Notoriety struck the Belgian-born literary critic Paul de Man more than once. First came his fame as one of the principal and most controversial theorists of deconstruction in the 1970s and early 1980s. After his death in 1983, notoriety struck a second time. In 1987, a Belgian scholar discovered that de Man had written in the early 1940s for several journals that collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of Belgium. The revelations precipitated debates that have yet to subside.The scholar who set loose this furor was Ortwin de Graef, who has since embarked on a comprehensive...

Inscribing the Other focuses on great authors who have by birth or choice (or both) found themselves outside the mainstream of their culture but who have still wished to address it: Goethe, Freud, Wilde, Heine, Nietzsche, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, among others. In thirteen probing, provocative essays Sander L. Gilman reinterprets their writing as it reveals their efforts to come to terms with their real or imagined sense of difference.The chapters treat many themes and problems, ranging widely from the romantic notion of the transcendent artist to the twentieth-century...

Georg Trakl (1887 1914) has emerged as one of the most influential poets of the century. Kudszus both explores and participates in the relentless process of Trakl s writing. Presumptions of objectivity, authority, dialogue, and coherence are questioned in a discourse that also involves Martin Heidegger s philosophical reflections on Trakl, C. G. Jung s self-analytical reading of James Joyce s Ulysses, and the Bluebeard tale as related by Charles Perrault.Faithful to its title, Poetic Process activates key issues of twentieth-century poetry terror, pain, madness, imagination unbound...

The Jews and Germany debunks a modern myth: that once upon a time there was a Judeo-German symbiosis, in which two cultures met and brought out the best in each other. Enzo Traverso argues that to the contrary, the attainments of Jews in the German-speaking world were due to the Jews aspiring to be German, with little help from and often against the open hostility of Germans. As the Holocaust proved in murder and theft, German Jews could never be German enough.Now the works of German Jews are being published and reprinted in Germany. It is a matter of enormous difference whether the...

Offers an indirect method for dealing with powerful and conservative voices in Trakl criticism, a method that unburdens the debate of its weighty pomposity and elicits delight from readers familiar with the critical context.

Can you forget the place you once called home? What does it take to make you recapture it? In this moving memoir, Susan Rubin Suleiman describes her returns to the city of her birth-where she speaks the language like a native but with an accent. Suleiman left Budapest in 1949 as a young child with her parents, fleeing communism; thirty-five years later, she returned with her two sons from a brief vacation and began to remember her childhood. Her earliest memories, of Nazi persecution in the final year of World War II, came back to her in fragments, as did memories of her first school years...

Are you acquainted with Tolstoy s The Gospel in Brief? At its time, this book virtually kept me alive. . . . If you are not acquainted with it, then you cannot imagine what an effect it can have upon a person. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker.The Gospel in Brief is Leo Tolstoy s integration of the four biblical Gospels into a single account of the life of Jesus. Inspired in large measure by Tolstoy s meticulous study of the original Greek versions of the Bible, The Gospel in Brief is a highly original fusion of biblical texts and Tolstoy s own...

A polymath well versed in European literature and philosophy, one of the founders of deconstruction, and a widely respected teacher, Paul de Man brought unprecedented attention and acclaim to the so-called Yale Critics. His fame was at a zenith when he died suddenly in 1983. A few years later, Ortwin de Graef found the de Man had written for the collaborationist press during the Nazi occupation, a discovery that ignited an international reassessment of de Man's work.

Serenity in Crisis is the first sustained account of the complex, intertextual tradition in which de Man wrote and of...

Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771 1833) occupied a unique place in German intellectual history. She is known for the salon she initiated in Berlin, which became a center for intellectuals and artists of various social classes especially for writers of the Romantic and the Young Germany schools. Based on research at the rediscovered Varnhagen Collection, Heidi Thomann Tewarson provides a new and comprehensive portrait of this remarkable woman. No longer primarily the sparkling salonniere, Varhagen is recognized as the author of a unique epistolary oeuvre.

Tewarson gives a rich account of...