TY - JOUR A1 - Waller, Nicole T1 - Marronage or underground? BT - the black geographies of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer JF - MELUS : multi-ethnic literature of the U.S. / Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States N2 - I combine a reading of contemporary scholarship on US maroon histories and the Underground Railroad—and the concomitant notions of marronage and the underground—with a reading of two recent works of African American literature: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer (2019). Foregrounding the idea of Black geographies as a form of placemaking and “thinking otherwise” about land and water, I suggest that despite the differing, and at times contrasting, trajectories of maroon histories and the histories of Black flight to the North, African American maroon experiences and the Underground Railroad are conceptually connected in contemporary African American literature. I read the two novels as recent literary expressions of this conceptual link, which is played out via representations of relating to the land. By reimagining and intertwining marronage and the underground, both novels articulate a critique of settler-colonial and plantation modes of spatial practice, modes they identify as formative for US-American nationhood. They also, tentatively but forcefully, gesture toward alternative ways of being “above” and “below” the land while affirming African American connectedness to place. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac021 SN - 0163-755X SN - 1946-3170 VL - 47 IS - 1 SP - 45 EP - 70 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Wilke, Heinrich T1 - Character and perspective in cosmic horror BT - Lovecraft and Kiernan JF - Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik : a quarterly of language, literature and cultur N2 - Despite their overt focus on inexplicable alien forces, cosmic horror stories are also determined by their human cast. Far from being merely fodder for horror, the characters significantly contribute to the generation of meaning, including that of the supernatural entity or phenomenon itself. The same holds for the narrators' (implicitly) political perspectives on the world of which they are part. Much of the perspective propounded in Lovecraft's cosmic horror stories partakes of myth, adopting in particular the latter's universal view and pronounced sidelining of humanity as a whole, which it intensifies to the point of horror. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this universal perspective is consistent with the racism permeating and structuring Lovecraft's writing. Though eschewing racism and universalism, the cosmic horror of Kiernan's "Tidal Forces" negotiates literary reflections of colonialism from an unreflective white perspective. KW - cosmic horror KW - H. P. Lovecraft KW - Caitlin R. Kiernan KW - race and whiteness KW - fiction Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2021-2038 SN - 0044-2305 SN - 2196-4726 VL - 69 IS - 2 SP - 173 EP - 190 PB - De Gruyter CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Röder, Katrin T1 - Mobiles Glück in den englischen Romanen des 18. Jahrhunderts JF - Mobilisierte Kulturen Y1 - 2011 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-57356 SN - 2192-3019 SN - 2192-3027 IS - 1 SP - 91 EP - 133 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Röder, Katrin T1 - Engaging with T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets as a Multimedia Performance T2 - Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik N2 - This article explores a recent performance of excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1935/36–1942) entitled Engaging Eliot: Four Quartets in Word, Color, and Sound as an example of live poetry. In this context, Eliot’s poem can be analysed as an auditory artefact that interacts strongly with other oral performances (welcome addresses and artists’ conversations), as well as with the musical performance of Christopher Theofanidis’s quintet “At the Still Point” at the end of the opening of Engaging Eliot. The event served as an introduction to a 13-day art exhibition and engaged in a re-evaluation of Eliot’s poem after 9/11: while its first part emphasises the connection between Eliot’s poem and Christian doctrine, its second part – especially the combination of poetry reading and musical performance – highlights the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of Four Quartets. Y1 - 2017 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-397808 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Stillmark, Hans-Christian ED - Langner, Paul Martin ED - Mirecka, Agata T1 - Perturbation als Analysemethode dramatischer Texte BT - Dramaturgien der "Störung" bei Bertolt Brecht und Heiner Müller JF - Tendenzen der zeitgenössischen Dramatik N2 - Perturbation als Analysemethode für dramatische Texte wird hier am Beispiel von Brecht und Müller ausprobiert. KW - Perturbation KW - Dramatik KW - Brecht KW - Heiner Müller Y1 - 2015 SN - 978-3-631-65597-9 SP - 11 EP - 29 PB - Lang-Ed. CY - Frankfurt, M. ER - TY - THES A1 - Peitzker, Tania T1 - Dymphna Cusack (1902 - 1981) : a feminist analysis of gender in her romantic realistic texts N2 - Das Dissertationsprojekt befasst sich mit der australischen Autorin Dymphna Cusack, deren Popularität in Ost und West zwischen 1955 und 1975 ihren Höhepunkt erreichte. In diesem Zeitraum wurde sie nicht nur in den westlichen Industriestaaten, in Australien, England, Frankreich und Nord Amerika viel gelesen, sondern auch in China, Russland, der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik und in vielen Sowjetrepubliken. Im Verlauf ihres Schaffens wurde ihr grosse Anerkennung für ihren Beitrag zur australischen Literatur zuteil; sie erhielt die „Commonwealth Literary Pension“, die „Queen′s Silver Jubilee Medal“ und 1981 den „Award of her Majesty“. Trotz dieser Unterstützung durch den Staat in Australien und England äusserte Cusack immer wieder feministische, humanistisch-pazifistische, und anti-faschistisch bzw. pro-sowjetische Sozialkritik. Sie war auch für ihren starken Nationalismus bekannt, plädierte dafür, eine „einheimische“ Literatur und Kultur zu pflegen. Besonders das australische Bildungssystem war das Ziel ihrer Kritik, basierend auf ihren Erfahrungen als Lehrerin in städtischen und ländlichen Schulen, die sie ihrer Autobiographie beschrieb. 'Weder ihr Intellekt, noch ihre Seele oder ihre Körper wurden gefördert, um ganze Männer oder ganze Frauen aus ihnen zu machen. Besonders letztere wurden vernachlässigt. Mädchen wurden ermutigt, ihren Platz dort zu sehen, wo deutsche Mädchen ihn einst zu sehen hatten: bei Kindern, Küche, Kirche.' Cusack engagierte sich stark für Bildungsreformen, die das Versagen australischer Schulen, das erwünschte liberal-humanistische Subjekt zu herauszubilden, beheben sollten. Der liberale Humanismus der Nachkriegszeit schuf ein populäres Bedürfnis nach romantischem Realismus, den man in Cusacks Texten finden kann. Um verstehen zu können, wie Frauen sich zwischen „Realismus und Romanze“ verfingen, biete ich eine Dekonstruktion von Geschlecht innerhalb dieses „hybriden“ Genres an. Mittels feministischer Methodik können Einblicke in die konfliktvolle Subjektivität beider Geschlechter in verschiedenen historischen Perioden gewonnen werden: die Zeit zwischen den Kriegen, während des Pazifischen Krieges und den Weltkriegen, während des Kalten Krieges, zur Zeit der Aborigine-Bewegung, des Vietnamkrieges, sowie zu Beginn der zweiten feministischen Bewegung in den siebziger Jahren. Eine Rezeptionsanalyse des romantischen Realismus und der Diskurse, die diesen prägen, sind in Kapitel zwei und drei untersucht. Die Dekonstruktion von Weiblichkeit und eines weiblichen Subjekts ist in Kapitel vier unternommen, innerhalb einer Diskussion der Art und Weise, wie Cusacks romantischer Erzählstil mit dem sozialen Realismus interagiert. Nach der Forschung von Janice Radway, werden Cusacks Erzählungen in zwei Tabellen unterteilt: die Liebesgeschichte versagt, ist erfolgreich, eine Parodie oder Idealisierung (s. „Ideal and Failed Romances“; „Primary Love Story Succeeds or Fails“). Unter Einbeziehung von Judith Butlers philosophischem Ansatz in die Literaturkritik wird deutlich, dass diese Hybridisierung der Gattungen das fiktionale Subjekt davon abhält, ihr/sein Geschlecht „sinnvoll“ zu inszenieren. Wie das „reale Subjekt“, der Frau in der Gesellschaft, agiert die fiktionale Protagonistin in einer nicht intelligiblen Art und Weise aufgrund der multiplen Anforderungen an und den Einschränkungen für ihr Geschlecht. Demnach produziert die geschlechtliche Benennung des Subjektes eine Vielfalt von Geschlechtern: Cusacks Frauen und Männer sind geprägt von den unterschiedlichen und konfliktvollen Ansprüchen der dichotom gegenübergestellten Genres. Geschlecht, als biologisches und soziales Gebilde, wird danach undefinierbar durch seine komplexen und inkonsistenten Ausdrucksformen in einem romantisch-realistischen Text. Anders gesagt führt die populäre Kombination von Liebesroman und Realismus zu einer Überschreitung der Geschlechtsbinarität, die in beiden Genres vorausgesetzt wird. Weiterführend dient eine Betrachtung von Sexualität und Ethnie in Kapitel fünf einer differenzierteren Analyse humanistischer Repräsentationen von Geschlecht in der Nachkriegsliteratur. Die Notwendigkeit, diese Repräsentationen in der Populär- und in der Literatur des Kanons zu dekonstruieren, ist im letzten Kapitel dieser Dissertation weiter erläutert. N2 - In her lifetime, Dymphna Cusack continually launched social critiques on the basis of her feminism, humanism, pacificism and anti-fascist/pro-Soviet stance. Recalling her experi-ences teaching urban and country schoolchildren in A Window in the Dark, she was particularly scathing of the Australian education system. Cusack agitated for educational reforms in the belief that Australian schools had failed to cultivate the desired liberal humanist subject: 'Neither their minds, their souls, nor their bodies were developed to make the Whole Man or the Whole Woman - especially the latter. For girls were encouraged to regard their place as German girls once did: Kinder, Küche, Kirche - Children, Kitchen and Church.' I suggest that postwar liberal humanism, with its goals of equality among the sexes and self-realisation or 'becoming Whole', created a popular demand for the romantic realism found in Cusack′s texts. This twentieth century form of humanism, evident in new ideas of the subject found in psychoanalysis, Western economic theory and Modernism, informed each of the global lobbies for peace and freedom that followed the destruction of World War II. Liberal ideas of the individual in society became synonymous with the humanist representations of gender in much of postwar, realistic literature in English-speaking countries. The individual, a free agent whose aim was to 'improve the life of human beings', was usually given the masculine gender. He was shown to achieve self-realisation through a commitment to the development of “mankind”, either materially or spiritually. Significantly, the majority of Cusack′s texts diverge from this norm by portraying women as social agents of change and indeed, as the central protagonists. Although the humanist goal of self-realisation seems to be best adapted to social realism, the generic conventions of popular romance also have humanist precepts, as Catherine Belsey has argued. The Happy End is contrived through the heroine′s mental submission to her physical desire for the previously rejected or criticised lover. As Belsey has noted, desire might be considered a deconstructive force which momentarily prevents the harmonious, permanent unification of mind and body because the body, at the moment of seduction, does not act in accord with the mind. In popular romance, however, desire usually leads to a relationship or proper union of the protagonists. In Cusack′s words, the heroine and hero become “whole men and women” through the “realistic” love story. Thus romance, like realism, seeks to stabilise gender relations, even though female desire is temporarily disruptive in the narrative. In the end, women and men become fully realised characters according to the generic conventions of the love story or the consummation of potentially subversive desire. It stayed anxieties associated with women seeking independence and self-realisation rather than traditional romance which signalled a threat to existing gender relations. I proposed that an analysis of gender in Cusack′s fiction is warranted, since these apparently unified, humanist representations of romantic realism belie the conflicting aims and actions of the gendered subjects in this historical period. For instance, when we examine women′s lives immediately after the war, we can identify in both East and West efforts initiated by women and men to reconstruct private/public roles. In order to understand how women were caught between “realism and romance”, I plan to deconstruct gender within the paradigm of this hybrid genre. By adopting a femininist methodology, new insights may be gained into the conflictual subjectivity of both genders in the periods of the interwar years, the Pacific and World Wars, the Cold War, the Australian Aboriginal Movement at the time of the Vietnam War, as well as the moment of second wave Western feminism in the seventies. My definition of romantic realism and the discourses that inform it are examined in chapters two and three. A deconstruction of femininity and the female subject is pursued in chapter four, when I argue that Cusack′s romantic narratives interact in different ways with social realism: romance variously fails, succeeds, is parodic or idealised. Applying Judith Butler′s philosophical ideas to literary criticism, I argue that this hybridisation of genre prevents the fictional subject from performing his or her gender. Like the “real” subject - actual women in society - the fictional protagonist acts in an unintelligible fashion due to the multifarious demands and constraints on her gender. Consequently, the gendering of the sexed subject produces a multiplicity of genders: Cusack′s women and men are constituted by differing and conflicting demands of the dichotomously opposed genres. Thus gender and sex become indefinite through their complex, inconsistent expression in the romantic realistic text. In other words, the popular combination of romance and realism leads to an explosion of the gender binary presupposed by both genres. Furthermore, a consideration of sexuality and race in chapter five leads to a more differentiated analysis of the humanist representations of gender in postwar fiction. The need to deconstruct these representations in popular and canonical literature is recapitulated in the final chapter of this Dissertation. KW - Cusack KW - Dymphna ; Geschlechtsunterschied KW - Gender / Geschlecht KW - Judith Butler KW - Romanze KW - Realismus KW - australische Literaturgeschichte KW - Ost/West Rezeption Y1 - 2000 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-0000276 ER - TY - THES A1 - Honka, Agnes T1 - Writing an alternative Australia : women and national discourse in nineteenth-century literature N2 - In this thesis, I want to outline the emergence of the Australian national identity in colonial Australia. National identity is not a politically determined construct but culturally produced through discourse on literary works by female and male writers. The emergence of the dominant bushman myth exhibited enormous strength and influence on subsequent generations and infused the notion of “Australianness” with exclusively male characteristics. It provided a unique geographical space, the bush, on and against which the colonial subject could model his identity. Its dominance rendered non-male and non-bush experiences of Australia as “un-Australian.” I will present a variety of contemporary voices – postcolonial, Aboriginal, feminist, cultural critics – which see the Australian identity as a prominent topic, not only in the academia but also in everyday culture and politics. Although positioned in different disciplines and influenced by varying histories, these voices share a similar view on Australian society: Australia is a plural society, it is home to millions of different people – women, men, and children, Aboriginal Australians and immigrants, newly arrived and descendents of the first settlers – with millions of different identities which make up one nation. One version of national identity does not account for the multitude of experiences; one version, if applied strictly, renders some voices unheard and oppressed. After exemplifying how the literature of the 1890s and its subsequent criticism constructed the itinerant worker as “the” Australian, literary productions by women will be singled out to counteract the dominant version by presenting different opinions on the state of colonial Australia. The writers Louisa Lawson, Barbara Baynton, and Tasma are discussed with regard to their assessment of their mother country. These women did not only present a different picture, they were also gifted writers and lived the ideal of the “New Women:” they obtained divorces, remarried, were politically active, worked for their living and led independent lives. They paved the way for many Australian women to come. In their literary works they allowed for a dual approach to the bush and the Australian nation. Louisa Lawson credited the bushwoman with heroic traits and described the bush as both cruel and full of opportunities not known to women in England. She understood women’s position in Australian society as oppressed and tried to change politics and culture through the writings in her feminist magazine the Dawn and her courageous campaign for women suffrage. Barbara Baynton painted a gloomy picture of the Australian bush and its inhabitants and offered one of the fiercest critiques of bush society. Although the woman is presented as the able and resourceful bushperson, she does not manage to survive in an environment which functions on male rules and only values the economic potential of the individual. Finally, Tasma does not present as outright a critique as Barbara Baynton, however, she also attests the colonies a fascination with wealth which she renders questionable. She offers an informed judgement on colonial developments in the urban surrounds of the city of Melbourne through the comparison of colonial society with the mother country England. Tasma attests that the colonies had a fascination with wealth which she renders questionable. She offers an informed judgement on colonial developments in the urban surrounds of the city of Melbourne through the comparison of colonial society with the mother country England and demonstrates how uncertainties and irritations emerged in the course of Australia’s nation formation. These three women, as writers, commentators, and political activists, faced exclusion from the dominant literary discourses. Their assessment of colonial society remained unheard for a long time. Now, after much academic excavation, these voices speak to us from the past and remind us that people are diverse, thus nation is diverse. Dominant power structures, the institutions and individuals who decide who can contribute to the discourse on nation, have to be questioned and reassessed, for they mute voices which contribute to a wider, to the “full”, and maybe “real” picture of society. N2 - Das heutige Australien ist eine heterogene Gesellschaft, welche sich mit dem Vermächtnis der Vergangenheit – der Auslöschung und Unterdrückung der Ureinwohner – aber auch mit andauernden Immigrationswellen beschäftigen muss. Aktuelle Stimmen in den australischen Literatur-, Kultur- und Geschichtswissenschaften betonen die Prominenz der Identitätsdebatte und weisen auf die Notwendigkeit einer aufgeschlossenen und einschließenden Herangehensweise an das Thema. Vor diesem Hintergrund erinnern uns die Stimmen der drei in dieser Arbeit behandelten Schriftstellerinnen daran, dass es nicht nur eine Version von nationaler Identität gibt. Die Pluralität einer Gesellschaft spiegelt sich in ihren Texten wieder, dies war der Fall im neunzehnten Jahrhundert und ist es heute noch. So befasst sich die vorliegende Arbeit mit der Entstehung nationaler Identität im Australien des späten neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Es wird von der Prämisse ausgegangen, dass nationale Identität nicht durch politische Entscheidungen determiniert wird, sondern ein kulturelles Konstrukt, basierend auf textlichen Diskurs, darstellt. Dieser ist nicht einheitlich, sondern mannigfaltig, spiegelt somit verschiedene Auffassungen unterschiedlicher Urheber über nationale Identität wider. Ziel der Arbeit ist es anhand der Texte australischer Schriftstellerinnen aufzuzeigen, dass neben einer dominanten Version der australischen Identität, divergierende Versionen existierten, die eine flexiblere Einschätzung des australischen Charakters erlaubt, einen größeren Personenkreis in den Rang des „Australiers“ zugelassen und die dominante Version hinterfragt hätten. Die Zeitschrift Bulletin wurde in den 1890ern als Sprachrohr der radikalen Nationalisten etabliert. Diese forderten eine Loslösung der australischen Kolonien von deren Mutterland England und riefen dazu auf, Australien durch australische Augen zu beschreiben. Dem Aufruf folgten Schriftsteller, Maler und Künstler und konzentrierten ihren Blick auf die für sie typische australische Landschaft, den „Busch“. Schriftsteller, allen voran Henry Lawson, glorifizierten die Landschaft und ihre Bewohner; Pioniere und Siedler wurden zu Nationalhelden stilisiert. Der australische „bushman“ - unabhängig, kumpelhaft und losgelöst von häuslichen und familiären Verpflichtungen - wurde zum „typischen“ Australier. Die australische Nation wurde mit männlichen Charaktereigenschaften assoziiert und es entstand eine Version der zukünftigen Nation, die Frauen und die Australischen Ureinwohner als Nicht-Australisch propagierte, somit von dem Prozess der Nationsbildung ausschloss. Nichtsdestotrotz verfassten australische Schriftstellerinnen Essays, Romane und Kurzgeschichten, die alternative Versionen zur vorherrschenden und zukünftigen australischen Nation anboten. In dieser Arbeit finden Louisa Lawson, Barbara Baynton und Tasma Beachtung. Letztere ignoriert den australischen Busch und bietet einen Einblick in den urbanen Kosmos einer sich konsolidierenden Nation, die, obwohl tausende Meilen von ihrem Mutterland entfernt, nach Anerkennung und Vergleich mit diesem durstet. Lawson und Baynton, hingegen, präsentieren den Busch als einen rechtlosen Raum, der vor allem unter seinen weiblichen Bewohnern emotionale und physische Opfer fordert. KW - Australien KW - Identität KW - Nation KW - Geschlecht KW - Literatur KW - Australia KW - Identity KW - Nation KW - Gender KW - Literature Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-16502 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Eckstein, Lars T1 - Transatlantic slavery and the literary imagination N2 - Transatlantic slavery and the literary imagination The challenges of turning transatlantic slavery into literature A polyphony of historical voices: Caryl Phillips’s dialogic imagination Literary imagination and the Zong Massacre: Fred D’Aguiar and David Dabydeen Perspectives T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe - 81 Y1 - 2009 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-59201 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Crane, Kylie Ann T1 - Anthropocene Presences and the Limits of Deferral BT - Alexis Wright's Carpentaria and The Swan Book JF - Open library of humanities N2 - Literary criticism, particularly ecocriticism, occupies an uneasy position with regard to activism: reading books (or plays, or poems) seems like a rather leisurely activity to be undertaking if our environment—our planet—is in crisis. And yet, critiquing the narratives that structure worlds and discourses is key to the activities of the (literary) critic in this time of crisis. If this crisis manifests as a ‘crisis of imagination’ (e.g. Ghosh), I argue that this not so much a crisis of the absence of texts that address the environmental disaster, but rather a failure to comprehend the presences of the Anthropocene in the present. To interpret (literary) texts in this framework must entail acknowledging and scrutinising the extent of the incapacity of the privileged reader to comprehend the crisis as presence and present rather than spatially or temporally remote. The readings of the novels Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) by Waanyi writer Alexis Wright (Australia) trace the uneven presences of Anthropocenes in the present by way of bringing future worlds (The Swan Book) to the contemporary (Carpentaria). In both novels, protagonists must forge survival amongst ruins of the present and future: the depicted worlds, in particular the representations of the disenfranchisement of indigenous inhabitants of the far north of the Australian continent, emerge as a critique of the intersections of capitalist and colonial projects that define modernity and its impact on the global climate. Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.348 SN - 2056-6700 VL - 5 IS - 1 PB - Open library of humanities CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hartung, Heike T1 - Longevity narratives BT - Darwinism and beyond JF - Journal of aging studie N2 - The essay looks at longevity narratives as an important configuration of old age, which is closely related to evolutionary theories of ageing. In order to analyse two case studies of longevity published in the early twentieth century, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall's book Senescence (1922) and the British dramatist Bernard Shaw's play cycle Back to Methuselah (1921), the essay draws on an outline of theories of longevity from the Enlightenment to the present. The analysis of the two case studies illustrates that evolutionary and cultural perspectives on ageing and longevity are ambivalent and problematic. In Hall's and Shaw's texts this is related to a crisis narrative of culture and civilization against which both writers place their specific solutions of individual and species longevity. Whereas Hall employs autobiographical accounts of artists as examples of longevity to strengthen his argument about wise old men as exclusive repositories of knowledge, Shaw in his vision of longevity as an extended form of midlife for both genders encounters the limits of age representation. KW - Age studies KW - Cultural studies KW - Longevity narratives KW - Evolutionary theories of ageing Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2018.03.002 SN - 0890-4065 SN - 1879-193X VL - 47 SP - 84 EP - 89 PB - Elsevier CY - New York ER -