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In Benjamin's Library, Jane O. Newman offers, for the first time in any language, a reading of Walter Benjamin's notoriously opaque work, Origin of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends to its place in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin's day. Taking into account the literary and cultural contexts of Benjamin's work, Newman recovers Benjamin's relationship to the ideologically loaded readings of the literature and political theory of the seventeenth-century Baroque that abounded in Germany during the political and economic crises of the Weimar years. To date, the significance of the Baroque for Origin of the German Tragic Drama has been glossed over by students of Benjamin, most of whom have neither read it in this context nor engaged with the often incongruous debates about the period that filled both academic and popular texts in the years leading up to and following World War I. Armed with extraordinary historical, bibliographical, philological, and orthographic research, Newman shows the extent to which Benjamin participated in these debates by reconstructing the literal and figurative history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books that Benjamin analyzes and the literary, art historical and art theoretical, and political theological discussions of the Baroque with which he was familiar. In so doing, she challenges the exceptionalist, even hagiographic, approaches that have become common in Benjamin studies. The result is a deeply learned book that will infuse much-needed life into the study of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

In Benjamin's Library, Jane O. Newman offers, for the first time in any language, a reading of Walter Benjamin's notoriously opaque work, Origin of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends to its place in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin's day. Taking into account the literary and cultural contexts of Benjamin's work, Newman recovers Benjamin's relationship to the ideologically loaded readings of the literature and political theory of the seventeenth-century Baroque that abounded in Germany during the political and economic crises of the Weimar years. To date, the significance of the Baroque for Origin of the German Tragic Drama has been glossed over by students of Benjamin, most of whom have neither read it in this context nor engaged with the often incongruous debates about the period that filled both academic and popular texts in the years leading up to and following World War I. Armed with extraordinary historical, bibliographical, philological, and orthographic research, Newman shows the extent to which Benjamin participated in these debates by reconstructing the literal and figurative history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books that Benjamin analyzes and the literary, art historical and art theoretical, and political theological discussions of the Baroque with which he was familiar. In so doing, she challenges the exceptionalist, even hagiographic, approaches that have become common in Benjamin studies. The result is a deeply learned book that will infuse much-needed life into the study of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

This book examines the interplay of history, textuality, dramaturgy, and politics in the school dramas of Daniel Casper von Lohenstein (1635–1683). The plays are based on well-known episodes from classical Roman history and were staged in Breslau by students at two all-male humanistic gymnasia. Organized exclusively around stories of such female protagonists as Agrippina, Cleopatra, Epicharis, and Sophonisbe, these productions required that the young actors dress as women to play roles that routinely involved scenes of political intrigue, incest, seduction, torture, and threatened infanticide. In print these plays were accompanied by massive annotational apparatuses that delineate the contours of the learned universe of eastern central Europe in exacting detail. Newman's study sheds light on the ideological complexity of gender, politics, and learned culture in the early modern period as it emerges from these intriguing and often bizarre plays.

The displaced are often rendered silent and invisible as they journey in search of refuge. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples from Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, Iraq, Syria, UK, Germany, France, the Balkan Peninsula, US, Canada, Australia, and Kenya, the contributions to this volume draw attention to refugees, asylum seekers, exiles, and forced migrants as individual subjects with memories, hopes, needs, rights, and a prospective place in collective memory. The book's wide-ranging theoretical, literary, artistic, and autobiographical contributions appeal to scholarly and lay readers who share concerns about the fate of the displaced in relation to the emplaced in this age of mass mobility.

The displaced are often rendered silent and invisible as they journey in search of refuge. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples from Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, Iraq, Syria, UK, Germany, France, the Balkan Peninsula, US, Canada, Australia, and Kenya, the contributions to this volume draw attention to refugees, asylum seekers, exiles, and forced migrants as individual subjects with memories, hopes, needs, rights, and a prospective place in collective memory. The book's wide-ranging theoretical, literary, artistic, and autobiographical contributions appeal to scholarly and lay readers who share concerns about the fate of the displaced in relation to the emplaced in this age of mass mobility.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Introduction: On Location -- I: HISTORIES OF THE PRESENT -- Feminist Cultural Literacy: Translating Differences, Cannibal Options -- Transnational Practices and Interdisciplinary Feminist Scholarship: Refiguring Women's and Gender Studies -- Notes from the (Non)Field: Teaching and Theorizing Women of Color -- The Progress of Gender: Whither ''Women''? -- The Present and Our Past: Simone de Beauvoir, Descartes, and Presentism in the Historiography of Feminism -- II: INSTITUTIONAL PEDAGOGIES (A FORUM) -- Contending with Disciplinarity -- The Past in Our Present: Theorizing the Activist Project of Women's Studies -- Rethinking Collectivity: Chicago Feminism, Athenian Democracy, and the Consumer University -- From Politics to Professionalism: Cultural Change in Women's Studies -- Battle-Weary Feminists and Supercharged Grrls: Generational Differences and Outsider Status in Women's Studies Administration -- Taking Account of Women's Studies -- Nice Work, If You Can Get It—and If You Can't? Building Women's Studies Without Tenure Lines -- The Politics of ''Excellence'' -- III: IN THE SHADOW OF CAPITAL -- Academic Housework: Women's Studies and Second Shifting -- (In)Different Spaces: Feminist Journeys from the Academy to a Mall -- Analogy and Complicity: Women's Studies, Lesbian/Gay Studies, and Capitalism -- Institutional Success and Political Vulnerability: A Lesson in the Importance of Allies -- Life After Women's Studies: Graduates and the Labor Market -- IV: CRITICAL CLASSROOMS -- Strangers in the Classroom -- ''Women of Color in the U.S.'': Pedagogical Reflections on the Politics of ''the Name'' -- Negotiating the Politics of Experiential Learning in Women's Studies: Lessons from the Community Action Project -- What Should Every Women's Studies Major Know? Reflections on the Capstone Seminar -- Subversive Couplings: On Antiracism and Postcolonialism in Graduate Women's Studies -- Afterword: Continuity and Change in Women's Studies -- Bibliography: Locating Feminism -- Contributors -- Index