GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

{"title":"‘PAST-PAST TIME’: ANTHROPOCENE ARRHYTHMIA AND REPARATIVE PHILOLOGY IN ULRIKE DRAESNER'S DOGGERLAND (2021)","authors":"Nicola Thomas,&nbsp;Katie Ritson","doi":"10.1111/glal.12444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12444","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article is concerned with the long poem <i>doggerland</i> (2021) by Ulrike Draesner, which we read here primarily in its relationship to the temporal disorder of the Anthropocene. We explore some specific manifestations of what we term ‘Anthropocene arrhythmia’ in Draesner's text, in particular through its engagement with linearity and cyclicality. We conclude by suggesting that Draesner's use of language both produces and demands a kind of philological practice that is tilted towards recovery and creativity. Our article illustrates the ways in which this ‘reparative philology’, working at the intimate scale of a single poem, can cultivate care and attention not just to the rupture of the Anthropocene, but also to the possibilities for recovery in human and geological history, interspecies relationships and a sense of place across time.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"78 3","pages":"364-379"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12444","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144574251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"THE ‘I’ OF SHAME AND RAGE: CONFESSION AND RUMINATION AT EITHER END OF A MILLENNIUM","authors":"Sarah Bowden,&nbsp;Nora Grundtner,&nbsp;Caitríona Ní Dhúill","doi":"10.1111/glal.12446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12446","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article brings together two texts that differ in numerous respects: the long poem <i>farbe komma dunkel</i> by Levin Westermann (2021) and a devotional text often known as the Bamberg Creed and Confession (<i>Bamberger Glaube und Beichte</i>), transmitted in a twelfth-century manuscript. Proceeding from a parallel reading, the article consists of a series of ruminations on a prominent grammatical feature shared by the poem and the confession — the I — and on a shared emotional tone involving shame and rage in the face of failure. The article offers a collaborative response to the two texts, both of which work with lists, repetitions and citations of pre-texts as a way of articulating location and emotion. The aim is to read in such a way as to combine affective responsiveness with interpretative rigour, attuned as much to the now of reading as to the historical and critical issues the texts raise. What emerges is a demonstration of the power and pleasure of literary language despite or quite possibly because of the consciousness of its precarity and, in the case of Westermann's poem, its seeming enmeshment within ecocidal forces.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"78 3","pages":"394-411"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12446","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144574199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"REFUGE AND THE WILDED CLASSROOM: FIGURE, PRACTICE, SPACE","authors":"Peter Arnds,&nbsp;Caitríona Ní Dhúill,&nbsp;Elliot Sturdy","doi":"10.1111/glal.70000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70000","url":null,"abstract":"<p>University teaching in a context of escalating planetary crisis requires new approaches to pedagogical encounter. Reconceptualising the university classroom as a potential refuge from polycrisis, we identify symptoms and effects of the academic-industrial complex and ‘fast academia’ in our practice, and we develop ways to take refuge from these effects so as to resist or undo them. These paths of resistance include: conscious deceleration and willed slowness as method and ethos; greater openness to the specificities of place and to the interaction of place and learning; a loosening of goal orientation; and closer attention to non-human life-forms and to possibilities for interspecies co-existence in a mode of ‘wild diplomacy’. We draw on Baptiste Morizot's reflections on <i>enforestment</i> and <i>tracking</i>, which foreground reciprocal relationships between places and the creatures, including humans, who move and cohabit within them, and we activate these reflections to reconfigure pedagogical dynamics both within and outside the classroom. We elaborate an ethos of <i>enforestment</i> with reference to three examples from our practice: the wolf seminar, the woodland class and a walk in the woods. In each instance, the realities of ecological relation are determinedly confronted and acknowledged, not as theme, topic, or object of study, but as the very ground of academic practice.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"78 3","pages":"321-341"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144574057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"INTRODUCTION. LETTERS IN THE WEB OF LIFE: TOWARDS AN ECOLOGICAL PHILOLOGY","authors":"Conor Brennan,&nbsp;Caitríona Ní Dhúill","doi":"10.1111/glal.12447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12447","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;The articles collected in this special number set out to explore new understandings of philology in the context of the multiple socio-ecological crises and predicaments of our time. It is with a consciousness of exhaustion, in an affective mode of overwhelm, that we rehearse the by-now familiar, yet ever-expanding list of interlocking, mutually exacerbating factors known under headings such as polycrisis, Global Ecological Change or the Anthropocene: in no particular order, these disorders include climate breakdown, species extinction, habitat destruction (including the destruction of human habitats), extreme weather events, the breaching of planetary boundaries, and the escalation of global social injustice, political polarization, violence, war and genocide. What does it mean to continue with the work of philology in times like these? Why might this work matter, both as it has always mattered and in new ways? How could it help us?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Philology, as its etymology suggests, is the discipline of loving words, but the term itself has occupied a shifting position within the changing disciplinary self-understanding of German Studies or ‘Germanistik’ over the course of its recent history. Philology/‘Philologie’ can resonate in a number of ways, depending on linguistic, cultural and institutional context: here the overarching designation of a university faculty in which German Studies might be located, there an exhortation to return to the text, elsewhere a dated curiosity that might repay being dusted off, or a confident proclamation of the inherent value of certain types of specialised expertise, concerning, say, editorial practice.1 In the Anglosphere, self-identification as a philologist or philologian may seem an oddity today, certainly out of step with dominant trends in German Studies of recent decades, in which cultural ‘production’ or ‘products’ have tended to be read within wider webs of medial, socio-historical, and political concern, and refracted through various theoretical and discursive turns. While acknowledging and responding to these disciplinary and wider discursive contexts, this special issue is primarily devoted to the question of how and why we practise philology in an unstable and volatile world. We ask: what is involved in a commitment to the labour of love towards words and ‘letters’ — in the capacious sense of ‘letters’ intended by the title of this journal — within the increasingly ruinous and polarising context of ecocidal late modernity?2 How can philological practice be or become a meaningful response to the precariousness of the world?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In its current professionalised forms, German Studies (a.k.a. ‘Germanic philology’, the study of the German language and its ‘letters’ in the wider sense) can be understood as itself a product of the industrial age, enmeshed with fossil-fuel culture across all its modes of production, dissemination and practice, including the production of the subjectivities of its practitioners","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"78 3","pages":"277-288"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12447","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144574022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"INSECT LIFE AND LETTERS: THE STUDIES OF HANNS HEINZ EWERS AND OTTO AND ROSE HECHT","authors":"Alice Christensen,&nbsp;Ina Linge","doi":"10.1111/glal.12445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12445","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article argues that vast histories of war and displacement in the twentieth century are connected to the small and almost unnoticeable lives of insects, and that philology has much to gain from paying attention to insect worlds. We examine two case studies: the work of the German entomologist Otto Hecht and his wife, Rose Caro Hecht, and the lay entomology of the German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers and his letter exchange with geneticist Richard B. Goldschmidt. Drawing on the cultural-theoretical work of Walter Benjamin, our analysis sheds light on the entanglement of entomological and philological labour and a recurrent interplay of intimacy and violence in both. We develop an approach which takes seriously the eros of intellectual pursuits and the endless curiosity that drives the study of words and insects, but which also shows how these encounters with the very small intersect with incomprehensibly large-scale political violence in the twentieth century. We playfully suggest that the method we develop in this article constitutes a form of ‘insect philology’.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"78 3","pages":"342-363"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12445","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144573848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"CONCEPTUALISING THE PEDAGOGUE AS WANDERER: WILHELM GENAZINO'S WENN WIR TIERE WÄREN (2011) AND FELICITAS HOPPE'S PIGAFETTA (1999)","authors":"Daniela Dora,&nbsp;Mary Cosgrove","doi":"10.1111/glal.12443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12443","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Our paper contemplates wanderer figures in literature as inspiration for rethinking the academic as pedagogue and the practice of reading in the context of ongoing ecological uncertainties. Academia is permeated by performance pressure in teaching and research. By prioritising productivity, growth and speed, universities are complicit with the anthropocentric values of fossil-fuel culture. Against this we reimagine the pedagogue as a wild/rewilding wanderer who deviates from institutional norms and reads their environment differently by moving through space. For the ‘wild’ pedagogue, the seminar room becomes a mobile space where minds can wander, fostering creativity and new insights. The wanderers we discuss in texts by Wilhelm Genazino — <i>Wenn wir Tiere wären</i> (2011) — and Felicitas Hoppe — <i>Pigafetta</i> (1999) — move through space in this way. Genazino explores human/non-human relationships from a resisting space of deliberately unproductive perambulation, while <i>Pigafetta</i> attempts to re-mystify the planet in the era of globalisation. Both texts model close, attentive reading through the looking practices of their protagonists. By means of radical philology, which fuses poetological and hermeneutic approaches to literature, and the close reading it necessitates, we trace an imaginary path from text to reimagined pedagogical practice.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"78 3","pages":"304-320"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12443","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144574115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"REWILDING GERMAN STUDIES: NOTES FROM AN EXPERIMENT","authors":"Hanna Bingel-Jones,&nbsp;Tina-Karen Pusse","doi":"10.1111/glal.12441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12441","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This contribution reports on the ‘Rewilding German Studies, Rewilding Pedagogies’ event held in January 2024 at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin under the title ‘Day of Dialogue and Reflection’. As well as describing the day's proceedings, we highlight the main points of discussions that emerged between the participants and give insight into the ecocritical, literary, and philosophical sources that inspired our discussions or proved to be relevant retrospectively. A main concern, as we explain, was to explore alternative routes that help to challenge academic routines and foster self-reflexive thinking about academic practices, while special emphasis was put on embodiment, space, place and collaborative thinking. We present the insights gained on the day and reflect on how these can help to revise disciplinary practice in light of the multiple ecological predicaments of the current age.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"78 3","pages":"289-303"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12441","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144573219","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"THE OTHER DEMOSTHENES. ON POSSIBLE FORMS OF PHILIATION BETWEEN ECOLOGY AND PHILOLOGY","authors":"Elliot Sturdy,&nbsp;Corinna Sauter,&nbsp;Thomas Traupmann","doi":"10.1111/glal.12442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12442","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Beginning with the oratorial askesis of Demosthenes and its use of nature as a tool for the amplitude and clarity of the human voice as a ‘Vexierbild’, this article suggests that the appropriation of philology to serve a particular end (rather than being an end in itself) risks repeating the very injustice that ecocritical discourses are trying to correct due to the way they restrict the potential of what texts can tell us. To bring out ecological aspects of philology, this article pursues a notion of language that understands it to be intrinsically linked with the opening up of the potential for affiliations, as found in Aristotle, August Boeckh, and Werner Hamacher. This article emphasises language's potential for kinships rather than its ability to make decisions and judgements about the right form for our relationship with the world. It also makes a plea for a philology that is not focused on extracting immediately usable meanings from its interpretations. Instead, philology should open itself up towards linguistic ‘wildness’. By doing so, it can provide us with a model for an ethics of co-responsibility that seeks to bring about open and inclusive forms of resonance across times, places and species.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"78 3","pages":"380-393"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12442","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144573220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"DIE ARBEIT DES ÜBERSETZENS: RILKE UND MICHELANGELO („SE ’L MIE ROZZO MARTELLO‘‘)","authors":"Astrid Dröse,&nbsp;Jörg Robert","doi":"10.1111/glal.12438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12438","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay examines Rainer Maria Rilke's reception of the sculptor and poet Michelangelo in the context of interest in the Renaissance around 1900, focusing first on the <i>Stundenbuch</i>, the <i>Florenzer Tagebuch</i> and the story ʻVon einem, der die Steine belauschtʼ (from the prose collection: <i>Geschichten vom lieben Gott</i>). Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche and his concept of Artistenmetaphysik, Rilke portrays Michelangelo as a ‘superman’ (ʻÜbermenschenʼ) and a desperate seeker for God. Rilke's translation of ʻSe ʼl mie rozzo martelloʼ then shows how he uses Michelangelo's poetic self-reflection to express a poetics of transformation (‘Verwandlung’) that focuses on the concept of ‘work’. Thus, Michelangelo becomes a figure of identification and reflection for Rilke in two respects: as a poet, he refers back to Rilke himself, as a sculptor to Auguste Rodin, who in his time was often perceived as a new Michelangelo.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"78 2","pages":"194-216"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12438","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143688940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"FROM TRASH TO TREASURE: RILKE AND VENICE REVISITED","authors":"Robert Vilain","doi":"10.1111/glal.12437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12437","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Rilke loved Venice and visited or passed through a dozen times between 1897 and 1920. He wrote extensively about the city in prose and verse between 1898 and 1908, including a cycle of poems in the <i>Neue Gedichte</i> and a polemical ‘Aufzeichnung’ in <i>Malte Laurids Brigge</i>. His letters from and about Venice have numerous lexical and imagistic echoes or prefigurations of his literary responses to the city. This article traces his interactions with Venice, his consistent hostility to tourism (and its reasons), and in particular the development of his poetic ways of seizing the city's fragile identity via a conviction that Venice's historical power, despite its precarious foundations, always underpins its surface glamour. Unlike most of his literary contemporaries, he did not regard Venice as the <i>locus classicus</i> of decadent decline; quite the reverse. Close readings both of canonical works and of much less familiar texts allow an elucidation of what might be called Rilke's ‘Venetian poetics’, which are closely associated with the technique of ‘aussparen’ (borrowed from painting). The failure of this technique in the context of his aborted biography of Admiral Carlo Zeno marks the end of his attempts to capture the city's essence in his creative writings.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"78 2","pages":"127-193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12437","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143688685","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}