new approach to German literary history but a thoroughly new paradigm for thinking about literary authorship.

Examines Jewish-German "tropes" in Hélène Cixous's oeuvre and life and their impact on her work as a feminist, poet, and playwright.Hélène Cixous is a poet, philosopher, and activist known worldwide for her manifesto on Écriture feminine (feminine writing) and for her influential literary texts, plays, and essays. While the themes were rarely present in her earlier writings, Germany and Jewish-German family figures and topics have significantly informed most of Cixous's late works. Born in Algeria in June 1937, she grew up with a mother who had escaped Germany after the rise of Nazism and a grandmother who fled the racial laws of the Third Reich in 1938. In her writing, Cixous refines the primitive scene of a "German" upbringing in French-occupied colonial, antisemitic Algeria.Scholar and filmmaker Olivier Morel delves into the signs and influences that "Germany," "German," and "Osnabrück" have exerted over Cixous's work. Featuring an exclusive interview with Hélène Cixous and stills from their travel together to Osnabrück in Morel's 2018 documentary, Ever, Rêve, Hélène Cixous, Morel's The "German Illusion" examines the unique literary meditation on the Holocaust sustained throughout her later texts. Morel helps us to understand an uncannily original oeuvre that embodies the complexities of modernity's genocidal history in a new way.

"Illuminates our understanding of the nation and the role of culture in the nation, in an era of extreme displacement and increased migration, in "German" geopolitical and linguistic-cultural spaces"--

A long-overdue reassessment of post-1918 Salzburg as a distinct Austrian cultural hub that experimented in moving beyond war and empire into a modern, self-consciously inclusive, and international center for European culture.For over 300 years, Salzburg had its own legacy as a city-state at an international crossroads, less stratified than Europe's colonial capitals and seeking a political identity based in civic participation with its own economy and politics. After World War I, Salzburg became a refuge. Its urban and bucolic spaces staged encounters that had been brutally cut apart by the war; its deep-seated traditions of citizenship, art, and education guided its path.In Interwar Salzburg, contributors from around the globe recover an evolving but now lost vanguard of European culture, fostering not only new identities in visual and performing arts, film, music, and literature, but also a festival culture aimed at cultivating an inclusive public (not an international elite) and a civic culture sharing public institutions, sports, tourism, and a diverse spectrum of cultural identities serving a new European ideal.

Writing the Mountains reconsiders the role of the mountains in German language fiction from 1800 to the present and argues that in a range of texts, from E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Die Bergwerke zu Falun" (1819) to Elfriede Jelinek's Die Kinder der Toten (1995) and beyond, the mountains serve as dynamic spaces of material change that generate aesthetic and narrative innovation. In contrast to dominant critical approaches to the Alpine landscape in literature, in which mountain ranges often features as passive settings, or which traces the influence of geographical and geological sciences in literary productions, this study argues for the dynamic role in literature of presumably rigid mineral structures.In German-language fiction after 1800, the counter-intuitive topology of rocky mountain ranges and unfathomable subterranean depths of the Alpine imaginary functions as a space of exception which appears to reconfirm and radically challenge the foundations of Enlightenment thought. Writing the Mountains reads the mountain range as a rigid yet permeable liminal space. Within this zone, semiotic orders are unsettled, as is the division between organic and inorganic, between the human and its other.