Can language hide thoughts? This question, posed by the German Academy for Language and Literature in 1965 as the topic of its first essay competition, was taken up by the philologist Harald Weinrich, with far-ranging results. The most immediate was his claiming first prize with this volume's title essay, published the following year as Linguistik der Luge. Weinrich's influential essay, now in its sixth printing in Germany, is presented here for the first time in English, with an updated preface by the author and additional essays selected by him.
With wit and clarity, Weinrich...
Can language hide thoughts? This question, posed by the German Academy for Language and Literature in 1965 as the topic of its first essay competit...
"Our daily encounters with forgetting have not taught us enough about how much power it exercises over our lives, what reflections and feelings it evokes in different individuals, how even art and science presuppose with sympathy or antipathy forgetting, and finally what political and cultural barriers can be erected against forgetting when it cannot be reconciled with what is right and moral. . . . We find that cultural history provides a helpful perspective in which the value of the art of forgetting emerges. . . . That is the subject this book (through which flows Lethe, the meandering...
"Our daily encounters with forgetting have not taught us enough about how much power it exercises over our lives, what reflections and feelings it evo...
