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Seminar Volume 54, No. 1, February 2018
Seminar Online: bit.ly/semr541
Articles
Im Schacht des Textes: Diskursive Schichten in E. T. A. Hoffmanns „Die Bergwerke zu Falun“
Alina Dana Weber
Already the title of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s „Die Bergwerke zu Falun“ (1818) highlights the structural composition of this novella as a mine consisting of ethnologic, alchemistic, chemical, psychoanalytical and transcendental-philosophical layers that this interpretation highlights. Ultimately caught in vitriol, the text’s protagonist Elis serves as the symbol of the blundering reader: Surrounded by layers of meaning, he is incapable of recognizing and interpreting them successfully. However, a reading that follows Hoffmann’s Serapiontic principle can identify Elis’s fate as the novella’s aesthetic and poetic guideline about how one should not read. Such a reading will be able to reconstruct the text’s hermeneutic mine creatively and effectively. Read it at>>> http://bit.ly/sem541a
Self-Ridiculing Nostalgia: Joseph Roth’s Die Kapuzinergruft
This article argues for a reinterpretation of the role of Habsburg nostalgia in Die Kapuzinergruft, the final novel by the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. From the early 1930s onward, Roth had been an enthusiastic proponent of the Habsburg myth, and the tenor of his pro-Habsburg journalism became particularly adulatory during the final years of his life. Partly as a result of this, Die Kapuzinergruft is frequently read as a heavy-handed endorsement of Austria’s imperial past, although several valuable contra-nostalgic interpretations of the text have appeared in recent years. This article reconciles the differences between these two views of the novel by arguing that in fact the work dramatizes Roth’s inner conflict between the solace offered by Habsburg nostalgia and his own awareness of the perceptual, psychological, and moral weaknesses that such nostalgia entailed. Read it at>>> http://bit.ly/sem541b
Gerhard Roth’s Fotonotizen: The Early Years, 1972–1980
This essay, the first of two on the Fotonotizen of the Austrian writer, photographer, essayist, and political and cultural commentator Gerhard Roth, examines the utilization of photography in his aesthetic practice from 1972 to the late 1970s. To date, the scholarship on photography in Roth’s work remains fragmented, either embedded in studies of individual works or, where the topic is explicitly addressed, largely confined to an analysis of general stylistic tendencies or to a particular moment in his literary development, in particular, the production of his first, seven-volume narrative cycle Die Archive des Schweigens (1980–91). This essay locates Roth’s photographic activities within the context of photographic theory, Roth’s interest in the history of photography, and his reflections on the photographs he has produced and utilized in his writing. Read it at>>> http://bit.ly/sem541c
Notebooks and Children’s Drawings, or the Inter-Authorship of Peter Handke’s Kindergeschichte
In 1981 Peter Handke published the semi-autobiographical text Kindergeschichte, containing reflections on the early years of life with his daughter Amina. During these years, Amina frequently wrote and drew in her father’s notebooks. This article considers Amina not only as the subject of her father’s work but also as a kind of co-author, by grounding the narrative thematization of the interaction between child and adult in the concrete interaction of their writing and drawing practices in Handke’s notebooks. The observation of his child’s entry into the material-semiotic systems of writing, I suggest, heightened Handke’s awareness of the visuality and materiality of his own compositional practice. Much like the “lessons” he learned from the painter Paul Cézanne in composing Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire, Amina’s emergent drawing and writing practice, her concrete “Suche nach Formen” on the pages of her father’s notebooks, was intertwined in the ongoing evolution of her father’s project of writing as it took shape in Kindergeschichte. Read it at>>> http://bit.ly/sem541d
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Founded in 1965, Seminar is one of the leading journals today for the study of Germanic literature, media and culture. It seeks to publish the highest-quality scholarship on a range of fields including philology, philosophy, aesthetics, media studies, visual culture, gender studies, and transnationalism in so far as they relate to German-language material or other languages in a German-cultural context. Jointly sponsored by the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German and the German division of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, the journal endeavors to promote German studies across a broad international context. Submissions are welcome in English, French or German.
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