Franz Kafka (1883-1924) has come to be one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. The Myth of Power and the Self brings together Walter Sokel's most significant essays on Kafka written over a period of thirty-one years, 1966-1997. This volume begins with a discussion of Sokel's 1966 pamphlet on Kafka and a summary of his 1964 book, Tragik und Ironie (Tragedy and Irony), which has never been translated into English, and includes several essays published in English for the first time. Sokel places Kafka's writings in a very large cultural context by fusing Freudian and...
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) has come to be one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. The Myth of Power and the Self brings together Wa...
The title of this collection echoes Siegfried Kracauer's statement that the lavish movie palaces of 1920s Germany served to stimulate peripheral vision and thus prevent the audience from being absorbed by the spectacle itself. In consideration of questions concerning spatial transformations in and around Weimar cinema, the eight essays in this volume, though some more explicitly than others, have Kracauer as their interlocutor. The first major critic of classic German cinema, Kracauer is patron of the optics that seeks insight on the periphery, inviting the analysis of those other spaces that...
The title of this collection echoes Siegfried Kracauer's statement that the lavish movie palaces of 1920s Germany served to stimulate peripheral visio...
Walter Benjamin is considered one of the most significant writers and theorists in 20th-century Western culture. The author of this work shows that Benjamin's engagement with the political cannot be understood in terms of unified concepts, but rather should be understood from his language.
Walter Benjamin is considered one of the most significant writers and theorists in 20th-century Western culture. The author of this work shows that Be...
Once associated with astrology and occultist prophecy, the art of interpreting personal character based on facial and other physical features dates back to antiquity. About Face tells the intriguing story of how physiognomics became particularly popular during the Enlightenment, no longer as a mere parlor game but as an empirically grounded discipline. The story expands to illuminate an entire tradition within German culture, stretching from Goethe to the rise of Nazism. In About Face, Richard T. Gray explores the dialectical reversal - from the occult to the scientific realm - that entered...
Once associated with astrology and occultist prophecy, the art of interpreting personal character based on facial and other physical features dates ba...
Alois Riegl's art history has influenced thinkers as diverse as Erwin Panofsky, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Paul Feyerabend, Gilles Deleuze, and F?lix Guattari. One of the founders of the modern discipline of art history, Riegl is best known for his theories of representation. Yet his inquiries into the role of temporality in artistic production-including his argument that art conveys a culture's consciousness of time-show him to be a more wide-ranging and influential commentator on historiographical issues than has been previously acknowledged. In Time's Visible Surface, Michael Gubser...
Alois Riegl's art history has influenced thinkers as diverse as Erwin Panofsky, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Paul Feyerabend, Gilles Deleuze, and...
Wearied by his life as an administrator at the Duke's court in Weimar, in 1786 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe departed unannounced in the middle of the night for what had been the destination of his imagination since childhood: Italy. His extended stay there dramatically affected his views of art, architecture, prose, poetry, and science. When he returned to Germany and Weimar, Goethe's experiences translated into his life and work in ways that influenced countless others as they developed Germany's own brand of high culture.
The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction of...
Wearied by his life as an administrator at the Duke's court in Weimar, in 1786 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe departed unannounced in the middle of the...
After Images explores the intersections of photography, archaeology, and psychoanalysis and their effect on conceptions of the subject and his formation or Bildung in the literature and theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All three disciplines emerge out of the same historical context, and both photography and archaeology had major impacts on how psychoanalysis came to conceive of the subject, his memory, and the formation of his identity; and psychoanalysis had an equally major impact on how contemporary authors came to think about these same things. In After...
After Images explores the intersections of photography, archaeology, and psychoanalysis and their effect on conceptions of the subject and his form...
Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, New York, number more than forty thousand and constitute the largest single group of Jews from Syria in the world. Their thriving community includes fifteen synagogues in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where the practice of singing Arab melodies is a cornerstone of their religious services. In Maqam and Liturgy, author Mark L. Kligman investigates the multidimensional interaction of music and text in Sabbath prayers of the Syrian Jews to trace how Arab and Jewish traditions have merged in this particular culture, helping to illuminate a little-known dimension of...
Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, New York, number more than forty thousand and constitute the largest single group of Jews from Syria in the world. Their t...
Situating German language scholarship in relation to European nationalism, 19th century notions of race and ethnicity, the methodologies of humanistic inquiry, and debates over the interpretation of scripture, Benes investigates how the German nation came to be defined as a linguistic community.
Situating German language scholarship in relation to European nationalism, 19th century notions of race and ethnicity, the methodologies of humanistic...
