Search results for ""author stephen d. dowden""

Survey of the criticism devoted to Kafka's The Castle, his final novel. Kafka's final, unfinished novel, The Castle, remains one of the most celebrated yet most impenetrable masterpieces of modernist fiction, and a focus of literary criticsm and theory. In this chronological survey of the critical attention it has attracted, both academic and non-academic, Professor Dowden emphasises the acts of critical imagination which have shaped our image and understanding of Kafka and the novel. He explores the historical and cultural milieus of criticism, from the Weimar Era of Max Brod and Walter Benjamin to Lionel Trilling's Cold War to postmodern multiculturalism and 'cultural studies', showing how and why The Castle has aroused strong opinionsin each generation of criticism; he also accounts for those moments in which the novel escapes from an historically anchored understanding into the realm of the universal.

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Demonstrates, contrary to conventional wisdom, that European modernism developed not only in the great metropolitan centers, but also in provincial cities such as Jena. The conventional wisdom is that the cultural sea change that was European modernism arose in urban centers like Berlin, Paris, Munich, and Vienna. Meike G. Werner's book, now in English translation, is a study of modernism in the provinces. Taking the small provincial city of Jena as a paradigmatic case, it re-creates the very different social and intellectual framework in which modernist experimentation occurred beyond the metropolitan centers. Invented traditions, social and spatial "liminality," and new ideas of social and aesthetic transformation combined in Jena to create a unique moment of cultural innovation. In the years leading up to the First World War, the Jena publisher Eugen Diederichs envisioned and guided the development of this alternative modernism. Taken up by young writers including Diederichs's wife Helene Voigt-Diederichs, numerous intellectual outsiders from across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and members of the Free Student movement and of Jena's Sera Circle, this "other" modernism was above all a youth movement, full of energy and bold optimism. Figures such as Rudolf Carnap, Wilhelm Flitner, Hans Freyer, Karl Korsch, and Elisabeth Busse-Wilson emerged from this Jena paradigm. Werner pieces together the story of Jena's modernism in its full richness, complexity, and inner contradictions.

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Proceedings of the Brandeis conference on Jewish Germanists who fled Nazi Germany and their impact on Anglo-American German studies. Among the Jewish academics and intellectuals expelled from Germany and Austria during the Nazi era were many specialists in German literature. Strangely, their impact on the practice of Germanistik in the United States, England, and Canada has been given little attention. Who were they? Did their vision of German literature and culture differ significantly from that of those who remained in their former homeland? What problems did they face in theAmerican and British academic settings? Above all, how did they help shape German studies in the postwar era? This unique and important symposium, which convened at Brandeis University under the auspices of its Center for Germanand European Studies, addresses these and many other questions. Among its distinguished participants--who numbered over thirty in all--are Peter Demetz (Yale, emeritus), Gesa Dane (Göttingen), Amir Eshel (Stanford), Willi Goetschel (Toronto), Barbara Hahn (Princeton), Susanne Klingenstein (MIT), Christoph König (Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach), Ritchie Robertson (Oxford), Egon Schwarz (Washington University St. Louis, emeritus), Hinrich Seeba (UC Berkeley), Walter Sokel (University of Virginia, emeritus), Frank Trommler (University of Pennsylvania), and many more. The volume includes not only the (revised) essays of the participants but also their prepared responses, transcripts of the panel discussion, and dialogue of the participants with members of the audience. Stephen D. Dowden is professor of German at Brandeis University; Meike G. Werner is assistant professor of German at Vanderbilt University.

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