Suchergebnisse

Seventeenth-century literature in the Holy Roman Empire has rarely been discussed in general cultural histories about the European Baroque. The dramatic achievements of Shakespeare, Calderon, and Corneille, the inimitable poetry of the Metaphysicals and Marino and the mischievous adventures of the Spanish picaro have long overshadowed the literary accomplishments of the German Baroque. Even today many scholars are still content to dismiss the German seventeenth century as derivative while, in the opposite camp, loyal Germanists currently defend its uniqueness. As is generally known, literary developments in the Empire were slowed by a number of unfortunate circumstances. Geographical, confessional, and linguistic disunity strongly contributed to the parochialism of German Baroque letters. Local literary societies were widely scattered throughout the Empire from Silesia to the Rhine and communication between them was greatly hampered. The lack of a main cultural center similar to the artistic hubs of Paris or London further isolated the writers from each other. In addition, confessional differences not only segregated Catholic and Protestant poets, but also resulted in the simultaneous development of a Batoque Latin and German literature.

ACTION MEANS ACTION WITH RESPECT TO TEXTS. ON OCCASIONS WHEN ONE CAN SENSE OTHER INTERESTS AT WORK, THE EFFECT IS VERY CURIOUS. IN A POLEMICAL EXCHANGE, FOR INSTANCE, BETWEEN A MARXIST CRITIC AND A POSTSTRUCTURALIST, ONE MAY KNOW WHAT SORT OF EVENT IS BEING STAGED; BUT, AS ONE LISTENS TO THE PRESENTATIONS, AND COMPARES THE ELOQUENCE ON BOTH SIDES WITH ITS APPARENT SUBJECT, ONE SEES THAT CRITICISM IS NOT THE POINT AT ALL. THEY ARE REALLY ARGUING ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE-A SOCIAL QUESTION OF SOME KIND-THOUGH NEITHER KNOWS IT YET. SKEPTICS LIKE TO REPLY THAT THE UNDERGROUND QUALITY OF SUCH ENCOUNTERS IS A SIGN OF A HOPELESS CULTURAL MOMENT.

In Mexican colonial history, the night the Aztecs of Tenochtitlán massacred Cortés's troops, 30 June 1520, is known as la noche triste. In Mexican contemporary history, the night of 2 October 1968 is known as la nueva noche triste, a night that saw the deaths of numerous student protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Tlatelolco) in Mexico City. It is also referred to as la noche de Tlatelolco or merely as Tlatelolco '68. Some writers contend that the events at Tlatelolco and the emergence of the student movement of 1968 leading to the confrontation are among the most important occurrences in Mexico since the revolution and that Mexico is profoundly different today because of them. It is therefore not surprising that a significant portion of the Mexican literature written since 1968 reflects in various ways the impact of these events on the Mexican national consciousness. A variety of texts, both fictional and nonfictional, appeared immediately after the incident, and others have continued to appear in contemporary Mexican literature in the ensuing years. These texts either address or refer to the dramatic occurences in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas and are collectively known as "Tlatelolco literature."

Interprets the text of Orwell's last book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Shows what Orwell had in mind when he outlined it, sketches his political and theoretical positions and tries to account for why the political and analytic lessons of the novel undermined those he was offering in his essay and journalism. Orwell complained his political views were distorted by the book's reviewers. (JLN)

The background to the past & present practice of apartheid in South Africa is investigated, based on various studies & literary texts. Emphasis is on some aspects of the Boers' social psychology & history, which tend to bias their ideas of reality & hamper them in action adapted to reality. This psychology revolves around a Calvinistic notion of predestination, linked with an idealized picture of historical turning points such as the Great Trek & the Boer Wars. At present, the Boers perceive themselves as surrounded by enemies; but they themselves are creating the dangers, & their defensive measures reinforce what they are meant to contain -- resistance & fear. Current "reforms" of apartheid disguise the entrenchment of basic apartheid structures, above all, the territorial separation of racial groups. The Boers' racist attitudes are combined with obstinacy, which can only be understood as an outflow of fear. 29 References. Modified AA

Lutz Rathenow (32), together with Frank-Wolf Matties, Jürgen Fuchs and Bettina Wegner, represents a new generation of opposition writers in East Germany. Brought to early prominence, they filled the gaps in a literary community decimated by the expulsion and emigration of many leading spokesmen. Rathenow has been fighting state censorship since 1980, when he became the first East German writer to be imprisoned for the crime of publishing a book abroad. In early June 1984, the staging of his pantomime play, Keine Tragoedie (No Tragedy) was cancelled a few days before opening at a university theatre in Leipzig. The director of the play was later suspended and the actors submitted to a 'personal and artistic aptitude test' to gauge their suitability for continuing in the pantomime group. This action followed a protest letter by Rathenow to the Ministry of Culture, which was leaked to the Western press, sharply attacking restriction on literary freedom in the GDR. The following sketch (translated by Jean Brown) is published here by permission of Piper publishing house (Munich); it appeared in Lutz Rathenow's book Boden 411. Stücke zum Lesen und Texte zum Spielen (Ground 411. Pieces for Reading and Texts for Acting). This book was impounded by the authorities when it was sent to Rathenow by his West German publisher – a fact which he duly included in his letter of protest to the Ministry of Culture.

Stanley Fish's rhetorical deconstructive project "Against Theory" (see, eg, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Cambridge, 1980), which favors authorial intention & community consensus over textual indeterminacy & critical subjectivism, is exposed as an unfair weapon against would-be adversaries. The politically leftist movement of critical legal studies (CLS), which had originally tried to realign the US legal system's notion of interpretation through deconstruction, ended by disenfranchising traditional liberal ideas. With his academic origins in literary modernism, Fish brought Richard Rorty's pragmatism into the nihilist CLS circle. After review of the against theory argument, Fish's purely rhetorical victories over liberal legal theorists Ronald Dworkin & Owen Fiss are discussed. Finally, a critique of the against theory argument points to essential assumptions of the deconstructionist, Fish's fundamentally ahistorical position, epistemological notions on beliefs as internalized theories, & his inescapable rightist conclusions. J. Sadler

In a study of English letters from the seventeenth century into the romantic era, Marjorie Nicolson analyzed the rise and persistence of topoi of mountain poetry. Beginning in the 1720s, such celebrated poets as James Thomson proved able to create compelling verse about peaks that they knew only from their reading; and even after seeing stupendous rocky terrain themselves poets tended to produce works conditioned to some extent by previous literary representations. Such a dynamic, whereby one text becomes the model for another in a continuing process, also figures in the depiction of the Caucasian landscape by Russians, starting with Gavrila Derzhavin. Most Russian mountain poetry is concentrated in the 1820s, when a conception of the southern borderland as sublime wilderness was firmly established by Aleksandr Pushkin in Kavkazskii plennik and then elaborated in verse by such secondary writers as K. F. Ryleev, S. D. Nechaev, V N. Grigor'ev, and V G. Tepliakov.

Only three out of her 36 short stories are available in English (two translated by the writer herself), and yet Simin Daneshvar (b. 1921) is Iran's first woman novelist and one of the country's most significant fiction writers. Daneshvar has published Savooshoon (the most popular Iranian novel), three collections of short stories, ten translations, and a memoir about her late husband, Jalal Al-e Ahmad. Having retired from her teaching position at Tehran University, she lives in Iran and is now working on her second novel, The Wandering Island.Daneshvar's literary work is a celebration of the feminine—her taste for life and love, her art of endurance and strength. While most of her female characters manage to survive, none reveals such stamina or resilience as the narrator of Jalal's Sunset. Confronted with the unexpected death of a husband, a colleague, and a collaborator, Daneshvar in this text portrays a real survivor.

A SPEECH OF BARERE (1788)
Bertrand Barère of Vieuzac (1755-1841), one of the members of the committee of public safety, tried to embark on a literary career before the Revolution, and from 1782 he wrote several discourses and eulogies, which brought him a certain degree of local renown. As a result he was elected member of the Academy of the Floral Games at Toulouse in 1788. His entrance discourse seems to have caused a certain sensation, if not a scandal, and we have some remarks written at the time, but the text itself was considered to be lost. I have found a dictated copy of the discourse at the municipal library in Bagneres-de-Bigorre, and I reproduce it here with this brief comment. It is interesting because it illuminates aspects of Barère's theory of history and his ideas about philosophy. It reveals the last formative stage in the intellectual development of Barère in the period before the Revolution.
Koichi YAMAZUKI.

The role of literature (fictional and non-fictional) and its reflection on the reading process of Soviet Germans is closely connected with Soviet German history up to the present situation. Principally, two reasons are responsible for this: 1) the lack of a satisfying German language competence and of a general interest by the Germans and 2) many problems with the distribution of German language literature. This includes fictional and non-fictional texts. Another result on the basis of 21 in-depth interviews with Soviet German emigrants and of the analysis of the Soviet German press reveals that there exists only very little interest in the Soviet German literature. The Soviet German press, first of all the weekly "Neues Leben", functions as a forum of Soviet German questions dealing with Soviet German history, culture and literature. For many Soviet Germans, "Neues Leben" is the only German language source they read. In reading more literature from East and West Germany the interest in German language literature could raise. Closer connections of Soviet German writers to their readers could increase the interest in reading Soviet German literature and in using the German language.

The early 1960s marked a period of intellectual and literary ferment in Taiwan. The East-West Controversy, which had its roots in the debate that took place in the middle of the last century regarding the continued validity of the Chinese tradition in the face of western military and economic superiority and in the controversy regarding westernization as the road to modernization in the 1930s, had broken out afresh. Creative writers, musicians and painters were experimenting with new forms and new techniques. As early as 1954 the writers of modern Chinese poetry had started the search for a more contemporary expression of their art form; and modern poetry societies, each with its own philosophy on how modernization should take place, had come into being. Writers of fiction who up till then had been almost exclusively concerned with the Sino-Japanese War; the mainland before the communist takeover in 1949, or the various aspects of the struggle against communism, were moving away from this kind of "propaganda-motivated writing" towards the production of "pure literature." However, there were few modern Chinese creative writers of stature on whom either the poet or fiction writer could model himself. This was because of the ban imposed by the government in Taiwan on the works of writers prior to 1949 due to the association of many of them with communism or with ideologies unacceptable to the authorities. This meant that they had to seek for inspiration in the works of western writers which could be found in translation or in pirated versions of the original texts in the major cities of Taiwan. The traditionalists viewed this growing trend with alarm as did those writers who were closely associated with the Kuomintang. The latter had formed themselves during the early 1950s into three writers' associations, the China Association of Literature and Art, the Chinese Youth Writers' Association, and the Taiwan Women Writers' Association.