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Framed Visions analyzes the pivotal role American mass media and popular culture have played in shaping the political, social, and psychological identity of postwar Germans and Austrians. Through detailed readings of films, novels, plays, and poems of a variety of contemporary artists--including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Elfriede Jelinek, Herbert Achternbusch, Monika Treut, Peter Handke, and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann--Gerd Gemuinden reveals the paradoxical stance of this generation toward American politics and Hollywood aesthetics. On the one hand, they are pulled toward a culture that has shaped childhood images, tastes and desires; on the other, they reject American politics and the colonizing effect of its mass culture. In contrast to most scholarship about the reception of U.S. culture abroad, this study underscores the imaginary relation of contemporary German and Austrian artists to America. Topics such as "Americanization" and "cultural imperialism" are therefore treated not as a foreign principle imposed from the outside but as ways that German and Austrian artists have tried to come to terms with their own problematic culture and history. Gem_nden's study elucidates how the culture of the United States has been mapped in contradictory ways onto questions of national and cultural identity in Germany and Austria over the last thirty years. Gerd Gemuinden is Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College.

Winner, 2022 MLA Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies

From the Jewish Provinces showcases a brilliant and nearly forgotten voice in Yiddish letters. An insistently original writer whose abrupt departure from the literary scene is the stuff of legend, Fradl Shtok composed stories that describe the travails of young women looking for love and desire in a world that spurns them. These women struggle with disability, sexual violence, and unwanted marriage, striving to imagine themselves as artists or losing themselves in fantasy worlds. The men around them grapple with their own frustrations and failures to live up to stifling social expectations. Through deft portraits of her characters’ inner worlds Shtok grants us access to unnoticed corners of the Jewish imagination.
 
Set alternately in the Austro‑Hungarian borderlands and in New York City, Shtok’s stories interpret the provincial worlds of the Galician shtetl and the Lower East Side with literary sophistication, experimenting with narrative techniques that make her stories expertly alive to women’s aesthetic experiences.

Richard Kramer follows the work of Beethoven and Schubert from 1815 through to the final months of their lives, when each were increasingly absorbed in iconic projects that would soon enough inspire notions of “late style.” 
 
Here is Vienna, hosting a congress in 1815 that would redraw national boundaries and reconfigure the European community for a full century. A snapshot captures two of its citizens, each seemingly oblivious to this momentous political environment: Franz Schubert, not yet twenty years old and in the midst of his most prolific year—some 140 songs, four operas, and much else; and Ludwig van Beethoven, struggling through a midlife crisis that would yield the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, two strikingly original cello sonatas, and the two formidable sonatas for the “Hammerklavier,” opp. 101 and 106. In Richard Kramer’s compelling reading, each seemed to be composing “against”—Beethoven, against the Enlightenment; Schubert, against the looming presence of the older composer even as his own musical imagination took full flight.

From the Ruins of Enlightenment begins in 1815, with the discovery of two unique projects: Schubert’s settings of the poems of Ludwig Hölty in a fragmentary cycle and Beethoven’s engagement with a half dozen poems by Johann Gottfried Herder. From there, Kramer unearths previously undetected resonances and associations, illuminating the two composers in their “lonely and singular journeys” through the “rich solitude of their music.”