imlr books

Possible Worlds: Jorge Luis Borges's (Pseudo-) Translations of Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka
Rebecca Maria DeWald
December 18, 2020

Reading creates imaginary worlds. Rather than merely contemplating this world, we establish links between the fictional world and the environment we live in. At the same time, the books we read form part of our daily lives, and contribute to the creation of a universe of possible worlds we inhabit. Taking Possible World Theory as a starting point, DeWald re-evaluates and overturns the assumed hierarchical relationship between original text and its translation. Focusing on the translations of Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the author considers why we insist on maintaining borders between texts. DeWald examines marginal cases of translations and originals (pseudo-translations and...

Urban Microcosms 1789-1940
Edited by Margit Dirscherl and Astrid Köhler
July 5, 2019

Urban microcosms are small-scale communal spaces that are integral to, or integrated into, city life. Some, such as railway stations or department stores, are typically located in city centres. Others, such as parks, are less quintessentially metropolitan, whilst harbours or beaches are often located on the peripheries of cities or outside them altogether. All are part of a network of nodes establishing connections in and beyond the city. Together, they shape and inflect the infrastructure of modern life. By introducing the concept of urban microcosm into social, cultural, and literary studies, this interdisciplinary volume challenges the widely held assumption that city life is evenly spread across its spaces. Sixteen...

Television Drama in Spain and Latin America
Paul Julian Smith
July 31, 2018

Television Drama in Spain and Latin America addresses two major topics within current cultural, media, and television studies: the question of fictional genres and that of transnational circulation. While much research has been carried out on both TV formats and remakes in the English-speaking world, almost nothing has been published on the huge and dynamic Spanish-speaking sector. This book discusses and analyses series since 2000 from Spain (in both Spanish and Catalan), Mexico, Venezuela, and (to a lesser extent) the US, employing both empirical research on production and distribution and textual analysis of content. The three genres examined are horror, biographical series, and sports-themed dramas; the three examples of...

Writing and the West German Protest Movements: The Textual Revolution
Mererid Puw Davies
December 22, 2016
The 1960s protest movements marked an astonishing moment for West Germany. They developed a political critique, but are above all distinctive for their overwhelming emphasis on culture and the symbolic. In particular, reading and writing had a uniquely prestigious status for West German protesters, who produced an extraordinary textual culture ranging from graffiti and flyers to agit-prop poetry and autobiographical prose. By turns witty, provocative, reflective and offensive, the avantgarde roots of anti-authoritarianism are as palpable in their texts as their debt to high literature. But due to this culture’s (apparently) anti-literary tone, it has often remained illegible to traditional criticism. This volume presents close...
Poets as Readers in Nineteenth-Century France
Edited by Joseph Acquisto, Adrianna M. Paliyenko, and Catherine Witt
October 30, 2015
This volume of essays focuses on how poets approach reading as a notion and a practice that both inform their writing and their relationship to their readers. The nineteenth century saw a broadened and increasingly self-conscious concern with reading as an interpretive and political act, with significant implications for poets' individual practice, which they often forged in dialogue with other poets and artists of the time. Covering the 1830s to the late 1990s, a period rich in poetic innovation, the essays examine a wide range of authors and their diverse approaches to reading as inscribed in - and related to - creative writing, and articulate the many ways in which reading developed as an active engagement key to the critical thought...
From North Africa to France: Family Migration in Text and Film
Isabel Hollis-Touré
March 27, 2015
Over the past four decades immigration to France from the Francophone countries of North Africa (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) has changed in character. For much of the twentieth century, migrants who crossed the Mediterranean to France were men seeking work, who frequently undertook manual labour, working long hours in difficult conditions. Recent decades have seen an increase in family reunification - the arrival of women and children from North Africa, either accompanying their husbands or joining them in France. Contemporary creative representations of migration are shaped by this shift in gender and generation from a solitary, mostly male experience to one that included women and children. Just as the shift made new demands of the '...
Constance Pascal (1877–1937): Authority, Femininity and Feminism in French Psychiatry
Felicia Gordon
November 14, 2014
Constance Pascal’s career in French psychiatry from 1908 to 1937 exemplifies the opportunities open to women in the French Third Republic as well as the prejudices they encountered. As the first woman psychiatrist in France, Pascal, of Romanian origin, attained professional success at the cost of suppressing her personal life. Best known for her work on dementia praecox, she founded one of the first schools in France for children with severe learning difficulties, and made remarkable contributions in the reform of asylum practices and, influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, in psychotherapeutic intervention. Her feminism is demonstrated by her distinguished, often contentious, career in a hitherto all male profession and by her...
Vicissitudes: Histories and Destinies of Psychoanalysis
Edited by Naomi Segal and Sharon Kivland
December 21, 2012
Academics, analysts and artists are gathered together in this illustrated volume, which celebrates the culmination of a two-year project at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies to discover and debate current issues in psychoanalysis in the arts and humanities across five language-fields in Europe and beyond. The twenty-four essays include surveys of psychoanalytic thought in areas speaking French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish; the work of eight artists, ranging from found objects in Marseilles or the figure of Gradiva on a manhole cover to the life of Le Corbusier, the lightest object in the world and words on a glass wall; and eight academic essays, including studies of humour in child therapy, Freud in Argentina,...
Terrorism, Italian Style: Representations of Political Violence in Contemporary Italian Cinema
Edited by Ruth Glynn, Giancarlo Lombardi, and Alan O'Leary
June 7, 2012
The legacy of Italy's experience of political violence and terrorism in the anni di piombo ('years of lead', c. 1969-83) continues to exercise the Italian imagination to an extraordinary degree. Cinema has played a particularly prominent role in articulating the ongoing impact of the anni di piombo and in defining the ways in which Italians remember and work through the atrocities and traumas of those years. Terrorism, Italian Style brings together some of the most important scholars contributing to the study of cinematic representations of the anni di piombo. Drawing on a comparative approach and a broad range of critical perspectives (including genre theory, family and gender issues, trauma theory and ethics), the book...
Writing and Muslim Identity: Representations of Islam in German and English Transcultural Literature, 1990-2006
Frauke Matthes
February 1, 2012
Writing and Muslim Identity is a comparative study of Islam in contemporary German- and English-language literature. At a time when the non-Islamic world seems to be defining itself increasingly in contrast to the Islamic world, this literary exploration of Islam-related issues sheds new and valuable light on the cultural interaction between the Muslim world and 'the West'. Writing and Muslim Identity engages with literary representations of different versions of Islam and asks how travel and migration, the transcultural experiences of migrant and post-migrant Muslims, may have shaped the Islams encountered in today's Germany and Britain. With its comparative approach to 'cultural translations' as creative and challenging...

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