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Throughout his literary work Goethe portrays characters who defy and reject 18th and 19th century ideals of aristocratic and civil families, notions of heritage, assumptions about biological connections, expectations about heterosexuality, and legal mandates concerning marriage. The questions Goethe's plays and novels pose are often modern and challenging: Do social conventions, family expectations, and legal mandates matter? Can two men or two women pair together and be parents? How many partners or parents should there be? Two? One? A group? Can parents love children not biologically related to them? Do biological parents always love their children? What is the nature of adoptive parents, children, and families? Ultimately, what is the fundamental essence of love and family? Gustafson demonstrates that Goethe's conception of the elective affinities is certainly not limited to heterosexual spouses or occasionally to men desiring men. A close analysis of Goethe's explication of affinities throughout his literary production reveals his rejection of loveless relationships (for example, arranged marriages) and his acceptance and promotion of all relationships formed through spontaneous affinities and love (including heterosexual, same-sex, nonexclusive, group, parental, and adoptive).
The Emprise of Poetry analyzes the insidious entwinement of anti-Americanism and antisemitism in modern and contemporary German culture through the writings of one of its most acclaimed literary figures: Dresden native Durs Grünbein (1962-). Michael Eskin offers an unprecedented view of the American-cum-Jewish discontents at the heart of modern and present-day German culture through the exemplary lens of the work of Durs Grünbein, the most widely translated and globally honored living German poet, and the only one to have been hailed as the Berlin Republic's “most qualified contemporary candidate for the office of German national poet.” Yet as Eskin outlines, Grünbein's work contains a paradoxical and tension-filled twofold self-construction: as an idiosyncratically 'American' poet and Ezra Pound's vociferously philosemitic heir, who merely happens to be writing in German, as it were, conjoined with an avidly anti-American German poet who writes emphatically, and not always savorily, as a German and a self-proclaimed heir to the legacies of Celan and Kafka – most notably, on matters American and Jewish. Against the foil of these tensions, Eskin traces and documents postwar German high culture's persisting inability to purge itself of ideological toxins that leach into the mainstream from centuries-old prejudices and antagonisms revolving around Germany's love-hate bond with America as well as its ostensibly enduring suspicion and antipathy toward Jews. Eskin's deep dive into the 'American' Grünbein's apparent philosemitism coupled with the German Grünbein's antisemitically-inflected anti-Americanism reveals the fault lines underlying the complex and contradictory legacies and contexts of postwar German culture.