Launige Gegenüberstellung von Altem und Neuem, Tradition und Moderne am Beispiel der Beschreibung eines alten Marktplatzes mit seinen neumodisch gekleideten Menschen und verwitterten Ornamenten, seinen eingesunkenen Giebeln und lärmenden Automobilen.

Textgenese eines Gedichtes von F. E. Peters dokumentiert durch den Dichter selbst.

Ein fiktiver Brief an einen "jungen Freund" zu dem Verhältnis von Krieg und Dichtung.

No description available.

This dissertation revitalizes the sociological approach to literature in the light of the 'cultural turn' in sociology represented by Pierre Bourdieu, Ulrich Beck, Gerhard Schulze and others - and demonstrates its potential for contemporary German-language literature. Advocating the decisive role of the social functions of cultural products, my investigation starts from the thesis that, with the electronic mass media acquiring a dominant role in the cultural sphere, a functional differentiation has taken place, forcing authors of artistic aspiration to focus on the media-specific strengths and benefits of literature as text while at the same urging them to adjust to the consumption patterns of mass entertainment - not least because literature as institution is increasingly permeated by the laws of a globalized market. The result is, as I argue, a neo-realism which appeals on the surface to readers looking for intense, authentic experiences of "reality" and shifts its more challenging artistic dimensions to a deeper level of symbolism, allusions and structural constellation.</br> My inquiry into the social functions of this new realistic paradigm is carried out by expos-ing the literary representation of the transforming East-German society after reunification, as rep-resented in Ingo Schulze's novel "Simple Storys", to a comparison with the sociological diagnosis of it. This comparison does not subjugate the novel to external, non-literary criteria; instead, it demonstrates the specific features of the literary "grip on reality" as opposed to the scientific one and relates them to the competition with the mass media. On the individual level, two main social functions of contemporary literature-as-art finally emerge: to work through the cultural knowledge of its readers and their modes of experience, to test their limits and to transcend them partially - and to do the same with the elements of identity bound up with this cultural knowledge, thus facilitating a partial self-transcendence which gives room for suppressed needs. On a more general level, these functions keep reader's cultural knowledge and personal identities flexible enough to adjust to an ever-changing social environment. At the same time, they provide the subjective basis for critical distance and creative innovation.

The dissertation investigates reading behaviors in Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96), Tiecks Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798/1843) and Novalis Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) within the framework of the history of reading and book production. Social and technological pressures during the latter part of the eighteenth century resulted in a re-definition and re-invention of the reading process as the modern book was being invented. New themes and genres appeared on the literary horizon that had as a goal the education of a new kind of reader. Goethes, Tiecks, and Novaliss novels, which were products of the paradigm shift in reading, did not, however, just embrace changes that were already in place. By engaging in the contemporary discussion about new and old reading behaviors, each of these works promoted a new kind of reading that in one way or another maintained older forms while still recognizing the revolution that the irreversible technological advances had initiated. Drawing on discussions by Engelsing and Schön on the history of reading, the dissertation shows that the three novels record new reading strategies by analyzing the epochal changes in terms of a three-fold movement from intensive to extensive reading, reading aloud to reading silently, and communal to solitary reading. Additionally, it shows how the novels investigate the relationship between the reception of textual and visual artifacts and, thereby, contribute to the contemporary discourse on changes in the aesthetic status of image and text. The three novels explore these shifts from different angles. The Lehrjahre thus analyzes the transition from intensive to extensive reading by placing these modalities between reading in a community and reading in solitude. Sternbald, less concerned with the complexities of this transition, focuses on the communal aspect of reading by exploring how a revitalized orality can affect a rapidly changing reading culture. Ofterdingen, by contrast, reflects on the inherent contradiction of efforts to enhance reading culture by restoring orality. For Novalis, the emergence of extensive solitary readers was final and irreversible.

This project uncovers the role of recent German-Balkan works in articulating transnational identity in and through literature. Drawing on social and political models of European identity representations as well as on studies on stigma, trauma, and diasporic cultures as distinct historical formations, I contend that migrant fictions from Eastern Europe and the Balkans not only illuminate the concepts and demarcations operative in European collective imaginations but also introduce an Eastern European/Balkan dimension regarding the formation of modern identities beyond a national focus. To investigate this process, I focus on three Eastern European expatriates: the Bulgarian-born German and Austrian writers Rumjana Zacharieva and Dimitre Dinev and the Russian-German Wladimir Kaminer. The dissertation begins with an overview of postcolonial and Western theories of subjectivity and hybridity within the context of German literary-critical discourse on alterity, migration, and Turkish-German writings to argue that the historical and cultural context from which Eastern Europe/the Balkans have developed as Europes Other within requires a reconfiguration of present theoretical models. In historiographic fashion, this thesis emphasizes the role of Ottoman and Soviet legacies and Western domination on the formation of Balkan subaltern identities. Attending to a tradition of Balkanist discourse that engages the internal bipolar demarcation of Balkan identities as part Western, part Oriental, I reconsider in chapters 3 and 4 how Dinev and Zacharievas writings negotiate the experience of migration from East to West and articulate particular kinds of Balkan identities as a response to competing representations of the Balkans and the West. In the fifth chapter, my application of the Russian discourse on itself and Europe in examining Kaminers works transcends the discussion of migration and Balkan identities to offer a related, yet differentiated, account of the manifold processes that surround other Eastern European writings in German. By analyzing these narratives through an East-West lens, the study shows how thinking about identity and migration in literary and historical perspectives proves useful for understanding the shifting identities and borders in Germanic Europe and beyond.

Thesis--Münster. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 7-11).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago. / Biographical sketch.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1909. / Double pagination. Offprint from Modern Philology, October, 1909, p. 245-288; January, 1910, p. 345-382. Includes bibliographical references (p. 1-2).