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Literary Approaches to the Problem of Identity
2 September 1985
The genre of autobiography is a highly popular form of self-expression in contemporary
Western literature. This sudy first explores the development and established
expectations of the genre in a broad European context and then presents analyses
of five autobiographical works by living German-speaking writers accomplished
in the fictional mode - Thomas Bernhard, Elias Canetti, Max Frisch, Wolfgang
Koeppen, and Christa Wolf. The chosen works not only illustrate that present-day
forms of autobiography are diverse, they also show that the traditional aims
of the genre are no longer valid. The search for personal identity is rendered
complex through writers' changed understanding of the processes of memory, history,...
1 November 1984
Novalis's theory of poetic historiography is seen here for the first time in
its Enlightenment context. Novalis did not, as traditionally supposed, merely
negate the ideals of Enlightenment historiography: rationality, objectivity,
evidence. In typical Romantic fashion he sought also to assimilate theses virtues
dialectically into his own world-view. His narrative techniques in Die Christenheit oder Europa, Hymnen
an die Nacht, and Heinrich von Ofterdingen are analysed from this
perspective. Commentators who see Novalis as Enlightenment's opponent emphasise
the ambiguous communicative function of these works. But here they are seen
as attempts to render the historical process transparent,...
1 March 1984
This study first examines how the early hostile reception of Spinoza's thought
in Germany rapidly established fundamental misconceptions, despite an undercurrent
of opposition from a few little-known, sometimes eccentric, radical freethinkers.
The development of a more productive assessment of Spinoza's philosophy is then
systematically traced in the writings of Mendelssohn, Lessing, Herder and Goethe,
culminating in the vitriolic Spinoza controversy of the 1780s, which provided
the final impulse for Herder's Spinoza-dialogues, God. Detailed analysis
of this neglected key work brings out the crucial importance of Spinoza in the
formulation of a world-view that intimately links the thought of Herder, Goethe...
1 October 1981
The 'banal object' is one whose very insignificance appears to hint at a hidden
meaning. In the texts Dr Segal examines here, the narrators have crucial encounters
with such objects: these scenes first dramatize, and later tentatively resolve,
a personal and literary crisis. Close analysis reveals many themes of radical
self-questioning, expressed in a language whose thematics - or, fundamental
imagery - reproduces the opposition of self and world seen in the relationship
between narrator and object, and displays a similar ambivalence of fear and
desire. The texts are also placed in a literary-historical context: their special
use of objects arises from the conflict between Symbolism and Naturalism, and...
1 January 1981
The Middle High German narrative poet inherited from his literary precursors
a conception of his art as consisting primarily in the translation and poetic
adaptation of given source material, which was allegedly historical truth and
which his patron and audience would expect him to follow. And yet the works
produced by the German poets are often strikingly different from their French
sources. This book describes the origin and history of the German poet's rule
of fidelity to a literary source and considers both the constraint which this
rule imposed upon him and the scope of his legitimate independence.
1 November 1980
Rilke's extraordinary sensitivity to the many and varied landscapes that he
experienced can throw much light on the notions of accommodating self and non-self,
and part and whole, that he repeatedly wrestles with in his poetry. By exmaining
the landscape experiences recorded in Rilke's letters, and the landscape imagery
of his poetry, John Sandford shows how the opaque existential and metaphysical
concerns of a notoriously 'difficult' poet are exemplified in a more tangible
and less elusive form in the relation of the individual to the landscapes about
him.
1 March 1980
This study is concerned with the specifically literary function of names in
Goethe's Faust. Connotation is seen to be an essential feature of Goethe's
name-giving practice, and the means are explored by which names, through their
semantic properties and evocative overtones, are able to offer comment on situations,
highlight character, interact through shared sound, sense or association, and
form part of symbolic patterns within the drama as a whole.
1 December 1979
This study sets out to investigate what kind of rhetoric an author employs
in order to make the reader's flesh creep. On the one hand this entails a close
examination of the language he uses; on the other hand it also entails asking
what the nature of the human experience is that the author is inviting the reader
to share with him. To do one without at the same time doing the other would
be either to fall into the trap of formalism or to risk the danger of confusing
life and literature. For the one, the author draws freely on both classical
rhetoric and modern linguistics and, for the other, on the insights provided
by psycho-analysis.
12 November 1979
Detection of the influence of one writer on another is a time-honoured critical
pursuit. Disclaimers of such influence on the part of writers themselves are
almost equally commonplace. The first problem raised by Rilke's encounter with
the work of Valéry is that it offers the unusual spectacle of a writer
proclaiming a deep indebtedness before a largely unbelieving critical world.
The ascertainable facts concerning Rilke's reading of Valéry have been
well documented elsewhere, and this study focuses on Rilke's expression of an
immediate and overwhelming sense of affinity with Valéry which
critics have for the most part ignored or set aside.