From dross to gold, an enchanting tale of love is spun.
Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Einstein--all praised the writings of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), a mathematician, physicist and astronomer by profession, and an aphorist and satirist on the sly. In "Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl," novelist Gert Hofmann weaves a wondrous fictionalized tale of Lichtenberg's real-life romance with "the model of beauty and sweetness," Maria Stechard, a flower seller he meets one day near his laboratory in Gottingen. "The greater part of what I...

Crisis presents chances for change and creativity: Adorno's famous dictum that writing poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric has haunted discourse on poetics, but has also given rise to poetic and theoretical acts of resistance. The essays in this volume discuss postwar poetics in terms of new poetological directions and territory rather than merely destruction of traditions. Embedded in the discourse triggered by Adorno, the volume's foci include the work of Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn, and Ingeborg Bachmann. Other German writers discussed are Ilse Aichinger, Rose Auslander, Charlotte...

Der letzte Roman Gert Hofmanns, dessen Manuskript er vier Wochen vor seinem Tod abgab, erzhlt von der Liebe des groen Aufklrers und Physikers Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799).

Travelling is the art of motion, motion results in moments of human encountering, and such moments manifest themselves in unsettling linguistic repercussions and crises of meaning. Places of arrival also function as inscriptions of such meaningful repercussions, inscriptions of the past crossing the present, of the other crossing the self. The contributions in this book explore places, rituals, texts and scriptures as religious or secular inscriptions - "topographies" - of such "arrivals." Each arrival happens, and its very place manifests itself only as a momentous component of the process...