This thesis is concerned primarily with Doderer as a realist. For Doderer, the realistic novel embodies an implicit moral purpose, a re-conquering of the 'external* world of everyday reality. I have, therefore, started from Doderer's moral viewpoint and tried to discuss how this is actually embodied in the novels themselves. I have taken three specific aspects of his work; narrator, plot, and language. In discussing the narrator I have argued that the most successful parts of Doderer 1 s work are those where a genuinely personal narrator is present. This can be seen in "Die DaWien" where the use of more than one narrator broadens the range of the novel and means that the problems of the would-be novelist are integrated with the central moral concern of 'Henschwerdung*. In comparison, those sections of Doderer's work where the author himself is in charge of the narration are infinitely less successful, as can be seen from the passages in "Die Damonen" where the author takes over the narration from Geyrenhoff and Schlaggenberg. In discussing plot I have tried to suggest that the structure of Doderer 1 s novels is a perfect mirror for his overall moral attitude to life. There are, however, certain thematic weaknesses in his moral viewpoint, and these manifest themselves in faults in the actual plots. The fourth chapter discusses the nature of Doderer 1 s language, which is not simply that of the "traditional" realist. I have tried to show how various aspects of Doderer's style (particularly his recurrent use of certain images ) are important as a reflection of his central moral concern. Furthermore, the very confusion and restlessness of the language is often a deliberate evocation of the insecurity in the minds of the characters themselves. For Doderer, language is important as a concept; if properly used, it implies a right moral attitude to life, one of communication and contact between people. In the concluding chapter I have attempted to locate Doderer in the world of the twentieth century Austrian novel and to show that, although he is strikingly "unmodern" in both his moral and his artistic standpoints, this does not justify one in simply dismissing his novels as "epigonal".

This thesis investigates the use of aphorism in the work (\(Notizenwerk\)) of Ludwig Hohl and selected passages of Friedrich Nietzsche and Peter Handke in order to demonstrate the connections (Zusammenhänge) between aphorisms, taking seriously what aphoristic writers say about their own work, i.e. that aphorisms are the result of long secret chains of thought (Nietzsche). The study thereby addresses a gap in the research identified by Neumann. Concurring with Fedler, this thesis understands aphorism as combining conceptual with metaphorical (non-conceptual) thought and chains of thought are investigated on different levels. The dissertation illustrates that aphoristic writers dissolve conceptual boundaries and have elaborate concepts of phantasy (\(Phantasie\)), confirming Blumenberg’s view that wherever the conceptual is questioned, phantasy will be re-evaluated. In the course of this, Kassner’s influence on Hohl and Hohl’s influence on Handke will be shown. With the help of Begriffsgeschichte the thesis will demonstrate unity underlying Hohl’s Notizen, that aphorisms are capable of expressing a complex life-affirming theory, and that furthermore the aphorism cannot be understood without an existential, ineffable and personal dimension. An ontological fragmentariness underlies aphoristic writing, meaning that there is no opposition between aphorism and fragment and that instead aphorisms are inherently fragmentary.

An Introduction to the thesis presents a "Forschungsbericht" which summarises and discusses research to date. Both Heinrich von Beringen and Jacobus de Cessolis are introduced, and the German and Latin manuscripts used in the production of the texts are described. The text of Heinrich von Beringen's "Schachbuch" edited from manu-script Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. poet. et phil. 4o Nr. 25 follows: Part 1 (the poet's introduction to his text), Part 2 (the noble chess-pieces), Part 3 (the pawns) and Part 4 (the moves in the game of chess). This is accompanied by readings from manuscript London, British Library, Additional Manuscript 24946 and in Part 3 by a Latin parallel text from Bloomington (Indiana), Lilly Library, Indiana University, Ricketts 194 (or from Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Lat 169 where the Bloomington text fails). Endnotes relating to the text have been added. Appendix I correlates verses in the Stuttgart and London manuscripts, and Appendix II presents an up-to-date list (with references) of extant manuscripts of the "Liber de ludo scaccorum".

More than eighty years after the death of its author, Kafka fiction continues to stimulate diverse critical interest: only Shakespeare has generated more publications, more biographies or indeed more PhD theses. In recent years, scholarship has recognised the irreducible, polysemantic nature of Kafka’s writing as a stimulus for this regenerative criticism. Another factor is the author himself, along with his well-known biography. Particularly in published monographs, Franz Kafka’s life story has attracted almost as much attention as the fiction he produced. Thus, unusually for a writer whose works have been so thoroughly dissected by criticism, Franz Kafka seems to have survived the so-called death of the author, promulgated throughout literary theory. This thesis highlights a tension between these two stimuli; between the elusive multivocality of Kafka’s fiction and the ongoing influence of the author. It argues that mythologies about Kafka have now outlived their usefulness, and suggests that greater attentiveness to theoretical insights might benefit the field. Accordingly, this study proposes new ways of looking at Kafka which marginalise the influence of the author and related approaches to his fiction. In its investigation of authority as a theme of Kafka’s writing, this volume repositions Kafka’s fictional and non-fictional output within new and established contexts, exploring philosophical and critical dimensions of the oeuvre. In so doing, it asks what Kafka can teach us about our reading of Kafka, our reading of theory and reading in general.

My thesis explores the various ways in which a small selection of novels published in 1931 depict and respond to a widespread sense of crisis during the final phase of the Weimar Republic, arguing that the authors foreground a powerful sense that modernity itself is in a state of crisis. I consider how the novels articulate diverse experiences of modernity, both within and beyond the metropolis and from different social, generational and gender perspectives. Moreover, I examine how the authors' evaluation of modernity is reflected in their use of formal and narrative techniques. Focusing upon Gabriele Tergit's Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm, Hans Fallada's Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben and Irmgard Keun's Gilgi - eine von uns, I contend that the ambiguity and complexity of the authors' responses towards modernity were often flattened, simplified or ignored by reviewers in the politically polarized environment of the late Weimar Republic. This is partly the result of the debates about Neue Sachlichkeit which influenced the original reception of the novels and have continued to shape subsequent criticism. The novels themselves have often been labelled as classic examples of Neue Sachlichkeit. However, it is my contention that the novels also problematize some of the programmatic statements about this movement which circuated widely in the Weimar Republic. Therefore, I seek to re-examine the novels within the context of Weimar debates about modernity and Neue Sachlichkeit, as well as in the light of recent theoretical work in these areas. I also draw extensive comparisons and contrasts between the models of modernity foregrounded in Tergit's novel and Emile Durkheim's writings on anomie; in Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben and Ernst Bloch's Erbschaft dieser Zeit, and in Gilgi - eine von uns and Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World.

This thesis examines Kulturkritik and the question of the representation of difference in the work of Anne Duden. It uncovers a far-reaching interrogation of Western culture in Duden's work as oppositional relations between culture-nature, mind-body, subject and object are constantly questioned. It examinesthe criticism of the treatment of the body in Western culture which appears in the texts in a variety of ways. Though oblique reference to Cartesian and Enlightenment selves, the texts question dominant modes of being in the West and the consequences of this promotion. This is examined firstly through an analysis of Duden's essays on paintings of George and the dragon where the links between Duden's thought and the radical philosophy coming out of the 1960s are investigated. Then the prose works Ubergang and Das Judasschaf are explored to highlight the criticism of binary structures which I argue needs to be understood with reference to the types of selves and bodies which are privileged in Western culture; the production of 'useful/rational' bodies and hierarchical and oppositional subject-object, mind-matter relations prevalent in Enlightenment thought. I also argue that there is not just a criticism of structures perceived to be dominant in Western culture in Duden's texts, but that different modes of being are conveyed by the writing as differences within culture. The narrators become selves through fluid processes of interchange with the environment rather than existing as fixed entities. This analysis is linked to Duden's questioning of abstract and generalised concepts which enables a reading of the experiences of the narrators not as a 'breakdown' or loss of self, but as expressions of alternative modes of being. A close examination of the narrative style in Ubergang and Das Judasschaf analyses how selves, bodies and reality are represented. I argue that the writing is centrally concerned with areas beneath fixed forms and remains immanent to the experiences of pain, dissolution, joy, panic and the semi-conscious body rather than transcending and translating them into speech. Thus the writing continually gives us the impression that it paradoxically narrates word-less experiences. This writing of the body and other realms normally considered beyond representation questions universal norms and concepts. However, the narrative does not descend into nonsense and differences and specificities are not located beyond words but expressed in the text. The avant-garde properties of Duden's texts are examined through an analysis of montage techniques and the juxtaposition of levels of time in 'Ubergang and Das Judasschaf. Narrative and formal aspects are then explicitly linked to history and politics in an examination of Das Judasschaf and the centrality of the problem of living in a post-Holocaust culture. I will argue that the text's Kulturkritik indirectly interrogates the culture which produced the Holocaust and that the breakdown of narrative can be linked to the complexities of the post-Holocaust historical state. In addition the presentation of the Holocaust through the quotation of historical documents is understood in terms of the text's inability to represent the Holocaust. Aesthetics and politics are also brought together in the examination of the Steinschlag poems. With reference to Duden's essays on aesthetics, I argue that the Steinschlag texts speak with and through the broken remains of a language left over from the atrocities of the 20th Century. The musical re-configurations of the remnants, however, produce a negative hope by speaking from the sites of the gaps in culture and history.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Germanic Studies, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-09, Section: A, page: 3876. Adviser: Claudia Breger. Title from dissertation home page (viewed May 8, 2008).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Germanic Studies, 2007. / Title from dissertation home page (viewed April 8, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-07, Section: A, page: 2962. Adviser: Fritz Breithaupt.

This study focuses on selected texts and authors associated with the cultural centre exil in Vienna which promotes the culture of migrants and minorities, mainly Roma and Sinti, in Austria. Since 1997 exil has awarded the annual prize writing between cultures. The literary prize addresses authors with a migrant background’ whose mother tongue is not German but who write in German. Texts entered for this prize should cover (in the broadest sense) one of the following topics: being foreign, being different, identity, flight, expulsion, arriving, integration or living between cultures. Attached to the centre is the publishing house edition exil. The thesis investigates the negotiation of cultural identities of migrants at the intersection of the cultural centre exil individual life histories and literary creations. Tensions and contradictions between institutional and individual discourses are identified and are related to the literary works of the authors Seher Çakr, Dimitré Dinev, Anna Kim, Grace M. Latigo, Julya Rabinowich, Simone Schönett and Sina Tahayori. My analysis is informed by a theoretical framework which incorporates concepts of cultural identity, canonisation and the construction of community, and combines a cultural sociological approach with a textual one: the analysis focuses on qualitative interviews with selected authors as well as literary texts. I hope to demonstrate the tensions between cultural integration and exclusion and to investigate the place authors around exil negotiate for themselves. The aim of the project is to highlight exil’s as well as the authors’ contribution to the Austrian literary field and to provide a better understanding of their early literary works and their self-conception as writers.