This study provides a wide-ranging critique of contemporary anti-humanist postcolonial theory. By charting a genealogy of the complicity of humanism and oppression in the New World, this analysis highlights the process of consolidation of a racialised, autonomous and rational modern subject as well as the existence of a fractured modernity. Situating contemporary Derridean critiques of humanism within the Hegelian tradition, this work demonstrates that post-modern anti-essentialism does not succeed in escaping totalisation. Furthermore, it contextualises the fractured modernity of the Western...

This essay collection examines the dynamics of memory organization and the way it varies among different media and modes of discourse in post-unification Germany. German unification has put the post-war period into a historical perspective. Such a rupture raises questions concerning the appropriate commemoration, preservation and reinterpretation of the past. The processes of reorientation after unification influenced the self-perception of literary authors as well as the social role, position and status of German literature. They also affected the way writers viewed the competition in which...

In celebrating the academic career and practice of a distinguished scholar of French literature, this volume concentrates on one of Peter Broome s major preoccupations and attainments: translation. Eschewing a dogmatic, theoretical approach, the contributors (former colleagues and students) tackle four rich areas of study: modern anglophone poets reactions to, and translations of, authors with whom they have closely identified (Racine, the Symbolists, Saint-John Perse, Valery); problematics of translating specific poets of recent centuries (Rimbaud, Mallarme, Valery, Cesaire, some...

Pastor Martin Niemoller, popular author Ernst Wiechert, and the young theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer were well known in the public sphere in Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. As the decade of the 1930s progressed each of these figures became a vocal opponent of National Socialism. In the last twenty-eight sermons delivered before his arrest in 1937 Martin Niemoller revitalized Protestant homiletic discourse as a political tool in defiance of the regime. Having protested Niemoller s imprisonment, Ernst Wiechert was arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated at Buchenwald for three...

During the mid-nineteenth century, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer pursued a fifty-year career as a playwright and theater manager in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at a time of the transformation of court theaters and itinerant troupes into commercial establishments staffed by middle-class professionals and subject to market forces. Although she has been undervalued by some critics past and present who considered her mainly as an adapter of contemporary novels, this study shows that with her thorough knowledge of the European dramatic tradition, her skill as a playwright, and above all her...

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, the concept of the divine plays an obvious and major role in German literature. Through an analysis of twentieth-century German theatre, this book investigates continuities and discontinuities of this tradition. More specifically, it examines the modern estrangement from religious traditions coupled with the modern alienation from language. This work, however, reveals that there is also a continued divine presence on the stage in modernity, despite the general historical turn toward secular atheism. It deals with divine presence in the plays of...

This volume is based on the selected proceedings from an international conference Concept of Progression in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning held in Dublin in February 2004.
Although progression always has been at the centre of any methodology of teaching and learning foreign language, there has been surprisingly little published on the concept of progression. Since the inclusion of the pragmatic and socio-cultural context into foreign language teaching methodologies, the concept of progression has broadened considerably: it is no longer restricted any more to structural elements...

This study provides a first comprehensive introduction to the political and economic thought of Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi (1717-1771). While previous scholarship saw Justi as quintessentially a German thinker, this analysis argues that his thought was a by-product of the broader European intellectual discourse on the political implications of modern trade.
Writing between the conclusion of the War of the Austrian Succession (1748) and the end of the Seven Years War (1763) when competition among European powers was sharply on the increase Justi s aim was to create modern commercial...

This volume provides a description and analysis of findings from a European Commission research and development project: -The Fifth Dimension Local Learning Communities in a Global World-, funded within the framework -Information, Society, and Technology (IST), School of Tomorrow-. The contributors take as a point of departure that the school of tomorrow, the school in the information society, has two significant features. One is the expanded use of information and communication technologies (ICT). The other is the development of partnerships. The cases described here are based on the work of...

This is the first book-length account of Joseph Conrad s reception in Germany, a virtually unresearched area of Conrad studies. It demonstrates that Conrad was read and used by his German readers as a cosmopolitan literary and moral voice against the prevailing nationalism of Germany in the dark times of the 1930s and 1940s, when their own voices were being silenced. Challenging the longstanding assumption that Germany remained largely indifferent to his works, this book demonstrates that, particularly after the translation of the complete fiction commencing in the 1920s, Conrad s works...