Search results for ""Author Simon Richter""

The cult of the female breast in contemporary American and European society is as pervasive as it is notorious. Our current fascination merely updates a long-standing obsession with the breast, which over the past twenty years has also become a subject of scholarly attention. Most historians and cultural theorists have focused on England and France, with virtually all research starting from the simple assumption that the breast is a signifier of the feminine and the female. With Missing the Breast, Simon Richter uses the texts of Enlightenment-era Germany to challenge that assumption, engaging instead the complexity of culturally constructed notions of the breast. Using the tools of medicine, literary theory, psychology, psychoanalysis, and etymology, Richter probes the breast-related fantasies underlying German culture and literature in the second half of the eighteenth century. His study reveals that, whereas in England and France and in the public imagination generally, the breast has been associated with the feminine and with abundance, the inherent “logic of the breast” in German culture unexpectedly pushes the breast toward masculinity and lack. Richter’s tour de force of textual and cultural analysis brings together the work of important German poets, writers, and dramatists, as well as major psychoanalysts and their critics, and writers and artists of the English-speaking world, to explore the tension between the plenitude of the breast and the implications of its absence. His engaging study draws the reader ineluctably toward a revolutionary possibility: the breast as an “unruly and uncontainable signifier,” the equal and more of what Lacan called the phallus. Missing the Breast will be an indispensable addition to the libraries of those interested in German textual studies, the history of sexuality, and theories of psychoanalysis. Its groundbreaking perspective will make a significant contribution to the fields of literary studies, gender studies, and women’s studies.

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Focuses on childhood in the Age of Goethe, in addition to various other topics and works. The Goethe Yearbook, first published in 1982, is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America and is dedicated to North American Goethe Scholarship. It aims above all to encourage and publish original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit, while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 14 features a special section on childhood in the Age of Goethe,co-edited with Anthony Krupp. In addition, readers will find two essays illuminating Goethe's Triumph der Empfindsamkeit, an inspired reading of Das Märchen against the background of Goethe's critique of Newtonian science, a careful analysis of the daemonic in the poem "Mächtiges Überraschen," and essays on Egmont and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. Contributors: Kelly Barry, Paul Fleming, Edgar Landgraf, Liliane Weissberg,Angus Nicholls, Robin A. Clouser Simon J. Richter is Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania, and book review editor Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German at Rutgers University. Anthony Krupp is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Miami.

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New essays from leading Goethe scholars providing testimony to the continuing, even renewed, relevance of Goethe for literary studies today. Invoking Goethe's name has become fashionable again. With new methods and technologies of reading threatening to render literature virtual and insubstantial, we have the sense that "Goethe's ghosts" - the otherwise neglected voices and traditions that, finding their most trenchant expression in Goethe, inform the Western storehouse of literature - can show us long-forgotten dimensions of literature. Inspired by the distinguished Goethe scholar Jane Brown,whose life's work has called attention to the allegorical modes haunting the mimetic forms that dominate modern literature, the contributors to this volume take a rich variety of approaches to Goethe: cultural studies, history ofthe book, semiotics, deconstruction, colonial studies, feminism, childhood studies, and eco-criticism. The persistence, omnipresence, and modalities of the "ghosts" they find suggest that more than influence or standards is at issue here. The stubborn reappearance of these revenants testifies to more fundamental issues concerning the status of literature and the task of the reader. As the contributors demonstrate, these questions acquire renewed urgency inwriters as diverse as Hegel, Adorno, Benn, Droste-Hülshoff, and Nietzsche. Each of the essays testifies to the enduring salience and presence of Goethe. Contributors: Helmut Ammerlahn, Benjamin Bennett, Dieter Borchmeyer, Franz-Josef Deiters, Richard T. Gray, Martha B. Helfer, Meredith Lee, Clark Muenzer, Andrew Piper, Jürgen Schröder, Peter J. Schwartz, Patricia Anne Simpson, Robert Deam Tobin, David E. Wellbery, Sabine Wilke. SimonRichter is Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Richard Block is Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington.

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New, interdisciplinary essays on an array of topics ranging from Goethe and mineralogy to theories of masculinity around 1800. The Goethe Yearbook, first published in 1982, is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America and is dedicated to North American Goethe Scholarship. It aims above all to encourage and publish original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit, while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Goethe Yearbook 15 features an array of interdisciplinary essays,among them articles on Goethe and such topics as architecture, mineralogy, theatrical improvisation, and Ulrich von Hutten. Readers will also find two astute and erudite interpretations of key poems, Alexis und Dora and Urworte. Orphisch, as well as a compelling exploration of the legal, social, and economic issues pertaining to the question: "Why Did Goethe Marry When He Did?" An interpretation of Goethe's Elective Affinities, two essays on Schiller's plays, and an incisive analysis by Peter Uwe Hohendahl titled "The New Man: Theories of Masculinity Around 1800" round out the volume. Contributors: Ehrhard Bahr, Yasser Derwiche Djazaerly, Robert Germany, Albert E. Gurganus, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Jocelyn Hollnad, Borge Kristiansen, Elizabeth Powers, Daniel Purdy, Peter J. Schwartz, and Christoph Schweitzer Simon J. Richter is Professor of German at the University ofPennsylvania, and Daniel Purdy is Associate Professor of German at Pennsylvania State University. Book review editor Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German at Rutgers University.

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Essays on the Wilhelm Meister novels, Faust, Goethe's early plays, Schiller's Räuber and on Goethe's thought in relation to current debates on cosmopolitanism and postcoloniality. The Goethe Yearbook, first published in 1982, is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America and is dedicated to North American Goethe Scholarship. It aims above all to encourage and publish original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit, while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. This year's volume features a cluster of exceptional essays thatshed new light on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels and Faust, as well as fascinating articles on the early play Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilen and the poem "Ilmenau," Schiller's Die Räuber, and anessay that places Goethe's thought in relation to current debates about cosmopolitanism and postcoloniality. Engaging reviews of recent publications in Goethe studies round out the volume. Contributors include Eric Denton, Matt Erlin, Jaimey Fisher, Ingrid Rieger, Rainer Kawa, David Barry, Stephanie Dawson, and John Pizer. Simon J. Richter is Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania. Book review editor Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German at Rutgers University.

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Volume 12 is dedicated to founding editor Thomas P. Saine, and includes essays on Goethe's novels, plays, and poems, the Ilmpark, Bach, Ossian, Goethe reception, and Schiller. The Goethe Yearbook, first published in 1982, is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America and is dedicated to North American Goethe scholarship. It aims above all to encourage and publish original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit, while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. The book review section seeks likewise to evaluate a wide selection ofrecent publications on the period, and is important for all scholars of 18th-century literature. Volume 12 honors founding editor Thomas P. Saine with contributions from prominent scholars such as Ehrhard Bahr, Benjamin Bennett, Dieter Borchmeyer, Jane Brown, Jill Kowalik, Ruth Kluger, Meredith Lee, John McCarthy, Jeff Sammons, Helmut Schneider, Hans Vaget, and more. The volume includes essays on Goethe's novels, plays, and poems, the Ilmpark, Bach, Ossian, Goethe reception, and Schiller. Simon J. Richter is associate professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Book review editor Martha B. Helfer is associate professor of German at the University of Utah.

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New essays providing an account of the shaping beliefs, preoccupations, motifs, and values of Weimar Classicism. In Germany, Weimar Classicism (roughly the period from Goethe's return to Germany from Italy in 1788 to the death of his friend and collaborator Schiller in 1805) is widely regarded as an apogee of literary art. But outside of Germany, Goethe is considered a Romantic, and the notion of Weimar Classicism as a distinct period is viewed with skepticism. This volume of new essays regards the question of literary period as a red herring: Weimar Classicism is best understood as a project that involved the ambitious attempt not only to imagine but also to achieve a new quality of wholeness in human life and culture at a time when fragmentation, division, and alienation appeared to be thenorm. By not succumbing to the myth of Weimar and its literary giants, but being willing to explore the phenomenon as a complex cultural system with a unique signature, this book provides an account of its shaping beliefs, preoccupations, motifs, and values. Contributions from leading German, British, and North American scholars open up multiple interdisciplinary perspectives on the period. Essays on the novel, poetry, drama, and theater are joined by accounts of politics, philosophy, visual culture, women writers, and science. The reader is introduced to the full panoply of cultural life in Weimar, its accomplishments as well as its excesses and follies. Emancipatory and doctrinaire by turns, the project of Weimar Classicism is best approached as a complex whole. Contributors: Dieter Borchmeyer, Charles Grair, Gail Hart, Thomas Saine, Jane Brown, Cyrus Hamlin, Roger Stephenson, Elisabeth Krimmer, Helmut Pfotenhauer, Benjamin Bennett, Astrida Orle Tantillo, W. Daniel Wilson. Simon J. Richter is Associate Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania.

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