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As witnessed by a tremendous upsurge in medieval research, academic meetings, innovative interpretive approaches, enrolment numbers, and public interest, Medieval Studies are proving once again to be a vibrant field of investigations both inside and outside of academia. Nevertheless, there is a tendency among colleagues and administrators in the field of Germanistik/German Studies to exclude the earlier period as an exotic and irrelevant subject matter. The contributors to this volume, all of whom teach at North American universities, make a strong case for the paradigmatic function of medieval German literature for the general field of Germanistik, and argue that many of the most recent changes in our discipline related to the German Studies paradigm have been foreshadowed by Medieval Studies where interdisciplinarity, comparative approaches, the consideration of Mentalitätsgeschichte, theology, history, art history, even gender studies, and the history of everyday life have often constituted the conditio sine qua non. Some of the authors in this volume argue for the relevance of medieval German literature by investigating concrete cases taken from the Middle Ages, others show how modern German literature has been deeply influenced by medieval texts. The purpose of this volume is not to privilege medieval literature over modern literature, but instead to reclaim the premodern period as an important and relevant field of investigation within contemporary German Studies.
While Germans, the largest immigration group in the United States, contributed to the shaping of American society and left their mark on many areas from religion and education to food, farming, political and intellectual life, Americans have been instrumental in shaping German democracy after World War II. Both sides can claim to be part of each other's history, and yet the question arises whether this claim indicates more than a historical interlude in the forming of the Atlantic civilization. In this volume some of the leading historians, social scientists and literary scholars from both sides of the Atlantic have come together to investigate, for the first time in a broad interdisciplinary collaboration, the nexus of these interactions in view of current and future challenges to German-American relations.
An essential critical history of German studies as an academic discipline. German studies has confronted many crises, as well as severe criticism and self-criticism, and yet it has managed to maintain its disciplinary system through every upheaval--the revolution of 1848, the establishment of the Second Reich in 1871, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich, the Second World War and the reconstruction era, the creation and reunification of the two German states. Pier Carlo Bontempelli focuses on this continuity, dating back to the early nineteenth century, when the "founding fathers" of Germanistik secured its status by grounding it in a set of fixed principles, revived by each successive generation of scholars in order to legitimize their position of power--and to ensure their capacity for cultural reproduction. Using the works of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, Bontempelli investigates the institution and principles of German studies and critically reconstructs its history. Mindful of the mechanisms of choice and domination operating at every turn in this history, his book exposes the repressed social and political history of German studies.
Even before Jean-Luc Godard and other members of the French New Wave championed Hollywood B movies, aesthetes and cineasts relished the raw emotions of genre films. This contradiction has been particularly true of horror cinema, in which the same images and themes found in exploitation and splatter movies are also found in avant-garde and experimental films, blurring boundaries of taste and calling into question traditional distinctions between high and low culture. In Cutting Edge, Joan Hawkins offers an original and provocative discussion of taste, trash aesthetics, and avant-garde culture of the 1960s and 1970s to reveal horror's subversiveness as a genre. In her treatment of what she terms "art-horror" films, Hawkins examines home viewing, video collection catalogs, and fanzines for insights into what draws audiences to transgressive films. Cutting Edged provides the first extended political critique of Yoko Ono's rarely seen Rape and shows how a film such as Franju's Eyes without a Face can work simultaneously as an art, political, and splatter film. The rediscovery of Tod Browning's Freaks as an art film, the "eurotrash" cinema of Jess Franco, camp cults like the one around Maria Montez, and the "cross-over" reception of Andy Warhol's Frankenstein are all studied for what they reveal about cultural hierarchies. Looking at the low aspects of high culture and the high aspects of low culture, Hawkins scrutinizes the privilege habitually accorded "high" art -- a tendency, she argues, that lets highbrow culture off the hook and removes it from the kinds of ethical and critical social discussions that have plagued horror and porn. Full of unexpected insights, Cutting Edge calls fora rethinking of high/low distinctions -- and a reassigning of labels at the video store.
Practicing Progress focuses on the German Enlightenment in its dual manifestation as a cultural era and as a mode of discourse. The volume’s unifying theme is the promise and limitations of the Enlightenment, as seen from the twenty-first century. Contributors deal with figures from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries in theology, poetry and drama, economic theory, and music. Included are such powerful critics of the politics of progress as Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, and Bertolt Brecht. The volume is of particular interest to scholars concerned with the complexity of literary phenomena. A variety of interpretive approaches yield fresh insights into the still ongoing project of Enlightenment.
Examines the challenges facing German-language study in the new millennium and highlights how creative, innovative, inspired approaches have allowed it to weather many of them.
A fresh examination of the role of the East in the German literary imagination, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present
Capitalizes on the ripeness of the German case for interdisciplinary investigation
Teaching a foreign language and culture is always a challenge, but it has been especially problematic to teach the German language and culture in the United States in the twentieth century. The tradition of Germany's great poets and thinkers of the past has been joined by a starker legacy. Through explorations of such topics as the world wars, the Holocaust, women in the language-teaching profession, Jewish contributions, and technology's impact on scholarship, this volume inspects the fascination and frustrating relationships of the two cultures as they interact through the teaching of German in American educational systems--from small liberal arts colleges to large and famous universities. This volume resulted from a conference, "Shaping Forces in American Germanics," held in Madison, Wisconsin in September 1996.