Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass's The Tin Drum

Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass's The Tin Drum PDF Author: Peter O. Arnds
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571132871
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In structure and content Grass's novel connects the persecution of degenerate art to the persecution and extermination of these "asocials," for whom the persecuted dwarf-protagonist Oskar Matzerath becomes a central metaphor and voice. This comparative study reveals that through intertextuality with the European fairy-tale tradition, the picaresque novels of Rabelais and Grimmelshausen, and through an array of carnivalesque figures Grass creates an irrational counterculture opposed to the rationalism of Nazi science and its obsession with racial hygiene, while simultaneously exposing the continuity of this destructive rationalism in postwar Germany and the absurdity of a Stunde Null, that putative tabula rasa of 1945."--BOOK JACKET.

Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass's The Tin Drum

Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass's The Tin Drum PDF Author: Peter O. Arnds
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571132871
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In structure and content Grass's novel connects the persecution of degenerate art to the persecution and extermination of these "asocials," for whom the persecuted dwarf-protagonist Oskar Matzerath becomes a central metaphor and voice. This comparative study reveals that through intertextuality with the European fairy-tale tradition, the picaresque novels of Rabelais and Grimmelshausen, and through an array of carnivalesque figures Grass creates an irrational counterculture opposed to the rationalism of Nazi science and its obsession with racial hygiene, while simultaneously exposing the continuity of this destructive rationalism in postwar Germany and the absurdity of a Stunde Null, that putative tabula rasa of 1945."--BOOK JACKET.

Günter Grass and His Critics

Günter Grass and His Critics PDF Author: Siegfried Mews
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 1571130624
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
A comprehensive narrative overview and analysis of the criticism of the controversial German author's works. When the Swedish Academy announced that Günter Grass had been awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, it singled out his first novel The Tin Drum (1959, English translation 1963) as a seminal work that had signaled thepostwar rebirth of German letters, auguring "a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction." Nearly fifty years after its publication, the novel's significance has been generally acknowledged: it is the uncontested favorite among Grass's works of fiction on the part of reading public and critics alike, yet its canonical status tends to obscure the decidedly mixed and even hostile reactions it initially elicited. Along with The Tin Drum, Grass's impressive body of literary work since the 1950s has spawned a cottage industry of Grass criticism, making a reliable guide through the thicket of sometimes contradictory readings a definite desideratum. SiegfriedMews fills this lacuna in Grass scholarship by way of a detailed but succinct, descriptive as well as analytical and evaluative overview of the scholarship from 1959 to 2005. Grass's politically motivated interventions in publicdiscourse have kept him highly visible, blurring the boundaries between politics and aesthetics. Mews therefore examines not only academic criticism but also the daily and weekly press (and other news media), providing additionalinsight into the reception of Grass's works. Siegfried Mews is Professor of German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture

Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture PDF Author: Carol Poore
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472115952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
This book offers a groundbreaking exploration of disability in Germany, from the Weimar Republic to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture reveals the contradictions of a nation renowned for its social services programs yet notorious for its history of compulsory sterilization and eugenic dogma. Covering the entire scope of Germany's most tragic and tumultuous century, this comprehensive volume reveals how central the notion of disability is to modern German cultural history. Carol Poore examines a wide range of literary and visual depictions of disability, focusing particular attention on disability and Nazi culture. Other topics explored include the exile community's response to disability, socialism and disability in East Germany, current bioethical debates, and the rise and gains of the disability rights movement. Twentieth-Century Germany gives students, scholars, and all those interested in disability studies, Germans studies, visual culture, Nazi history, and bioethics the opportunity to explore controversial questions of individuality, normalcy, citizenship, and morality.

The German Picaro and Modernity

The German Picaro and Modernity PDF Author: Bernhard Malkmus
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628929537
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The German Pícaro and Modernity reads the re-emergence of the picaresque narrative in twentieth-century German-language writing as an expression of modernity and its social imaginaries. Malkmus argues that the picaresque, whose origins date back to the Spanish Renaissance and the Baroque Age, re-emerged as a reflection both of Germany's explosive modernizing processes between 1880 and 1930 and of the most barbarous implosion of modern civilization under National Socialism. Another reason for the fertility of this literary form at that particular cultural moment is rooted in the complexities of German-Jewish relations and the history of Jewish assimilation in central Europe. A considerable number of authors who used the picaresque form in the twentieth century are from a Jewish background, and Malkmus demonstrates how the picaresque narrative template also offers a medium for German-Jewish self-reflection. In highlighting these connections, he contributes not only to scholarship in European literature, but also but also to our understanding of major social, economic and political issues at stake in modernity

Modern Critical Studies: A Critical Inquiry into English Literature

Modern Critical Studies: A Critical Inquiry into English Literature PDF Author: Pradeep Hariharan
Publisher: Archers & Elevators Publishing House
ISBN: 9388805380
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Lycanthropy in German Literature

Lycanthropy in German Literature PDF Author: Peter Arnds
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137541636
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Lycanthropy in German Literature argues that as a symbol of both power and parasitism, the human wolf of the Germanic Middle Ages is iconic to the representation of the persecution of undesirables in the German cultural imagination from the early modern age to the post-war literary scene.

Encyclopedia of the World Novel, 1900 to the Present

Encyclopedia of the World Novel, 1900 to the Present PDF Author: Michael David Sollars
Publisher: Infobase Learning
ISBN: 1438140738
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 3388

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Book Description
Praise for the print edition:"...a useful and engaging reference to the vast world of the novel in world literature."

The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass

The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass PDF Author: Stuart Taberner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113982824X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Günter Grass is Germany's best-known and internationally most successful living author, from his first novel The Tin Drum to his recent controversial autobiography. He is known for his tireless social and political engagement with the issues that have shaped post-War Germany: the difficult legacy of the Nazi past, the Cold War and the arms race, environmentalism, unification and racism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999. This Companion offers the widest coverage of Grass's oeuvre across the range of media in which he works, including literature, television and visual arts. Throughout, there is particular emphasis on Grass's literary style, the creative personality which inhabits all his work, and the impact on his reputation of revelations about his early involvement with Nazism. The volume sets out, in a fresh and lively fashion, the fundamentals that students and readers need in order to understand Grass and his individual works.

The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass

The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass PDF Author: Nicole A. Thesz
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139567
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
A major contribution to Grass scholarship that looks at his career as a whole and identifies four phases or stages of his writing in terms of communicative strategy and style.

Günter Grass and the Genders of German Memory

Günter Grass and the Genders of German Memory PDF Author: Timothy Bruce Malchow
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1640140859
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
The first book to examine the connection between gender and memory in Grass's oeuvre, which is especially timely in light of current concerns about male privilege.Günter Grass (1927-2015) was a fixture at the heart of German cultural life, a self-styled spokesman of the Kulturnation (cultural nation) who imagined it linking him to canonical male literary figures and their authority. He was also the object of valid feminist criticism: a rigid conception of gender permeates his works, belying his professed skepticism toward ideologies. A heterosexual male, Grass lent his representative persona a natural veneer by appropriating his era's gendered discursive constructs, including Heimat, the Bildungsroman, and narratives about German wartime victims and perpetrators. Such appropriation elevated his remembering artist's masculinity above that of the status quo's defenders and exploiters of memory. This book is the first to evaluate the connection between gender and memory in Grass's oeuvre and its legacy in light of current concerns about male privilege. It highlights his breakthrough novel The Tin Drum (1959) and his memoir Peeling the Onion (2006). The former establishes the gendered persona that Grass would develop in subsequent decades to relate contemporary issues to Nazi-era memories. The latter reclaims the novel's autobiographical material but fails to account for his decades-long silence about having served in the Nazi Waffen-SS. Instead, it foregrounds his mourning for his mother, allowing for a more personal reading of his oeuvre and its gendered imagery. of current concerns about male privilege. It highlights his breakthrough novel The Tin Drum (1959) and his memoir Peeling the Onion (2006). The former establishes the gendered persona that Grass would develop in subsequent decades to relate contemporary issues to Nazi-era memories. The latter reclaims the novel's autobiographical material but fails to account for his decades-long silence about having served in the Nazi Waffen-SS. Instead, it foregrounds his mourning for his mother, allowing for a more personal reading of his oeuvre and its gendered imagery. of current concerns about male privilege. It highlights his breakthrough novel The Tin Drum (1959) and his memoir Peeling the Onion (2006). The former establishes the gendered persona that Grass would develop in subsequent decades to relate contemporary issues to Nazi-era memories. The latter reclaims the novel's autobiographical material but fails to account for his decades-long silence about having served in the Nazi Waffen-SS. Instead, it foregrounds his mourning for his mother, allowing for a more personal reading of his oeuvre and its gendered imagery. of current concerns about male privilege. It highlights his breakthrough novel The Tin Drum (1959) and his memoir Peeling the Onion (2006). The former establishes the gendered persona that Grass would develop in subsequent decades to relate contemporary issues to Nazi-era memories. The latter reclaims the novel's autobiographical material but fails to account for his decades-long silence about having served in the Nazi Waffen-SS. Instead, it foregrounds his mourning for his mother, allowing for a more personal reading of his oeuvre and its gendered imagery.is mourning for his mother, allowing for a more personal reading of his oeuvre and its gendered imagery.