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  [Description of] German Literature as a Transnational Field of Production, 1848-1919

  Lynne Tatlock, Editor and Kurt Beals, Editor

  A collection of new essays bringing into view the push and pull of the national and the international in the German-language cultural field of the period.
  
  The cultural formations of the so-called Age of Nationalism (1848-1919) have shaped German-language literary studies to the present day, for better or worse. Literary histories, German self-representations, the view from abroad - all of these perspectives offer images of a culture ever more concerned with formulating a coherent, nationally focused idea of its origins, history, and cultural community. But even in this historical moment the German-speaking territories were not culturally self-contained; international forces always played a significant role in the constitution of the so-called "German" literary and cultural field.
  This volume rethinks the historical period with fourteen case studies that bring into view the push and pull of the national and international in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, undertaking a reframing of literary-cultural history that recognizes the interrelatedness of literatures and cultures across political and linguistic boundaries. Viewing even overtly national literary and cultural projects as belonging to an international system, these case studies examine the interrelations, organization, and positioning of the agents, forces, enterprises, and processes that constituted the German-language literary-cultural field, locating these ostensibly national developments within an inter- or even anti-national context.

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  [Introduction to] Wim Wenders: Making Films That Matter

  Olivier Delers and Martin Sulzer-Reichel

  "Wim Wenders: Making Films That Matter is the first book in 15 years to take a comprehensive look at Wim Wenders's extensive filmography. In addition to offering new insights into his cult masterpieces, the 10 essays in this volume highlight the thematic and aesthetic continuities between his early films and his latest productions. Wenders's films have much to contribute to current conversations on intermediality, whether it be through his adaptations of important literary works or his filmic reinventions of famous paintings by Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth. Wenders has also positioned himself as a decidedly transnational and translingual filmmaker taking on the challenge of representing peripheral spaces without falling into the trap of a neo-colonial gaze. Making Films That Matter argues that Wenders remains a true innovator in both his experiments in 3D filmmaking and his attempts to define a visual poetics of peace."

  Please download the Introduction from the link above. You may purchase this book directly from the publisher from the link below.

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  [Introduction to] Chinese Revolutionary Cinema: Propaganda, Aesthetics and Internationalism 1949-1966, Volume 48

  Jessica Ka Yee Chan

  Engaging with fiction films devoted to heroic tales from the decade and a half between 1949 and 1966, this book reconceives state propaganda as aesthetic experiments that not only radically transformed acting, cinematography and screenwriting in socialist China, but also articulated a new socialist film theory and criticism. Rooted in the interwar avant-garde and commercial cinema, Chinese revolutionary cinema, as a state cinema for the newly established People's Republic, adapted Chinese literature for the screen, incorporated Hollywood narration, appropriated Soviet montage theory and orchestrated a new, glamorous, socialist star culture. In the wake of decolonisation, Chinese film journals were quick to project and disseminate the country's redefined self-image to Asia, Africa and Latin America as they helped to create an alternative vision of modernity and internationalism. Revealing the historical contingency of the term 'propaganda', Chan uncovers the visual, aural, kinaesthetic, sexual and ideological dynamics that gave rise to a new aesthetic of revolutionary heroism in world cinema.

  Based on extensive archival research, this book's focus on the distinctive rhetoric of post-war socialist China will be of value to East Asian Cinema scholars, Chinese Studies academics and those interested in the history of twentieth-century socialist culture.

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  [Introduction to] Psychopathology of American Capitalism: Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice

  Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

  This book synthesizes psychoanalytic and Marxist techniques in order to illuminate the resistance to a socialization of the American economy, the protectionist discourses of anomalous American capitalism, and the suppression of the capitalist welfare state. After the Second World War, Democrats and Republicans effectively eliminated the communist and socialist parties from the American political spectrum and suppressed their allied labor movements. The right-wing shift of both parties fabricated a false opposition of left and right that does not correspond to political oppositions in the industrialized democracies. Marxist perspectives can account for the massive inequality of the political economy, but they are insufficient for illuminating its preservation. Psychoanalysis is necessary in order to explain why Americans continue to vote within a two-party system that neglects the lower classes, and why the working class tends to vote against its own interests. The psychoanalytic techniques employed include doubling, repetition, displacement, condensation, inversion, denial, fetishizing, and cognitive repression. In examining the fixation upon the proxy binary of Democrat vs. Republican, which suppresses the true opposition of left vs. right and neutralizes alternatives, the work analyses numerous contemporary political issues through applications of Marxist psychoanalytic theory.

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  [Introduction to] The Writing of the Nation: Expressing Identity through Congolese Literary Texts and Films

  Kasongo Mulenda Kapanga

  The book is the study of literary texts and films seen as the manifestations of the Congolese consciousness and a response to the colonial discourse of denial, deletion and co-optation. It is a historical and ideological account of how writers and filmmakers have conceptualized the DRC or Zaire as a space supposedly out of a chaotic mode in need of domestication. Extending back to the precolonial times, it studies the epistemic foundations that underlie literary writings at various historical periods: an area to discover, to evangelize to exploit and to civilize. At the same time, the book addresses the problematic issue of nation-building and national identity that has dominated Postcolonial discourses in the last two decades. It examines postulations of national consciousness formation as a sedimentation drawn from various elements of which the result is a new cultural and political space. In studying literary texts and films, it identifies elements of national identity (political discourse, education system, history, ethnic identification) consciously or unconsciously articulated in the claims of commonality. The book highlights three factors of great importance that paved the way to a national discourse. First, the African hinterland has always proved an impenetrable entity to the outside eye. As a consequence, the hinterland came to be associated with three main characteristics (no man’s land, threat to human reason, chaos) descriptive of an unfathomable abyss that swallow’s life. Secondly, the heart of darkness allegory has acquired a metonymic value on which pronouncements on the Congo, however outrageous, find their foundation. Thirdly, contrary to most literary accounts (Kadima-Nzuji, Ngandu Nkashama, Riva), the book delves into the study of colonial and exotic literatures as historical steps toward the rise of modern Congolese literature. It also looks at the role orality has played in modern Congolese literature and at on the way the consciousness of belonging to the nation has been expressed by mainstream writers (V. Y. Mudimbe, Ngandu Nkashama, Ngal). Finally, it examines the ideological and historical elements of identity construction by Congolese filmmakers (Ngangura, Balufu Kanyinka and Raoul Peck) in their works as instances of agency. The book ends with questions related to recent Congolese writers influenced by conditions of globalization, location and exile.

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  [Introduction to] Representing Heresy in Early Modern France

  Gabriella Scarlatta and Lidia Radi

  Heresy is a fluid concept, not easy to define or pinpoint, and certainly one that defies religious and political boundaries. Heresy could be said to be a cultural construct manufactured by competing narratives. The articles in this volume examine the varieties of perceptions and representations of heresy in early modern France. In so doing, they reveal that such perceptions and representations have had more of an impact on our understanding of heresy than heresy itself. This, in turn, provides us with new and stimulating viewpoints on how heresy was recognized and depicted at the intersections of faith, art, gender, poetry, history, and politics.

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  [Introduction to] The Other Rise of the Novel in Eighteenth- Century French Fiction

  Olivier M. Delers

  The rise of the novel paradigm—and the underlying homology between the rise of a bourgeois middle class and the coming of age of a new literary genre—continues to influence the way we analyze economic discourse in the eighteenth-century French novel. Characters are often seen as portraying bourgeois values, even when historiographical evidence points to the virtual absence of a self-conscious and coherent bourgeoisie in France in the early modern period. Likewise, the fact that the nobility was a dynamic and diverse group whose members had learned to think in individualistic and meritocratic terms as a result of courtly politics is often ignored. The Other Rise of the Novel calls for a radical revision of how realism, the language of self-interest and commercial exchanges, and idealized noble values interact in the early modern novel. It focuses on two novels from the seventeenth century, Furetière’s Roman bourgeois and Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves and four novels from the eighteenth century, Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and Sade’s Les infortunes de la vertu. It argues that eighteenth-century French fiction does not reflect material culture mimetically and that character action is best analyzed by focusing on the social and discursive exchanges staged by the text, rather than by trying to create parallels between specific behavior and actual historical changes. The novel produces its own reality by transforming characters and their stories into alternative social models, different articulations of how individuals should define their economic relations to others. The representation of interpersonal relations often highlights personal conceptions of private interest that cannot be easily reconciled with the traditional narrative of a transition towards economic modernity. Realism, then, is not only about verisimilar storytelling and psychological depth: it is an epistemological questioning about the type of access to reality that a particular genre can give its readers.

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  [Introduction to] Red Star Tales: A Century of Russian And Soviet Science of Fiction

  Yvonne H. Howell

  For over a century, most of the science fiction produced by the world’s largest country has been beyond the reach of Western readers. This new collection aims to change that, bringing a large body of influential works into the English orbit.
  
  A scientist keeps a severed head alive, and the head lives to tell the tale… An explorer experiences life on the moon, in a story written six decades before the first moon landing... Electrical appliances respond to human anxieties and threaten to crash the electrical grid… Archaeologists discover strange powers emanating from a Central Asian excavation site… A teleporting experiment goes awry, leaving a subject to cope with a bizarre sensory swap… A boy discovers the explosive truth of his father’s “antiseptic” work, stamping out dissent on distant worlds…
  
  The last 100 years in Russia have seen an astonishing diversity and depth of literary works in the science fiction genre, by authors with a dizzying array of styles and subject matter.
  
  This new volume brings together 18 such works, translated into English for the first time, spanning from path-breaking, pre-revolutionary works of the 1890s, through the difficult Stalinist era, to post-Soviet stories published in the 1980s and 1990s.

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  [Introduction to] Why is English Literature? Language and Letters for the Twenty-First Century

  Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

  Why is English synonymous with literature in the United States? At the turn of the twentieth century, literature courses were taught in the original language, and English did not signify literature any more than did French, Italian, or other modern languages. Fifty years later, English had colonized literature, and non-English literatures became configured as "foreign language study." This timely and important intervention into an on-going debate shows how the multilingual population of American faculty and students became progressively more monoglot, as did the configuration of literary studies. Thomas Paul Bonfiglio locates these changes within the anti-immigration, xenophobic, anti-labor, mercantile, militarist, and technocratic ideologies that arose in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century and recommends the return of literary studies and the humanities to their roots.

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  [Introduction to] Le Penser de Royal Memoire

  Lidia Radi

  Le Penser de royal memoire (1518) Ce volume est une édition critique, précédée d'une étude, du Penser de royal memoire (1518), deuxième œuvre originale de Guillaume Michel, dit de Tours. Produit hors de l'entourage royal, Le Penser se présente comme une série de discours appelant le roi à soutenir une cause politique précise (la guerre contre les Turcs). L'essentiel de l'étude est une analyse rhétorique de ces discours. Ce travail contribue à l'étude de la rhétorique de la croisade au début du xvi^e siècle.
  
  Table des matières
  
  This is a critical edition of Penser de royal memoire (1518), the second original work by Guillaume Michel, known as Guillaume de Tours. Complete with scholarly essay, the book is a contribution to the study of early sixteenth-century crusade rhetoric.

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  [Introduction to] Mother Tongues and Nations: The Invention of the Native Speaker

  Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

  This monograph examines the ideological legacy of the the apparently innocent kinship metaphors of “mother tongue” and “native speaker” by historicizing their linguistic development. It shows how the early nation states constructed the ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism, a composite of national language, identity, geography, and race. This ideology invented myths of congenital communities that configured the national language in a symbiotic matrix between body and physical environment and as the ethnic and corporeal ownership of national identity and local organic nature. These ethno-nationalist gestures informed the philology of the early modern era and generated arboreal and genealogical models of language, culminating most divisively in the race conscious discourse of the Indo-European hypothesis of the 19th century. The philosophical theories of organicism also contributed to these ideologies. The fundamentally nationalist conflation of race and language was and is the catalyst for subsequent permutations of ethnolinguistic discrimination, which continue today. Scholarship should scrutinize the tendency to overextend biological metaphors in the study of language, as these can encourage, however surreptitiously, genetic and racial impressions of language.

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  Apokalipticheskii realizm. Nauchnaia fantastika A.i B. Strugatskikh.

  Yvonne Howell

  Russian Translation of Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, New York: Peter Lang, 1994.

  Translated by Alla Kuznetsova.

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  The Space of Freedom: Apartment Exhibitions in Leningrad, 1964-1986

  Joseph C. Troncale, Evgeny Orlov, and Sergei Kovalsky

  The Space of Freedom: Apartment Exhibitions in Leningrad, 1964-1986

  Joel and Lila Harnetl Museum of Art, University of Richmond Museums, VA

  September 16 to December 3, 2006

  We are very pleased to present this traveling exhibition of artwork from the collection of the Museum of Nonconformist Art, Pushkinskaya 10 Art Centre, St. Petersburg, Russia, presented within the context of a re-created "apartment" exhibition from Leningrad. [...]

  To our knowledge, [...] The Space of Freedom is the first exhibition organized in the United States to focus on both the artwork shown in communal apartments and on the exhibition space of the apartments themselves as a significant part of the history of Russian art. However, this is not a re-creation of a specific apartment exhibition; the art on view is a representative selection of work that was displayed at various such exhibitions between 1964 and 1986, including several pieces by the most important figures in the history of these exhibitions and in the history of nonconformist painting. These forty-six works have never before been exhibited together or in such an installation outside of Russia.

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  [Introduction to] Race and the Rise of Standard American

  Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

  This study examines the effect of race-consciousness upon the pronunciation of American English and upon the ideology of standardization in the twentieth century. It shows how the discourses of prescriptivist pronunciation, the xenophobic reaction against immigration to the eastern metropolises - especially New York - and the closing of the western frontier together constructed an image of the American West and Midwest as the locus of proper speech and ethnicity. This study is of interest to scholars and students in linguistics, American studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, and studies in race, class, and gender.

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  The Brotherhood of Free Culture: Recent Art from St. Petersburg, Russia

  Joseph C. Troncale and Richard Waller

  The Brotherhood of Free Culture: Recent Art from St. Petersburg, Russia

  Marsh Art Gallery, University of Richmond Museums, VA

  October 11 to December 15, 2002.

  We are pleased to present this exhibition of recent art from St. Petersburg, Russia, created by artists from Pushkinskaya 10. Known as the Brotherhood of Free Culture, the society was formed in 1989 as a cultural center to promote nonconformist art (often referred to as underground art during the Soviet period) in contemporary Russia. In addition to organizing exhibitions and providing performance, museum , and gallery spaces, Pushkinskaya 10 offers studio space to forty performing and visual artists at any given time. This exhibition features seven of those artists.

  The exhibition is made possible in part with the generous support of the University of Richmond Cultural Affairs Committee.

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  [Introduction to] Ethics and Remembrance in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs and Rose Auslander

  Kathrin M. Bower

  This is the first comparative study in English of two German-Jewish women poets who survived the Nazi genocide but did not escape its effects. The study begins with a reading of Sachs's and Ausländer's poetry in the context of the wider scope of 'Holocaust literature.' Focusing on the poet as witness bearing the double burden of survival and remembrance, the work argues that 'work of memory'achieved by Ausländer and Sachs exemplifies the complexity of poetic reflection on trauma and history.
  
  In addition to aesthetic considerations, the book concentrates on the implications of Sachs's and Ausländer's poetic engagement for an 'ethics of remembrance'. The poetic dialogue with memory exemplified in these poets' works offers a model for 'working through' the trauma of the past with significance not only for Holocaust studies, but also for investigations of memory and trauma. As conscientious yet troubled efforts at representing the diversity of individual and collective suffering embracing both 'Jewish' experience and the human condition, Sachs's and Ausländer's poems can be read as at once subjective and universal injunctions to an awareness of the connections, divisions, and tensions that memory brings to bear on social relations.

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  [Introduction to] Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

  Yvonne Howell

  The brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky have been Russia's most popular science fiction writers since their first publication appeared in 1959. The enormous and consistent popularity of their works over three decades of fluctuating political and literary conditions is all the more interesting when one considers that their primary readership has been the Russian scientific-technical intelligentsia - a sector of society whose values and attitudes were instrumental in transforming the Soviet Union. This lively and original study of the Strugatskys' development as writers and as spokesmen for a generation of Russian scientists is as timely as it is unique. It is also the first English language study of the Strugatskys' previously unpublished novels.

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  [Introduction to] Achim von Arnim's Novellensammlung 1812: Balance and Mediation

  Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

  Working within the context of current Arnim studies, Bonfiglio demonstrates how Novellensammlung 1812 is a coherent opus that allegorically represents a cosmology structured by Arnim's early work in physics along with his reception of Schelling's Naturphilosophie. These influences laid the foundation for an electromagnetic cosmology that informs Arnim's historiography, aesthetics, and poetics. Bonfiglio focuses his study on how Arnim's Romantic science determines his use of tropes, his Romantic idealism, and his own idiom of Romantic irony.