Results by title
212 books match the query 'German' and 9 start with r
Recognizing Reality
German Realism and the Mediation of PresenceJessica C. Resvick
Northwestern University Press, 2026
Reveals how literary scenes of recognition stage the process of coming to know reality
In this deeply researched and thought-provoking study, Jessica C. Resvick traces nineteenth-century German realist writing’s paradoxical investment in mediated accounts of the world and the direct, unfiltered experience of reality. Focusing on the motif and operation of recognition in its Aristotelean sense, Resvick examines self-reflexive narratives in which the authors struggle to resolve this tension between the media they choose and the immediacy they hope to create.
Through close readings of key works by canonical authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, and Wilhelm Raabe, Resvick demonstrates the medially influenced and historically contingent ways in which they represent reality. Each chapter focuses on a different form of recognition, reconstructing the techniques that allow these authors to generate an effect of presence. Exploring the history and poetics of knowledge exchange, Recognizing Reality: German Realism and the Mediation of Presence expands on recent media histories of realism, examining the material bases for realist aesthetics while also investigating media’s epistemological accomplishments, and astutely elaborates the role of recognition as a medium-specific tool.
Remembering 1989
Future Archives of Public ProtestAnke Pinkert
University of Chicago Press, 2024
For many, 1989 is an iconic date, one we associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The year prompts some to rue the defeat of socialism in the East, while others celebrate a victory for democracy and capitalism in the reunified Germany. Remembering 1989 focuses on a largely forgotten interregnum: the months between the outbreak of protests in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 and its absorption by the West in 1990. Anke Pinkert, who herself participated in those protests, recalls these months as a volatile but joyous “laboratory of radical democracy,” and tells the story of how and why this “time out of joint” has been erased from Germany’s national memory.
Remembering 1989 argues that in order to truly understand Germany’s historic transformation, we must revisit protesters’ actions across a wide range of minor, vernacular, and often transient sources. Drawing on rich archives including videotapes of untelevised protests, illegally printed petitions by Church leaders, audio recordings of dissident meetings, and interview footage with military troops, Pinkert opens the discarded history of East European social uprisings to new interpretations and imagines alternatives to Germany’s neoliberal status quo. The result is a vivid, unexpected contribution to memory studies and European history.
Requiem for Ernst Jandl
Friederieke Mayröcker
Seagull Books, 2018
Austrian poet and playwright Ernst Jandl died in 2000, leaving behind his partner, poet Friederike Mayröcker—and bringing to an end a half century of shared life, and shared literary work. Mayröcker immediately began attempting to come to terms with his death in the way that poets struggling with loss have done for millennia: by writing. Requiem for Ernst Jandl is the powerfully moving outcome. In this quiet but passionate lament that grows into a song of enthralling intensity, Mayröcker recalls memories and shared experiences, and—with the sudden, piercing perception of regrets that often accompany grief—reads Jandl’s works in a new light. Alarmed by a sudden, existential emptiness, she reflects on the future, and the possibility of going on with her life and work in the absence of the person who, as we see in this elegy, was a constant conversational and creative partner.
Respectability and Deviance
Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of RepresentationRuth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Studying a period of German literary history that has been largely ignored by modern readers, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres demonstrates that these writings offer intriguing opportunities to examine such critical topics as canon formation; the relationship between gender, class, and popular culture; and women, professionalism, and technology. The writers she explores range from Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, who managed to work her way into the German canon, to the popular serial novelist E. Marlitt, from liberal writers such as Louise Otto and Fanny Lewald, to the virtually unknown novelist and journalist Claire von Glümer. Through this investigation, Boetcher Joeres finds ambiguities, compromises, and subversions in these texts that offer an extensive and informative look at the exciting and transformative epoch that so much shaped our own.
Richard Wagner's Political Ecology
Kirsten S. Paige
University of Chicago Press, 2026
A study of the deep history of the Wagnerian environmental imagination.
Richard Wagner’s operas are bursting with environmental imagery, from tittering birds to flowing rivers to towering trees. In Richard Wagner’s Political Ecology, Kirsten S. Paige asks where Wagner’s environmental imagination came from, how it was received by audience members and reconceived by stage directors, and how it refracts his politics. By tracing the ecological dimensions of the composer’s essays and dramas, Paige reveals how Wagner’s environmental imagination was inextricable from broader political concerns of his time.
The book begins by examining the way Wagner’s political ecology shape-shifted across its rhetorical, musical, scenographic, and technological permutations. Although Wagner’s essays and dramas invite a range of interpretations, for Paige, they point to an all-encompassing image of opera-as-climate. The book then turns to the ways Wagnerian drama—and opera more generally—at once participates in the industrial-technological lineage of climate change and helps spectators grapple with the challenges of living in a warming world. In providing the first close examination of Wagner’s artistic thought, practice, and reception in relation to nineteenth-century climate theory and the early history of environmentalism, Richard Wagner’s Political Ecology considers what it might mean to reimagine opera around ethical mandates of sustainability.
Robert Walser
A CompanionEdited by Samuel Frederick and Valerie Heffernan
Northwestern University Press, 2018
The Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) is now recognized as one of the most important European authors of the modernist period, having garnered high praise from such prominent voices as Susan Sontag, W. G. Sebald, and J. M. Coetzee. Robert Walser: A Companion is the first comprehensive guide to Walser’s work in English. The twelve essays in this collection examine Walser’s literary output, historical milieu, and idiosyncratic writing process, addressing aspects of his biography; discussing the various genres in which he wrote (the novel, short prose, drama, lyric poetry, and letters); and analyzing his best-known novels and short stories alongside lesser-known but no less fascinating poems, plays, and prose pieces.
An essential addition to the scholarship about this eccentric, prolific, and influential writer’s work, Robert Walser: A Companion will be of interest both to established scholars and to those coming to Walser for the first time.
Romantic Things
A Tree, a Rock, a CloudMary Jacobus
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Roy Pascal and Georg Lukács
Towards a Re-Evaluation of the History of Marxist Literary Criticism in Britain?Helmut Peitsch
University of London Press, 2018
Rubble Flora
Selected PoemsVolker Braun
Seagull Books, 2019