The purpose of this study is to compare three concepts of the theme of "metamorphosis" in twentieth century literature, namely in three selected novels by Kafka, Butor and Garc(')ia Marquez respec- tively. The search for the "Metamorphosis of the Metamorphosis" is divided in two parts: the history of metamorphosis from the Biblical creation through the Greek myths and finally to modern literature. The second part will focus on the analysis of the three works. / The Die Verwandlung (1915), by Franz Kafka, exemplifies the external aspect of a regressive change, from a human being to a cockroach. The "metamorphosis" in Kafka's novel reveals a day- dream, a psychic wound inflicted by the first World War on the individual and society in general. La Modification (1957), by the French New Novelist Michel Butor, emphasizes the process of internalized metamorphosis on the subconscious level, the modify- ing myth of a modern descent to Hades. This inner modification leads to an aborted quest for a manly God, to a wrong "Change of Heart." The Colombian novel Cien anos de soledad (1969), by Gabriel Garc(')ia Marquez, both combines and explains our three thematic views of "metamorphosis," "modification," and "alchemy" as an endless inward movement inevitably making its way back to nothingness--mental alienation and self-destruction. The solitary cycle of progress and regression in the biological and the spiritual dimensions of man in the Columbian novel is expressed in the apocalyptic return to a Zero Degree. / This study concludes by focusing on multiple novelistic, artistic and cinematographic devices in the twentieth century leading to a pessimistic view of society. Most of the authors and artists who use the theme of metamorphosis after the traumatic Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God and the genetic experience of "mutation" caused by atomic bombs show a cyclic regression, a spiritual disease: the aspiration of contemporary man to be God, which makes man a beast. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 47-01, Section: A, page: 0169. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1986.

Friedrich von Schiller's aesthetic idealism was a significant influence on the literary community of nineteenth century Russia. Fyodor Dostoevsky's appreciation of Schiller caused him to organize his writings according to the German author's paradigm of beauty, nature, and reason. Schiller's secularized concept of aesthetics relied on art as the medium for the education and refinement of the mind. Dostoevsky christianized Schiller's ideas by assigning Christ the function of beauty. In Schiller's view, people who succeed in integrating nature and reason through the ability to perceive beauty rise to the ideal condition of human existence which he called the "beautiful soul." For Dostoevsky, those who unify nature and reason within themselves through an appreciation for the ideal beauty of Christ become the "higher man." For both authors, the failure to harmonize nature and reason is the cause of suffering. The purpose of the present study is to show how Schiller's aesthetics influenced the Russian author. Contrary to the view in contemporary scholarship that the affect of Schiller's ideas varies in the course of Dostoevsky's literary development, this study shows that Schiller's influence is strong and continual throughout Dostoevsky's major fiction. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 48-07, Section: A, page: 1762. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1987.

Thesis--Hamburg. / Bibliography: p. [174]-178.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-10, Section: A, page: 4287. Adviser: Mikhail Iampolski.

Recent trends in immigration to the German speaking countries have contributed to a new multi-cultural demographic in the "culture boxes" of L2 German textbooks. A close analysis of their content, however, reveals a racist discourse that promotes and reinforces a power-based, hegemonic majority culture at the expense of minorities, as well as materials that reinforce U.S. American cultural values at the expense of German ones by imagining a community of German speakers that meets U.S. national identity needs. Utilizing tools from the fields of semiotics, critical discourse analysis and cultural studies, the dissertation demonstrates how both racism toward the German "Other" and U.S. American ethnocentrism are promoted by discourse strategies including but not limited to: narration, indexicality, myth, metaphor and metonym. This dissertation views and comments on the L2 German textbook from the perspective of text itself, the culture therein represented, and the users of the materials, proposing that "reading" the L2 German textbook from a Cultural Studies perspective effectively addresses current theories about culture teaching and disciplinarity while bringing basic language learners into a much-advocated arena of critical thinking about the self and others. Such activities align basic language instruction more closely with beliefs about the responsibilities and goals of Humanities and General Education teaching in the United States.

Sigmund Freud has much to say about the subject of war and death in his later work, written after 1914. Freud explores the effect of war on the soldier, his adjustment to war, his retreat to the primitive, the development of neuroses in combat, and the soldier's reaction to death. War and death are also important subjects found in German literature of the First World War. The aim of this thesis is to briefly review Freud's ideas on the individual in war, and to juxtapose these ideas to various accounts provided by German soldiers of the First World War. The four works of German World War I Literature used in this comparison are: Im Westen Nichts Neues by Erich Maria Remarque, Feuer und Blut by Ernst Junger, Seelenleben des Soldaten an der Front by Ludwig Scholz, and Kriegsbriefe gefallener Studenten edited by Philipp Witkop.

The dissertation investigates whether there is a place of refuge for women characters within and/or beyond American literary texts written by men around the turn of the twentieth century. Besides major and minor texts of leading American men of letters, Henry Adams and Henry James, the texts also include two Dutch novels, Multatuli's Max Havelaar and Frederik van Eeden's Van de koele meren des doods. In examining these texts, the dissertation seeks for a male feminist practice that does not immediately turn into a male practice of appropriation and violence, I adopt a feminist practice of exposing gender representations in canonical male-authored texts, giving particular attention to the results of their representations for women. The question I ask of them is also a question I ask of my critical practice: is a genuine representation of female characters by male authors possible? The metaphors of feminism as a "no man's land" and American literature as a "territorial battle" connect issues central in Adams, James, Multatuli, and Van Eeden. The inclusion of the Dutch texts "within" American literature takes place not only on the basis of intertextual links with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, but also because their preoccupation with gender resembles gender systems in texts of Henry Adams and Henry James. All these male authors share an interest in the representation of women in their literary works. Henry Adams argues in The Education that there is "no refuge" for modern American women except "such as the male created for himself." After analyzing the Dutch novels, James's The Wings of the Dove, and Adams's Esther, his South Seas letters, and The Education of Henry Adams, I locate these dubious moments of refuge for women within male representation in strategies of idealizations of female alterity, self-reflexivity, exposure of the cultural construction of gender, and silence. Whether these places of refuge for women within the borders of the male texts go beyond already staked out territories into "no man's land" is a question at the heart of the dissertation.

The writer Elfriede Jelinek and the multi-media artist Valie Export represent Austria's feminist avant-garde which evolved in the 1960s. Their work--a strong criticism of the social, economic and political situation of women in today's Austria combined with innovative avant-garde aesthetics--evoked a wide range of reactions by the press over the past 25 years. Interviews with Jelinek and Export conducted by the author and included in this study give light to the problematic relationship between the press and the artists. This dissertation presents a thorough compilation and analysis of the book, theatre and film reviews which were published in the "Fueilleton" section of German and Austrian daily and weekly newspapers. An examination of the post-war status and the intense scholarly discussion of its legitimacy in today's mass media-dominated society reveals the current crisis of "feuilletonistic" art-criticism. The clash between the provocative content and aesthetics of avant-garde art as an alternative and the media as voice of mainstream society demonstrates a climax of the problematic situation in contemporary Austria and Germany. The large number of negative reactions of Jelinek's literature and Export's films by the critics and their aggressive rhetoric had a strong influence on the general public's resentment against Austria's feminist avant-garde. Jelinek's and Exports perseverance as active feminists stands out in Austria's conservative society. Its strong social and religious traditions and patriarchal values have been the major hurdle for many women to achieve equality. The fact that Austria's women in large part still succumb to their traditional roles underscores, on the one hand, the importance of Jelinek's literature and Export's films as an artistic endeavor for consciousness-raising. On the other hand, a large majority of the media's art-critics, most of them men, show a strong reluctance to look beyond the horizons of tradition. The combination of avant-garde aesthetics and political feminist views in Jelinek's and Export's work lead therefore to rigorous misunderstandings and extreme misrepresentations of Austria's feminist avant-garde.

This dissertation explores the grounding of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the intellectual and artistic movements of the modernist period, and reads masculine anxiety in the modernist novel in terms of Lacan's work on psychosis, masochism, and narcissism. The thrust of my dissertation is twofold. The first half aims at a reinterpretation of Jacques Lacan's work in light of his early intellectual engagements with Freud, G. G. de Clerambault, and Heidegger, and as such establishes the basis for Lacan's early work in the traditions of Freudian dream analysis, experimental French psychiatry, and existential phenomenology. The second half, starting with a discussion of Lacan's third seminar, The Psychoses, and D. P. Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, examines Henry James's enigmatic 1901 novella The Sacred Fount as a meditation on the uniquely masculine anxiety over negotiating same-sex intellectual relationships, manifested as psychosis. The subsequent chapters on Proust, Sacher-Masoch, and Joyce, read with the later Lacan of Seminars XX and available sections of XXIII, explore and flesh out possible Lacanian readings of masochism and narcissism with regard to paternal (or pseudo-paternal) relationships. The major theme of my dissertation is that of vexed intellectual relationships between men separated by generational difference. Situating Lacan's discourse in the context of the modernist period, I illustrate how Lacan's intellectual apprenticeships and encounters (real and imagined) play out in his mature work, beginning with the first seminars of the 1950s. With numerous polymathic allusions, jokes, and non sequiturs, Lacan attempts a "return" and a self-conscious rewriting of Freud from the perspective of a rank outsider, pre-emptively exiled from the Freudian school for having been born too late, in the wrong country, and medically trained outside of the psychoanalytic tradition. By the same token, texts such as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and Ulysses depict the psychic contortions of sidestepping Oedipal conflict through elaborate delusions and blunt disavowals of the father's potency. In sum, the trajectory of modernist intellectual life, especially psychoanalysis, turns on tendentious and broken relationships between teachers and students, as technical and artistic disciplines struggled to keep pace with cultural upheavals of the period.

The glorification of war and the thoughtless use of "national" stereotypes characteristic of 19th century literature have broken down in the later 20th century after World War II and the end of the Cold War in 1991. German-speaking authors from various parts of Europe have participated in this dismantling through their creation of engaging fictions related to the war experience that contain critical reexaminations of relationships between the German and Slavic peoples of Europe at an individual, existential level. They have proven that "national" stereotypes perish when individuals are presented with real human beings. The works examined are Siegfried von Vegesack's Tanja: Eine Erzahlung aus dem Kaukasus, Heinrich Boll's Der Zug war punktlich and Gruppenbild mit Dame, Max Frisch's Als der Krieg zu Ende war, Herbert Eisenreich's Tiere von ganz naturlicher Grausamkeit, and Christa Wolfs Moskauer Novelle. Thus, the phenomenon is a Europe-wide development and not an isolated incident.