GERMAN QUARTERLY最新文献

{"title":"“Das Problem des Stilwandels”: Stylistic Transformation in the Work of Emil Staiger","authors":"Elisa Ronzheimer","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12476","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article reconstructs a theoretical and methodological problem in the work of German literary scholar Emil Staiger, a representative of the postwar school of <i>Werkimmanenz</i>, which called for a renewal of form-sensitive practices of reading. It analyzes Staiger's notion of style and traces its application in his monumental <i>Goethe</i> monograph and his essay collection <i>Stilwandel</i>, highlighting the difficulties that arise from Staiger's attempt to operationalize style in the sense of an artwork's inner unity (“Einstimmigkeit”) for his study of dynamic and changing forms. These difficulties led him to reframe his notion of style in a 1968 paper that, however, ultimately left the problem of how to write a history of literary styles unresolved.</p>","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 4","pages":"506-521"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12476","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142862125","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":"Recovering Kafka's rhetorical unconscious","authors":"Stanley Corngold","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12479","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12479","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Kafka has become answerable to cultural studies, in one form or another, to an extraordinary degree—a fact that speaks for the seemingly inexhaustible ability of his work to accommodate “forms of the real” both contemporaneous with his writing and in the decades following. So, there is Kafka, with his celebrated “Ohr für das Kommende,” held, as in “Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer,” &lt;i&gt;Das Schloß&lt;/i&gt;, and &lt;i&gt;Der Proceß&lt;/i&gt;, to have anticipated today's intractable border disputes, relentless immigration, and baffling simulacra, as if AI-generated. This approach, now so widely extended, marks, to my mind, a crisis, recalling us to the detail of Kafka's prose that mattered most to him as arising, we might say (and as Lacan has said) from his rhetorical unconscious. We know that it was Kafka's practice to frequent bookstores and riffle through the pages of the new arrivals, something short of reading them with the sort of engagement that justifies his mooted encyclopedic anticipations. His work is certainly full of allusions to contemporary authors and issues suggestive of our own; and even where they are not explicitly named, we are entitled to conclude the impossibility of proving that any such matter was &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; known to him. For example, he does not appear to have written down the name Nietzsche, but it is certain that he knew a great deal about him. And yet we should not leave home for all this border-crossing. I call for a return to Kafka's text with its special intensity drawn from regions “below,” following “dieses Hinabgehen zu den dunklen Mächten, diese Entfesselung von Natur aus gebundener Geister, fragwürdige Umarmungen und was alles noch unten vor sich gehen mag, von dem man oben nichts mehr weiß, wenn man im Sonnenlicht Geschichten schreibt” (Kafka to Brod; &lt;i&gt;Briefe&lt;/i&gt; 384). This underworld is explosive with sexual and aggressive energies, confirmed, as it happens, by Kafka's saying to Max Brod, in answer to Brod's question of what Kafka meant with the concluding sentence of “Das Urteil,” “Ich habe dabei an eine starke Ejakulation gedacht” (Beug and Heller 20).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where, exactly, does this alleged crisis take us? In a diary entry, Kafka wrote, “Mein Inneres löst sich […] und ist bereit Tieferes hervorzulassen” (&lt;i&gt;Tagebücher&lt;/i&gt; 139). It is a truth universally acknowledged that many of Kafka's most telling inspirations—in the form of pregnant, “vacillating” (Lacan) metaphors—arrive on the page as if expelled from the unconscious: they have something to tell that springs over the artificial, daylit borders between stories. We want to pay attention to them in their rhetorical journey: they have no easy correlates with the empirical &lt;i&gt;Realien&lt;/i&gt; of cultural studies, as, for example, the pocket. In “Das Urteil,” this signifier has lethal implications, marking the peak moment of aggression by a son to his father. You recall: as Herr Bendemann and his son Georg seem to share the running of a business, the father declares that he, ","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 4","pages":"529-531"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12479","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142862127","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":"Transnational German Film at the End of Neoliberalism: Radical Aesthetics, Radical Politics By Claudia Breger and Olivia Landry (Eds.), Camden House. 2024. pp. 256. $120 (hardcover), $29.95 (ebook).","authors":"Barbara Mennel","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12494","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 4","pages":"570-572"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142869073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Murderous Mothers: Late Twentieth-Century Medea Figures and Feminism By Claire E. Scott, Peter Lang. 2022. pp. 212. $72.95 (paperback or ebook)","authors":"Alexandra M. Stewart","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12490","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 4","pages":"564-566"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142862126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kafka and Realism","authors":"Erica Weitzman","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12480","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;A curious scene takes place in the middle of Kafka's final novel-fragment, &lt;i&gt;Das Schloß&lt;/i&gt;. Having just been upbraided by the headmistress of the school where he has been set up as caretaker, K., now alone with his fiancée Frieda, hears a knock at the door and rushes to open it, thinking it is Barnabas with a message from the Castle. Instead, it turns out to be the young schoolboy Hans Brunswick, the precocious son of the village shoemaker, who tells K. that he was so upset by the headmistress's behavior that he has snuck out of class to childishly offer K. his help. Toward the end of the conversation—which, in its increasingly intricate demands and complications, eventually comes to strangely parallel the intrigues and maneuverings of K.’s own attempts at progress—Frieda, who has been only half listening, asks Hans casually what he would like to be when he grows up. To everyone's surprise, Hans answers without hesitation: “er wolle ein Mann werden wie K.” (236). Given that K. is not only a near total stranger, but also one whose present status hardly seems like something to aspire to, Hans's statement at first appears inexplicable. Upon questioning, however, Hans explains that his wish is not due to K.’s present condition—which, he admits, is “keineswegs beneidenswert, sondern traurig und verächtlich, das sah auch Hans genau” (237)—but rather to the belief that, while “jetzt sei zwar K. noch niedrig und abschrekkend, […] in einer allerdings fast unvorstellbar fernen Zukunft werde er doch alle übertreffen” (237). As the narration continues: “Das besonders kindlich-altkluge dieses Wunsches bestand darin, daß Hans auf K. herabsah wie auf einen Jüngeren, dessen Zukunft sich weiter dehne, als seine eigene, die Zukunft eines kleinen Knaben” (237). For Hans, that is, K.’s story is a tale of the arduous overcoming of present hardships in the service of eventual triumph, a triumph that acquires special value precisely through that overcoming. In other words, it is a &lt;i&gt;Bildungsroman&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In fairness to Hans's interpretation, the &lt;i&gt;Bildungsroman&lt;/i&gt;, as the exemplary genre of the emergence of the individual within a society he must learn to navigate, is perhaps not the worst genre choice for Kafka's novel. And like the hero of the typical &lt;i&gt;Bildungsroman&lt;/i&gt;, K. is an unripe or indeed blank figure, despite all superficial obduracy strikingly labile in his desires and thus open to any number of possible futures, possible identities, possible outcomes. Nevertheless—even besides the fact that K. is described in the novel as a grown man, thus theoretically already &lt;i&gt;ausgebildet&lt;/i&gt;—the usual arc of struggle, development, and social integration that Hans predicts for K. seems, to say the least, unlikely. But this unlikeliness is not only due to the fact of K.’s actual downward progression in the novel—analog to the descending trajectories of Kafka's other two novel protagonists—where K., far from achieving his goals, proves himself consistently w","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 4","pages":"532-535"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12480","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142862207","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: The persistence of Kafka in a metamorphosing world","authors":"Imke Meyer","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12481","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;“Vor dem Gesetz steht ein Türhüter“ (&lt;i&gt;Drucke&lt;/i&gt; 267). The famous first sentence of Kafka's parable “Vor dem Gesetz” appears on the page as a literal &lt;i&gt;Feststellung&lt;/i&gt;, a frozen constellation that will expand into an eternal present for the &lt;i&gt;Mann vom Lande&lt;/i&gt; who approaches the &lt;i&gt;Türhüter&lt;/i&gt; to ask for entry into the law. The &lt;i&gt;Mann vom Lande&lt;/i&gt; is not granted entry and will spend year after year, the remainder of his life, waiting for a change in the situation—which, of course, will never occur. In a cruel irony, as the dying man's consciousness fades away, the &lt;i&gt;Türhüter&lt;/i&gt; tells him that “dieser Eingang [zum Gesetz] war nur für Dich bestimmt. Ich gehe jetzt und schließe ihn” (&lt;i&gt;Drucke&lt;/i&gt; 269). The first sentence of Kafka's parable, then, turns out to be as much of a foreclosure of narrative development as it is an opening of the text itself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The situation into which we as readers are thrown when we encounter the parable's first sentence is not dissimilar from that experienced by the &lt;i&gt;Mann vom Lande&lt;/i&gt;. The sentence seemingly opens a path into the text, and yet it also forecloses access: how can we read beyond a sentence that states the opposite of what it shows us? “Before the law there stands a gatekeeper”—and yet, in the word order of the sentence itself, we see that it is not the gatekeeper who stands before the law; rather, the law is quite literally placed before the gatekeeper: &lt;i&gt;ein Türhüter&lt;/i&gt; actually stands behind the &lt;i&gt;Gesetz&lt;/i&gt;. The sentence's meaning continues to oscillate; it vexes us, and if we decide to read on regardless, we proceed at our own risk. And what we experience if we do read on is not a gradual lifting of our vexed state, but rather what Benjamin termed “die wolkige Stelle i[m] Innern” of the parable (420). Reflecting on Benjamin's reading of Kafka's prose, Adorno observes that what we encounter in Kafka's writing “ist eine Parabolik, zu der der Schlüssel entwendet ward […] Jeder Satz spricht: deute mich, und keiner will es dulden“ (251).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;One hundred years after his death on June 3, 1924, Kafka's texts are as alive as ever. His works continue to disquiet us. Just as the dog in Kafka's “Forschungen eines Hundes” seeks in vain to “restlos durch Untersuchung auflösen“ the puzzle of his encounter with the seven dancing dogs “um den Blick endlich wieder freizubekommen für das gewöhnliche ruhige glückliche Leben des Tages“ (&lt;i&gt;Nachgelassene Schriften&lt;/i&gt; 435), we seek in vain to regain our countenance in the face of Kafka's texts. On the morning after his transformation, Gregor Samsa, in &lt;i&gt;Die Verwandlung&lt;/i&gt;, keeps hoping for “die Wiederkehr der wirklichen und selbstverständlichen Verhältnisse“ (&lt;i&gt;Drucke&lt;/i&gt; 123). We know, of course, that Gregor will never experience such a &lt;i&gt;Wiederkehr&lt;/i&gt; and that whatever may have seemed &lt;i&gt;selbstverständlich&lt;/i&gt; was in fact &lt;i&gt;missverständlich&lt;/i&gt; and may never have been &lt;i&gt;wirklich&lt;/i&gt; to begin with. We should also know, though, that like Greg","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 4","pages":"522-525"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12481","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142859924","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":"Kafka in the age of artificial intelligence","authors":"Ruth V. Gross","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12482","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Our singer is called Franz. “Wer [ihn] nicht gehört hat, kennt nicht die Macht des Gesanges” (Kafka 193). These (slightly altered) opening lines of “Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse” came to mind when an audience member came up to me after a presentation I gave recently on “Kafka in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” She lamented the fact that not one of her students in the past three years had a notion of who Franz Kafka was. I was not surprised. For years, so many of us have relied on high school literature classes to introduce at least one of Kafka's stories to our students—usually it had been &lt;i&gt;The Metamorphosis&lt;/i&gt;—that served as a base we could build on to take them to higher levels of understanding and appreciation of this world literary phenomenon. The new normal means that without a “canon” or “cultural literacy” as we knew it in the twentieth century (and I fully realize how loaded those two terms are today), Franz, the singer, like his beloved mouse Josephine, “wird [wohl]…bald…in gesteigerter Erlösung vergessen sein wie alle [seine] Brüder” (209). In Kafka's story “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,” Rotpeter, the chimpanzee, explains that he managed to attain “die Durchschnittsbildung eines Europäers” (174). Our task to keep Kafka's works alive and part of “the cultural level of an average” &lt;i&gt;college student&lt;/i&gt; (European or otherwise) has now become a bit more difficult. Like the protagonist of “Der Bau,” however, I am prepared “mit der Stirn…tausend- und tausendmal tage- und nächtelang gegen die Erde [anzurennen]” (425) and keep delving into Kafka's texts, long and short, to (I hope) illuminate the power—and absolute joy—of his writing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I find that Kafka's accessibility begins with the little texts, which are, perhaps, also his most humorous. I never cease to enjoy Kafka's own evident amusement in writing his little story “Poseidon,” perhaps my favorite of his smaller pieces. Since I am working on a special issue on &lt;i&gt;Kafka in the Age of Artificial Intelligence&lt;/i&gt; for the online journal &lt;i&gt;Humanities&lt;/i&gt; that should be out later this year, I have come to think of “Poseidon” in this strange new context.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kafka wrote this gem in 1920, but it was published only posthumously in 1936 in an edition by Max Brod. Poseidon, in Kafka's tale, is not the glorious god we think of from mythology. Instead of being the divine master over all the waters of the earth, Kafka's Poseidon is reduced to the role of bureaucratic administrator. Like a department chair, he spends his time at a desk running and rerunning calculations. Driven by a blind work ethic and an exaggerated sense of responsibility, this Poseidon devotes himself completely to his job. We are told he has tried to find another line of work—one might imagine him today going online to Monster.com—but all his attempts to find other work are doomed to failure, since as god of the oceans he is destined to assume the managerial post over the waters of the world.&lt;","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 4","pages":"544-546"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12482","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142859923","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":"German Ways of War: The Affective Geographies and Generic Transformations of German War Films By Jaimey Fisher, Rutgers University Press. 2022. pp. 250. $150.00 (hardback), $37.95 (paperback), $37.95 (ebook)","authors":"Larson Powell","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12493","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12493","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 4","pages":"560-563"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142862000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Forms of the Mother Right: Marxism's Matriarchal Origins from Friedrich Engels to Lu Märten","authors":"Mari Jarris","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12477","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The nineteenth-century discovery of the matrilineal origins of society shattered assumptions about the necessity of the bourgeois family. For Marxists, ethnographic studies of the mother right provided an aesthetic form to reevaluate the “woman question” from a scientific perspective. Although Marx and Engels had long rejected the idea of <i>the</i> family in favor of “family forms,” Engels's adaptation of Morgan's <i>Ancient Society</i> (1877) in <i>Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats</i> (1884) was canonized as the authoritative Marxist text on the subject. While the ethnographic form enabled the denaturalization of the family, its racialized and gendered temporality undercut socialist critiques of social forms. This article introduces Lu Märten's queer utopian response to the mother right, <i>Geschichte der Frau vom Mutterrecht bis zur Gegenwart</i> (1947), which dispenses with the evolutionary structure of the ethnographic study to offer a vision of polyamorous and androgynous forms in a classless society.</p>","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 4","pages":"472-489"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142861963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kafka and the Anthropocene","authors":"Heather I. Sullivan","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12489","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12489","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;The many explanations of the geological age of the Anthropocene typically feature the question of just how much the &lt;i&gt;Anthropos&lt;/i&gt; has already altered the planet's ecosystems and how much future change will result now that “we,” or rather, industrialized humans consumed by fossil fuels and extractivist, plantation economics, have attained the status of a geological force. Such large-scale agency! But collective agency is not always celebrated by the extractivist systems fueling the Anthropocene with visions of a supposedly enlightened individual subject driven by what is claimed to be the rationality of profits and power (Plumwood; Dürbeck et al.). Indeed, let us ask what human agency actually is, considering the fact that &lt;i&gt;Anthropos&lt;/i&gt;-industrial activities collectively impinge on the entire planet, thereby erasing the hopes of full-blown individual agency not only for those enhanced by industrial technology and economics, but also for Indigenous and other groups who resist or who are excluded, like much of the Global South, from the much-celebrated benefits (but not the costs) of the fossil-fueled frenzy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;While the Anthropocene is typically considered to have begun in the late eighteenth century with the industrial revolution (this origin story is heavily debated), I look here to Franz Kafka's famous story &lt;i&gt;Die Verwandlung&lt;/i&gt;, written when industrial powers were rapidly expanding in the early twentieth century, precisely because its transformation of the human into a cockroach or dung beetle disturbs with bodily materiality the euphoric trajectory of what is often understood as the increasing “freedom” of individual human agency. Similarly, Kafka's “Strafkolonie” portrays how human bodies engage—agentially, willingly?—with the industrial, colonial machinery writ large (and penetratingly). Here we are today, delving again into Kafka's tales of bodily horror, lack of individual agency, and gruesome interactions with machines in order to map out a sense of our bodily fates in the Anthropocene's current mass extinction event, genocidal plantation and agricultural practices, and climate change (Kolbert; Bittman).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In his seminal essay, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Dipesh Chakrabarty notes that discussions of “freedom” from the Enlightenment through today fail to acknowledge how the expanded use of fossil fuels, especially oil, enabled our very modern sense of power, freedom, and individuality: “In no discussion of freedom in the period since the Enlightenment was there ever any awareness of the geological agency that human beings were acquiring at the same time as and through processes closely linked to their acquisition of freedom […]. The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use” (Chakrabarty 208). In other words, the actuality of increasingly vast and non-individual agency is shrouded by celebratory discourses of individual power. Human agency in the Anthropocene has taken new ","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 4","pages":"540-543"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12489","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142862001","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}