Bijna vijfhonderd jaar lang werden de Joden in Europa weggestopt in getto’s of in dorpjes op het platteland. Pas eind achttiende eeuw, tijdens de Franse Revolutie, kregen de Franse Joden hun vrijheid. Het tijdperk van de Joodse emancipatie kon beginnen.Vanaf dat moment groeide de invloed van Joden op cultureel en intellectueel gebied enorm. Uit de geïsoleerde minderheid ontpopten zich belangrijke schrijvers, filosofen en kunstenaars als Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Lessing, Heine, Freud, Mahler, Herzl, Kafka, Einstein en Wittgenstein. De westerse cultuur bloeide op.In dit buitengewone boek volgt Michael Goldfarb het Joodse emancipatieproces op de voet. Op onnavolgbare wijze beschrijft hij de geschiedenis van een minderheid die vecht voor een plaats in de samenleving en tegelijkertijd de fundamenten legt voor de bloei van de westerse cultuur.
Wat gebeurt er als de Staat, die je jarenlang vol overtuiging hebt gediend, zich plotseling tegen je keert?Op 18 juni 2009 werd Heleen de Waal op haar werkplek bij de Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst aangehouden. Het bericht dat juist zij werd verdacht van het lekken van staatsgeheimen naar De Telegraaf, sloeg in als een bom. Zij werkte er al twaalf jaar als analist en stond bekend als deskundig en gedreven. Tijdens de eerste intensieve verhoren, verstoken van ieder contact met de buitenwereld, vertrouwde De Waal erop dat deze nachtmerrie snel voorbij zou zijn. Tot haar verbijstering ging het OM echter over tot strafvervolging. Omdat de onderliggende stukken geheim waren, konden de door de AIVD gepresenteerde feiten nauwelijks getoetst worden. Deze Kafkaëske situatie zou bijna vijf maanden duren. Op 14 juli 2010 werd ze door de rechter vrijgesproken. In Halve lucht beschrijft Heleen de Waal, op basis van dagboeken die ze in het geheim bijhield, hoe haar dagen eruit zagen op de vrouwenafdeling van een Nederlandse gevangenis. Hoe stelde ze zich teweer tegen de onterechte beschuldigingen van ‘haar’ AIVD? Hoe hield zij zich staande tussen verdachte drugsgebruikers en veroordeelde moordenaars? Een beklemmend relaas over geheimen en overtuiging, over verdenking en wantrouwen.
This remarkable biography gives a compelling insight into the tragic life of Moeller van den Bruck and uses personal interviews with contempories such as Kafka, Munch and Dietrich to explore the political and artistic whirlpools of Weimar Germany in which he lived.
A biography that provides a meticulously researched insight into the author's family background, his education and employment, his attitude to his native city, his literary influences, and his relationships with women.
This collection of essays, which originally appeared as a book in 1962, is virtually the complete works of an editor of Commentary magazine who died, at age 37, in 1955. Long before the rise of Cultural Studies as an academic pursuit, in the pages of the best literary magazines of the day, Robert Warshow wrote analyses of the folklore of modern life that were as sensitive and penetrating as the writings of James Agee, George Orwell, and Walter Benjamin. Some of these essays-notably "The Westerner," "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," and the pieces on The New Yorker, Mad Magazine, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and the Rosenberg letters-are classics, once frequently anthologised but now hard to find. Along with a new preface by Stanley Cavell, The Immediate Experience includes several essays not previously published in the book-on Kafka and Hemingway-as well as Warshow's side of an exchange with Irving Howe.
Provides an examination of Franz Kafka, an intriguing writer of the twentieth century. This work discusses some of the major themes that emerge in his work, using his short story "Metamorphosis" as a recurring example. It shows how his work explores themes such as the place of the body in culture, the power of institutions over people, and more.
A kaleidoscope of essays, poetry, fiction and drama inspired by and in homage to writer/mystic Franz Kafka. Wood engravings by Frank C Eckmair. A letterpress edition on Mohawk Vellum.
"A group of us go in two cars to the Waterfall (a pretty little valley on the way to Rabat). The same, uninterrupted sadness, a kind of listlessness that (since a recent bereavement) bears upon everything I do, everything I think. Return, an empty apartment, a difficult time: the afternoon (I'll speak of it again). Alone, sad. Marinade. I reflect with enough intensity. The beginnings of an idea: something like a 'literary' conversion-it's those two very old words that occur to me: to enter into literature, into writing; to write, as if I'd never written before: to do only that.Will I really write a novel? I'll answer this and only this. I'll proceed as if I were going to write one."Completed just weeks before his death, the lectures in this volume mark a critical juncture in the career of Roland Barthes, in which he declared the intention, deeply felt, to write a novel. Unfolding over the course of two years, Barthes engaged in a unique pedagogical experiment: he combined teaching and writing to "simulate" the trial of novel-writing, exploring every step of the creative process along the way.Barthes's lectures move from the desire to write to the actual decision making, planning, and material act of producing a novel.He meets the difficulty of transitioning from short, concise notations (exemplified by his favorite literary form, haiku) to longer, uninterrupted flows of narrative, and he encounters a number of setbacks. Barthes takes solace in a diverse group of writers, including Dante, whose La Vita Nuova was similarly inspired by the death of a loved one, and he turns to classical philosophy, Taoism, and the works of Francois-Rene Chateaubriand, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust. This book uniquely includes eight elliptical plans for Barthes's unwritten novel, which he titled Vita Nova, and lecture notes that sketch the critic's views on photography. Following on The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France (1977-1978) and a third forthcoming collection of Barthes lectures, this volum
Franz Kafka is one of the most widely taught, and read, writers in world literature. Readers encountering texts like "The Metamorphosis" and "The Trial" for the first time are frequently perplexed by his often intentionally weird writing. This guide helps the reader understand why and how perplexity has been deliberately created by Kafka's texts.
A collection of 29 pieces on books, writing, photography, and the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa. With literary subjects ranging from Defoe through Rilke and Kafka to the giants of the 20th century, those who admire Coetzee as a novelist can also read his literary criticism.
German Jewry. Among other things - or rather, above all - the term evokes creativity and destruction. This book is about both sides of that dichotomy, and also the links between them. It is about the German Jews - for example, Heine, Freud, and Kafka - whose accomplishments have played such a significant role in shaping our modern sensibilities.
Explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished, revealing previously unseen relationships between politics and culture. This book identifies three fundamental areas of cultural inventiveness related to this Prague circle's political and cultural dilemma.
Tussen 1933 en 1941 woonde Martinus Nijhoff (1894-1953) in Utrecht. Hier schreef hij zijn bekendste werken: De moeder de vrouw ('Ik ging naar Bommel om de brug te zien'), Het kind en ik, Awater en Het uur U. In het befaamde pand Oudegracht 341 woonde hij samen met de schilder Pyke Koch, de schrijvers Jan Engelman en Cola Debrot en de musicus Hans Philips. In deze groep verkeerden ook Victorine Hefting, balletdanser-choreograaf Igor Schwezoff en actrice Claudine Witsen Elias. Veel minder bekend is de docente klassieke talen Josine van Dam van Isselt, met wie Nijhoff tussen 1933 en 1947 een relatie had en die veel meer dan tot nu toe werd aangenomen een stempel op zijn persoon en werk heeft gedrukt.Awaters spoor is een wandeling langs de tien 'staties' van Awater, het gedicht dat zich geheel in Utrecht ontrolt. Aan de hand van Nijhoffs beroemde gedicht en briefcitaten volgen we de dichter van 'Awater' op zijn gang door de Domstad.Over de auteurNiels Bokhove is filosofie- en literatuurhistoricus. Hij publiceerde eerder over Franz Kafka, David Vogel, Bruno Schulz, Paul Celan en Sßndor Mßrai.
This book traces the intersection of artistic and moral ideas in European and American literary modernism. Rather than reading modernism as a complete rejection of social morality, this perceptive study shows how early twentieth-century writers such as Conrad, Faulkner, Gide, Kafka, Mann and Stein devised new aesthetic techniques to address ethical problems.
Conflict between father and son is one of the oldest themes in literature, and this is an open letter to his father - a letter which was never sent - in which Kafka tries to come to terms with one of the most deeply rooted obsessions of his troubled soul.
This text contains two of Walter Benjamin's essays, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", and "Theses on the Philosophy of History", as well as others on the art of translation, Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, Proust, and book collecting.
Actor and film director Hanns Zischler draws on years of detective work to provide an account of Kafka's moviegoing life. Hunting down rare films in collections all over Europe, accompanied by a wealth of illustrations, Zischler's work is a true labour of love.
What makes us human? Where is the limit between human and animal? These are questions that haunt post-Darwinian literature. Covering fiction from Kipling to Kafka, this study offers a historically embedded analysis of anthropological anxiety in the period between the publication of the Origin of Species and the beginning of the Second World War.
Charles Darwin: 'My dear Einstein, what are you so worried about? Still longing for the Theory of Everything? Whereas it already exists?'Albert Einstein: 'What? Have I missed something?'Wat gebeurt er wanneer alle knappe koppen uit de geschiedenis van de wetenschap samenkomen. In Darwin Meets Einstein: On the Meaning of Science laat Frans Saris Darwin, Spinoza, Niko Tinbergen, Francis Bacon, Kamerlingh Onnes, Franz Kafka en Albert Einstein om beurten met elkaar in gesprek gaan.Zo hoopt Saris de alomvattende vraag te beantwoorden: Waartoe wetenschap? Volgens de auteur zijn we in deze postmodernistische tijd de betekenis van wetenschap vergeten. Wetenschap is niet ontstaan uit geldingsdrang. Het is er niet om welvaart te creÙren en het is zeker niet iets wat je voor de 'lol' doet; wetenschap is essentieel voor evolutie en het voortbestaan van de mensheid. Over de auteurFrans W. Saris is professor of physics and Dean of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Leiden.
Presenting an account of how the weave of life-writing has altered over time to arrive at its present form, this text tells the story of an evolving literary form. The writings of St. Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and the work of sculptor, Albert Giacometti.
In the course of nine sections, this book examines the major situations of our time in the light of the wisdom of the great novelists: Kafka; Stravinsky; Hemingway; Rabelais; and Janacek. Ultimately, this brings about the question of the betrayed testaments of Europe, art and the novel.
Melancholie, depressie en burn-out hebben altijd bestaan, maar met verschillende namen en uitingen en een wisselende culturele status. In De kamers van de melancholie beschrijft Karin Johannisson de geschiedenis van de melancholie. In de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw werd zij vooral geassocieerd met angst en woeste wanhoop. Vanaf de negentiende eeuw wordt melancholie steeds meer gezien als depressie, gepaard gaand met grote somberheid, gevoelens van extreme verveling en slapeloosheid. Johannisson laat zien dat elke eeuw een eigen emotionele stijl kende die deel uitmaakte van een cultuur en zich zowel uitte in het privéleven als in het collectieve leven.Aan de hand van sprekende voorbeelden uit de kunst, literatuur en wetenschap beschrijft Karin Johannisson de verschillende typen van melancholie en haar verschijningsvormen. Bekende schrijvers die leden aan een vorm van melancholie of depressie, zoals Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka en Marcel Proust, passeren de revue. Maar Johannisson raadpleegde ook memo’s, medische rapporten en patiëntenverslagen. Het resultaat is een prachtige cultuurgeschiedenis van een zeer complexe emotionele staat.Over de auteurKarin Johannisson is hoogleraar ideeën- en wetenschapsgeschiedenis aan de universiteit van Uppsala. Zij schreef vele boeken. In het Nederlands verscheen eerder Het duistere continent.
Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose. In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers - Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov - and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot's Middlemarch. She looks to John Le CarrÚ for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery O'Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail, and to James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield for clever examples of how to employ gesture to create character. She cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.
In Old Worlds, New Mirrors Moshe Idel turns his gaze on figures as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, Franz Kafka and Franz Rosenzweig, Arnaldo Momigliano and Paul Celan, Abraham Heschel and George Steiner to reflect on their relationships to Judaism in a cosmopolitan, mostly European, context.
Oost en west botsen nu op Europees grondgebied. Maar zij hebben sinds de aanwezigheid van de nakomelingen van Abraham al twee duizend jaar lang tegenover elkaar gestaan. Abraham zien geeft in tien portretten een westers beeld van een oosters volk.Botsingen worden begeleid door beeldvorming. Beeldvorming is vaak schadelijk, omdat zij het leven vertekent en misvormt. In veel nieuwsbeelden is het weerbare Isra het mikpunt van kritiek. Dit boek stelt scheve beelden uit heden en verleden aan de kaak. En ontmaskert stereotype beeldvorming aan de hand van reacties van toonaangevende literatoren, van Shakespeare tot kafka en van Revius tot Mulisch. Daarnaast komen ook vooraanstaande filosofen en theologen ter sprake, van kant tot Sartre en van Bernard van Clairvaux tot karl Barth.De auteur dr. L. Engelfriet studeerde Nederlands, filosofie en theologie, promoveerde op Bilderdijk en het Jodendom en schreef diverse artikelen over Isra en het westen. Hij is werkzaam als docent en voorganger in de PKN.
A guide to the twentieth-century, illuminating the careers of many of its greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers, such as Louis Armstrong, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust.
"Re-Scriptures" means rewritings of Scriptures of the Bible. The author discusses how some of the most fascinating scenes of the Old and New Testament are directly or indirectly rewritten in works ranging from the medieval period to the late 20th-century, including Shakespeare and Kafka.
"A group of us go in two cars to the Waterfall (a pretty little valley on the way to Rabat). The same, uninterrupted sadness, a kind of listlessness that (since a recent bereavement) bears upon everything I do, everything I think. Return, an empty apartment, a difficult time: the afternoon (I'll speak of it again). Alone, sad. Marinade. I reflect with enough intensity. The beginnings of an idea: something like a 'literary' conversion-it's those two very old words that occur to me: to enter into literature, into writing; to write, as if I'd never written before: to do only that.Will I really write a novel? I'll answer this and only this. I'll proceed as if I were going to write one."Completed just weeks before his death, the lectures in this volume mark a critical juncture in the career of Roland Barthes, in which he declared the intention, deeply felt, to write a novel. Unfolding over the course of two years, Barthes engaged in a unique pedagogical experiment: he combined teaching and writing to "simulate" the trial of novel-writing, exploring every step of the creative process along the way.Barthes's lectures move from the desire to write to the actual decision making, planning, and material act of producing a novel.He meets the difficulty of transitioning from short, concise notations (exemplified by his favorite literary form, haiku) to longer, uninterrupted flows of narrative, and he encounters a number of setbacks. Barthes takes solace in a diverse group of writers, including Dante, whose La Vita Nuova was similarly inspired by the death of a loved one, and he turns to classical philosophy, Taoism, and the works of Francois-Rene Chateaubriand, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust. This book uniquely includes eight elliptical plans for Barthes's unwritten novel, which he titled Vita Nova, and lecture notes that sketch the critic's views on photography. Following on The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France (1977-1978) and a third forthcoming collection of Barthes lectures, this volum
How did George Eliot's love life affect her prose? Why did Kafka write at three in the morning? In what ways is Barack Obama like Eliza Doolittle? Can you be over-dressed for the Oscars? Devided into five sections - 'Reading', 'Being', 'Seeing', 'Feeling' and 'Remembering' - this collection of essays presents material both personal and cultural.
Investigates the long-range consequences of childhood abuse on the body. Using the experiences of the author's patients along with biographical stories of literary giants such as Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, this work shows how a child's humiliation, impotence and bottled rage will manifest itself as adult illness.
Addressing a set of historical and theoretical questions central to reevaluations of modernism, this volume presents American readers with an account of German modernism studies in the eighties. It examines texts by well-known authors - Kafka, Rilke, Musil, Doblin, Benjamin, Benn, and Junger.
A collection of essays that provides an insight into the themes that came to dominate Sebald's life. Sebald also examines the works of writers such as Gunter Grass, Bruce Chatwin and Kafka, showing both how literature can provide restitution for the injustices of the world, and how such literature came to have so great an influence on him.
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei presents striking new readings of the exotic in major German writers such as Kafka, Mann, Brecht, and Hesse, alongside the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, Simmel, and Expressionist aesthetics. She shows how the evocation of exotic spaces serves to reflect on central problems of European modernity and the modern self.
How did George Eliot's love life affect her prose? Why did Kafka write at three in the morning? In what ways is Barack Obama like Eliza Doolittle? Can you be over-dressed for the Oscars? What is Italian Feminism? If Roland Barthes killed the Author, can Nabokov revive him? This title features a collection of essays.
Michael Keren studies the political ideas conveyed by some of the twentieth century's greatest novelists in this insightful and long-overdue study of political philosophy via literature. This book expounds the key features of the "good citizen" as expressed by eight literary characters: Hans Castorp (Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain), Joseph K. (Franz Kafka's The Trial), John the Savage (Aldous Huxley's Brave New World), Winston Smith (George Orwell's 1984), Ralph (William Golding's Lord of the Flies), Meursault (Albert Camus' The Stranger), Ida Ramundo (Elsa Morante's History), and Chauncey Gardiner (Jerzy Kosinski's Being There). Keren observes these characters as they struggle through the world wars, the rise and fall of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, the development of the atomic bomb, de-colonisation, the Cold War, and globalisation. As both participants in and victims of the twentieth century's ideological, technological and organisational projects, these characters reflect on their experiences, and Keren explores how the nature of their self-reflection advances the notion of civil society on a global scale.A refreshing contribution to civil society theory and represents a pioneering effort to cross the boundaries between politics, literature, and culture.
June O. Leavitt offers a fascinating examination of the mystical in Franz Kafka's life and writings, showing that Kafka's understanding of the occult was not only a product of his own clairvoyant experiences but of the age in which he lived.
More than 800 entries detail the life and works of one of the most enduring authors of world literature. Few writers have had as great an impact as Franz Kafka. Known for depicting alienation, frustration, and the victimisation of the individual by impenetrable bureaucracies, his works have given rise to the term "Kafkaesque," which people use to describe similar situations in their own lives. Although his influence has been enormous and he has secured a lasting place in contemporary culture, his writings often are seen as inscrutable, especially for readers approaching them for the first time. Designed for undergraduates, specialists, and general readers, this encyclopedia details his life and works. Included are more than 800 alphabetically arranged entries on his works, characters, themes, family members, acquaintances, and other topics, including: Abraham; Absurd; Animals; Bureaucracy; Colonialism; Death; Don Quixote; Sigmund Freud; Guilt; Irony; Judaism; K.; Thomas Mann; Nihilism; and many more. Entries often cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography.Written by a team of leading scholars; Summarizes all of Kafka's works and discusses his major characters; Explains his relationships with family members and acquaintances; Explores his themes, influences, and literary and intellectual culture
Among Western literatures, only the German-speaking countries can boast a list of world-class writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, Kleist, Kafka, Schmitt, and Schlink who were trained as legal scholars. This book traces a history of the sometimes fraught relationship between German law and literature in the modern period, from Grimm to Schmitt.
This monograph explores how seven prominent German and Austrian novelists of the twentieth century--Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Anna Seghers, Uwe Johnson, Ingeborg Bachmann, Wolfgang Hilbig, and Marlene Steeruwitz--conveyed their literary figures' time spent waiting. By presenting states of waiting as emblematic of human existence in the turbulent twentieth century, these writers criticized hierarchical power structures in various historical contexts. Killing Time presents fresh readings of seven German-language novels, while providing insights into how and why German and Austrian writers repeatedly turned to the waiting motif to expose the injustices inherent in interpersonal, political, and social hierarchies. In investigating the treatment of waiting in literary texts, William reexamines how prominent philosophers of metaphor and time influenced German and Austrian writers of the past century. This study is underpinned in part by the work of cultural and social theorists who have emphasized how the liminal status of the subjugated within social hierarchies ensures that they are kept perpetually waiting.
