Fontane In The Twenty First Century

Assesses the relevance of the works of Fontane, perhaps the foremost German novelist between Goethe and Mann, for the twenty-first century.

What happens when fashionable forms of unserious speech prove to be contagious, when they adulterate and weaken communicative spheres that rely on honesty, trust, and sincerity? Demonstrating how the tension between irony and avowal constitutes a central conflict in Fontane's works, this book argues that his best-known society novels play out a struggle between the incompatible demands of these two modes of speaking. Read in this light, the novels identify an irreconcilable discrepancy between word and deed as both the root of emotional discord and the proximate cause of historical and political upheaval. Given the alarm since 2016 over unreliability, falsehood, and indifference to truth, it is now easier to perceive in Fontane's novels a profound concern about language that is not sincere and not meant to be taken literally. For Fontane, irony exemplifies a discrepancy between language and meaning, a loosening of the ethical bond between words and the things to which they refer. His novels investigate the extent to which human relationships can continue to function in the face of pervasive irony and the erosion of language's credibility. Although Fontane is widely regarded as an ironic writer, Tucker's analyses reveal a critical distance between his works and the prospect of irony as a dominant idiom. Revisiting Fontane's novels in a post-truth age brings the conflict between irony and avowal into sharper relief and makes legible the stakes and contours of our own post-truth condition.

Human life is susceptible of changing suddenly, of shifting inadvertently, of appearing differently, of varying unpredictably, of being altered deliberately, of advancing fortuitously, of commencing or ending accidentally, of a certain malleability. In theory, any human being is potentially capacitated to conceive of—and convey—the chance, view, or fact that matters may be otherwise, or not at all; with respect to other lifeforms, this might be said animal’s distinctive characteristic. This state of play is both an everyday phenomenon, and an indispensable prerequisite for exceptional innovations in culture and science: contingency is the condition of possibility for any of the arts—be they dominantly concerned with thinking, crafting, or enacting. While their scope and method may differ, the (f)act of reckoning with—and taking advantage of—contingency renders rhetoricians and philosophers associates after all. In this regard, Aristotle and Blumenberg will be exemplary, hence provide the framework. Between these diachronic bridgeheads, close readings applying the nexus of rhetoric and contingency to a selection of (Early) Modern texts and authors are intercalated—among them La Celestina, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Wilde, Fontane.

George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century reexamines Eliot two hundred years after her birth and offers an innovative critical reading that seeks to change perceptions of Eliot. Tracing Eliot’s literary reception from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, K. M. Newton frames Eliot as an unorthodox radical and considers the philosophical, ethical, political, and artistic subtleties permeating her writings. Drawing from close readings of her novels, essays, and letters, Newton offers a new critical perspective on George Eliot and reveals her enduring relevance in the twenty-first century.

Most of the contributions to Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-First Century evolve from a practical commitment to the translation of Shakespearean drama and at the same time reveal a sophisticated awareness of recent developments in literary criticism, Shakespeare studies, and the relatively new field of Translation studies. All the essays are sensitive to the criticism to which notions of the original as well as distinctions between the creative and the derivative have been subjected in recent years. Consequently, they endeavour to retrieve translation from its otherwise subordinate status, and advance it as a model for all writing, which is construed, inevitably, as a rewriting. This volume offers a wide range of responses to the theme of Shakespeare and translation as well as Shakespeare in translation. Diversity is ensured both by the authors’ varied academic and cultural backgrounds, and by the different critical standpoints from which they approach their themes – from semiotics to theatre studies, and from gender studies to readings firmly rooted in the practice of translation. Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-First Century is divided into two complementary sections. The first part deals with the broader insights to be gained from a multilingual and multicultural framework. The second part focuses on Shakespearean translation into the specific language and the culture of Portugal.

The world is spinning around us and we are spinning with it. When changes occur at the geopolitical level, inevitable changes also occur in people’s identity and in the way they see and represent the world. This book looks at this world with new eyes, approaching contemporary history (and herstory) from a scholarly perspective that cancels borders. Emphasis here is laid on migration, geopolitics, global citizenship, human rights, the EU and the non-EU, and East and West, as represented in fiction and drama or translated on television. The first part of the volume deals with migration and alterations in the non-Western world, with constant references to September 11, terrorism and wars, and the Syrian refugee crisis, before the focus moves on to one of the most important migration hosts nowadays, the European Union, discussing its expansion to the East, French President Macron’s call for renewal, and, lastly, a possible beginning of the end, announced by Brexit. This volume is a mirror of the discourses of globalization, one that makes the old self-other dichotomy obsolete. We are all selves in the eye of the storm that is raving around us, bringing change with it.

Essays in this volume rethink conventional ways of conceptualizing female authorship and re-examine the formal, aesthetic, and thematic terms in which German women's literature has been conceived.