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Author: Gary Lee Baker
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570032820
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
An overview of the work of Uwe Johnson, concentrating on five of his novels, including Ingrid Babendererde and Two Views. A chapter dedicated to his life describes the themes that concerned Johnson in his scandalized existence in both Germanys, the USA and Great Britain.
Author: Gary Lee Baker
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570032820
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
An overview of the work of Uwe Johnson, concentrating on five of his novels, including Ingrid Babendererde and Two Views. A chapter dedicated to his life describes the themes that concerned Johnson in his scandalized existence in both Germanys, the USA and Great Britain.
Author: Uwe Johnson
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681372045
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1713
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Book Description
A landmark of 20th Century literature about New York in the late 1960s, now in English for the first time. Late in 1967, Uwe Johnson set out to write a book that would take the unusual form of a chapter for every day of the ongoing year. It would be the tale of Gesine Cresspahl, a thirty-four-year-old single mother who is a German émigré to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and of her ten-year-old daughter, Marie—a story of work and school, of friends and lovers and the countless small encounters with neighbors and strangers that make up big-city life. An everyday tale, but also a tale of the events of the day, as gleaned by Gesine from The New York Times: Johnson could hardly foresee the convulsions of 1968, but some of the news—the racial unrest roiling America, the escalating war in Vietnam—was sure to be news for some time yet to come. Finally, it would be a tale told by Gesine to Marie about Gesine’s childhood in a small north German town, of her independent and enterprising father, of her troubled mother, of Nazi Germany (Gesine was born the year Hitler came to power) and World War II and Soviet retribution and the grimly regulated realities of Communist East Germany. An ambitious historical novel as well as a wonderfully observed New York novel, Anniversaries would take in the unsettled world of the present along with the twentieth century’s disastrous past, while vividly depicting the struggle of a loving, though hardly uncomplicated mother and a bright, indomitably curious girl to understand and care for each other and to shape a human world. Gesine and Marie are among the most memorable and engaging characters in literature, and Anniversaries, at once monumental and intimate, sweeping and full of incident, stylistically adventurous and endlessly absorbing, is quite simply one of the great books of our time.
Author: Uwe Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781681372037
Category : German fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1668
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Book Description
A landmark of 20th Century literature about New York in the late 1960s, now in English for the first time. As a novel, Uwe Johnson's masterpiece, Anniversaries, is at once daringly simple in conception and wonderfully complex and engaging in effect. Late in 1967, Johnson, already one of the most celebrated German novelists of his generation, set out to write a book that would take the form of an entry for every day of the year that lay ahead. The first section was dated August 20, and Johnson had of course no idea what the year would bring--that was part of the challenge--but he did have his main character--Gesine Cresspahl, a German emigre living on the Upper West Side of New York City and working as a translator for a bank who is the single mother of a ten-year-old daughter, Marie. The book would tell the story of a year in the life of this little family in relation to the unfolding story of the year, as winnowed from the pages of the New York Times, of which Gesine is a devoted if wary reader. These stories would in turn be overlayed by another--Gesine is 34, born just as Hitler was coming to power, and she has decided to tell Marie the story of her grandparents' lives and of her own rural childhood in Nazi Germany. It is important that Marie know where and what she comes from. The days of the year are also anniversaries of years past. The world that was and the world of the 1960s--with the struggle for civil rights leading to riots in American cities and, abroad, the escalating destruction of the Vietnam War--are, in the end, one world. Anniversaries was published in four volumes over the more than ten years that it took Johnson to write it, and as the volumes came out it became clear that this was one the great twentieth-century novels. The book courts comparison to Joyce's Ulysses, the book of a day, and to Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the book of a lifetime, but it stands apart in its dense polyphonic interplay of voices and stories. Anniversaries is many books--the book of a mother and daughter, of a family and its generations, of the country and the city, and of two times and two countries that seem farther apart perhaps than they are. It is a novel of private life, a political novel, and a new kind of historical novel, reckoning not only with past history but with history in the making. Monumental and intimate, sweeping in vision and full of incident, richly detailed and endlessly absorbing, Anniversaries, now for the first time available in English in a brilliant new translation by Damion Searls, is nothing short of a revelation.
Author: Uwe Johnson
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681375567
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 913
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Book Description
The first volume of a titanic masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, named one of the best books of 2018 by The New York Times critics. Published to great acclaim as a two-part boxed set in 2018, Anniversaries is now available as two individual volumes. It is August 1967, and Gesine Cresspahl, born in Germany the year that Hitler came to power, a survivor of war, of Soviet occupation, and of East German Communism, has been living with her ten-year-old daughter, Marie, in New York City for six years. Mother and daughter find themselves caught up in the countless stories of the world around them: stories of work and school and their neighborhood, with its shifting and varied cast of characters, as well as the stories that Gesine reads in The New York Times every day—about Che Guevara, racial violence, the war in Vietnam, and the US elections to come. Now, with Marie growing up, Gesine has decided to tell her daughter the story of her own childhood in a small north German town in the 1930s and ’40s. Amid memories of Germany’s criminal and disastrous past and the daily barrage of news from a world in disarray, Gesine, conscientious, self-scrutinizing, with a sharp sense of humor, struggles to describe what she has learned over the years and what she hopes to pass on to Marie. Marie, articulate, quizzical, with a perspective that is very much her own, has plenty of questions, too. Uwe Johnson’s intimate portrait of a mother and daughter is also a panorama of past and present history and the world at large. Comparable in richness of invention and depth of feeling to Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Anniversaries is one of the world’s great novels.
Author: Matthew D. Miller
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810137348
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
Matthew Miller’s The German Epic in the Cold War explores the literary evolution of the modern epic in postwar German literature. Examining works by Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge, it illustrates imaginative artistic responses in German fiction to the physical and ideological division of post–World War II Germany. Miller analyzes three ambitious German-language epics from the second half of the twentieth century: Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance), Johnson’s Jahrestage (Anniversaries), and Kluge’s Chronik der Gefühle (Chronicle of Feelings). In them, he traces the epic’s unlikely reemergence after the catastrophes of World War II and the Shoah and its continuity across the historical watershed of 1989–91, defined by German unification and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Building on Franco Moretti’s codification of the literary form of the modern epic, Miller demonstrates the epic’s ability to understand the past; to come to terms with ethical, social, and political challenges in the second half of the twentieth century in German-speaking Europe and beyond; and to debate and envision possible futures.
Author: Sonja Boos
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080147194X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany is an interdisciplinary study of a diverse set of public speeches given by major literary and cultural figures in the 1950s and 1960s. Through close readings of canonical speeches by Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Ingeborg Bachmann, Martin Buber, Paul Celan, Uwe Johnson, Peter Szondi, and Peter Weiss, Sonja Boos demonstrates that these speakers both facilitated and subverted the construction of a public discourse about the Holocaust in postwar West Germany. The author's analysis of original audio recordings of the speech events (several of which will be available on a companion website) improves our understanding of the spoken, performative dimension of public speeches.While emphasizing the social constructedness of discourse, experience, and identity, Boos does not neglect the pragmatic conditions of aesthetic and intellectual production—most notably, the felt need to respond to the breach in tradition caused by the Holocaust. The book thereby illuminates the process by which a set of writers and intellectuals, instead of trying to mend what they perceived as a radical break in historical continuity or corroborating the myth of a "new beginning," searched for ways to make this historical rupture rhetorically and semantically discernible and literally audible.
Author: Marta Figlerowicz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190650362
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
We've all encountered protagonists who, over the course of a novel, turn out to be more complicated than we thought at first. But what does one do with a major character who simplifies as a novel progresses, to the point where even this novel's other characters begin to disregard him? Flat Protagonists shows that writers have undertaken such formal experiments-which give rise to its titular “flat protagonists”-since the novel's incipience. It finds such characters in British and French novels ranging from the late-seventeenth to the early-twentieth century by Aphra Behn, Isabelle de Charrière, Françoise de Graffigny, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust. Marta Figlerowicz argues that these uncommon flat protagonists challenge our larger views about the novel as a genre. Upending a longstanding tradition of valuing characters for their complexity, Figlerowicz proposes that novels, and their characters, should be appreciated for highlighting the limits to how much attention any particular person's self-expression tends to garner, and how much insight anyone has to offer her community. As invitations to consider how we might come across to others, rather than merely how others come across to us, flat protagonists both subvert and complement the more conventional approach to novels as, at their best, sites of instruction in interpersonal empathy.
Author: Uwe Johnson
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
When Jakob Abs, an East German railroad dispatcher who's been sought by the Russians to help recruit a girl for Soviet espionage, is killed on his return home from visiting this NATO employee in West Berlin, speculations abound "as layer after layer of recollection, overheard conversation, and inner monologue is peeled away."--Cover.
Author: Damion Searls
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 1564785475
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 106
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Book Description
Seventeen years after the publication of the first volume of Jacques Roubaud's epic and moving "The Great Fire of London," Dalkey Archive Press is proud to publish the first English translation of The Loop, the second novel in Roubaud's Proustian series, which has in its capacity to astonish been compared to the compositions of Messiaen and the buildings of Antonio Gaudi. Devastated after the death of his young wife, Alix, the author conceives of a project that will allow him not only to continue writing, but continue living--writing a book that leads him to confront his terrible loss as well as examine the lonely world in which he now seems, more and more, to exist: that of Memory. The Loop finds Roubaud returning to his earliest recollections, as well as considering the nature of memory itself, and the process--both merciful and terrible--of forgetting. Neither memoir nor novel, by turns playful and despairing, The Loop is a masterpiece of contemporary prose.
Author: Reiko Tachibana
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438421745
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
CHOICE 1999 Outstanding Academic Books The wartime and postwar cultural histories of Germany and Japan show similar experiences of defeat, occupation, and then the reconstruction of powerful societies. Little previous research has examined the literary works that reflect these contacts and parallelisms. For the first time, this book offers an extensive comparative study of German and Japanese narratives that serve as a form of "counter-memory," in Foucault's phrase, for the two cultures. Rather than attempting to present objective or comprehensive views of history, these narratives draw upon personal memories to offer subjective, selective, and individualistic reports. They provide an alternative (or "counter-memory") to more official versions of World War II and its aftermath. Major writers such as Mishima Yukio, Ibuse Masuji, Oba Minako, Gunter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Christa Wolf, and the Nobel Prize winners Oe Kenzaburo and Heinrich Boll are set in the context of lesser-known writers, including a nine-year-old child, a medical doctor, a woman who served as a journalist, and a former prisoner, to provide a broad cultural basis for understanding responses to the war from within the two societies. This book combines a broad historical scope with detailed examinations of important individual texts, with both aspects securely set on a firm foundation of historical and literary scholarship. The rhythm of alternation between synthetic generalizations and close textual explication (yielding interpretive insights while providing lucid and economical exposition and summary) allows for carefully balanced and integrated comparisons.
