Kaltenburg

A story loosely based on the life and work of Konrad Lorenz follows the experiences of a brilliant zoologist's student, whose work at a newly established research institute reveals disturbing aspects about the zoologist's past.

Love in a Time of Slaughters examines a diverse array of contemporary creative narratives in which genocide and extinction blur species lines in order to show how such stories can promote the preservation of biological and cultural diversity in a time of man-made threats to species survival. From indigenous novels and Japanese anime to art installations and truth commission reports, Susan McHugh analyzes source material from a variety of regions and cultures to highlight cases where traditional knowledge works in tandem with modern ways of thinking about human-animal relations. In contrast to success stories of such relationships, the narratives McHugh highlights show the vulnerabilities of affective bonds as well as the kinds of loss shared when interspecific relationships are annihilated. In this thoughtful critique, McHugh explores the potential of these narratives to become a more powerful, urgent strategy of resistance to the forces that work to dehumanize people, eradicate animals, and threaten biodiversity. As we unevenly contribute to the sixth great extinction, this timely, compelling study sheds light on what constitutes an effective response from a humanities-focused, interdisciplinary perspective. McHugh’s work will appeal to scholars working at the crossroads of human-animal studies, literature, and visual culture, as well as artists and activists who are interested in the intersections of animal politics with genocide and indigeneity.

"A special double issue of Publications of the English Goethe Society to celebrate the 70th birthday of Professor Martin Swales (UCL, UK) This volume collects papers from a conference held at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in October 2010. The conference aimed to analyse how literary texts articulate (and give voice to) ideas and ideologies. In contrast to most philosophy, literature rarely makes claims to systematic conceptual rigour. Literary statements are always conjectural; they are also conditioned by the conventions of the genre in which they are made. Because literature is such a hypothetical medium of expression, it is uniquely suited to philosophical experimentation. Indeed, because literature invokes imagined or remembered experience, it functions as a laboratory in which ideas may be tested against experience. Literature's formal qualities, which allow for statement and counter-statement, move and counter-move, make it a highly sophisticated mode of discourse in which to test out ideas. Concepts can be played against each other, and genre conventions may be adhered to or subverted, in order to create multiple layers of signification. The papers presented are published here in this special issue of Publications of the English Goethe Society, and take account of German (or European) poetry, drama or prose literature from 1750 to the present day."

Interdisciplinary views of the debates over and transformation of German cultural identity since unification. The events of 1989 and German unification were seismic historical moments. Although 1989 appeared to signify a healing of the war-torn history of the twentieth century, unification posed the question of German cultural identity afresh. Politicians, historians, writers, filmmakers, architects, and the wider public engaged in "memory contests" over such questions as the legitimacy of alternative biographies, West German hegemony, and the normalization of German history. This dynamic, contested, and still ongoing transformation of German cultural identity is the topic of this volume of new essays by scholars from the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, and Ireland. It exploresGerman cultural identity by way of a range of disciplines including history, film studies, architectural history, literary criticism, memory studies, and anthropology, avoiding a homogenized interpretation. Charting the complex and often contradictory processes of cultural identity formation, the volume reveals the varied responses that continue to accompany the project of unification. Contributors: Pertti Ahonen, Aleida Assmann, Elizabeth Boa, Peter Fritzsche, Anne Fuchs, Deniz Göktürk, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Anja K. Johannsen, Jennifer A. Jordan, Jürgen Paul, Linda Shortt, Andrew J. Webber. Anne Fuchs is Professor of German Literature at the University of St.Andrews, Scotland. Kathleen James-Chakraborty is Professor of Art History at University College Dublin, Ireland. Linda Shortt is Lecturer in German at Bangor University, Wales.

Anne Fuchs traces the aftermath of the Dresden bombing in the collective imagination from 1945 to today. As a case study of an event that gained local, national and global iconicity, the book investigates the role of photography, fine art, architecture, literature and film in dialogue with the changing German socio-political landscape.

The invention of the present-tense novel is a literary event whose importance is on par with the discovery of perspective in painting. From the first novels shaped by interior monologues and the use of the present tense in the tradition of modernism, the present tense has, over the course of its century-long evolution, changed the conditions of fictional narration, along with our conceptions of time in a philosophical and linguistic framework. Indeed, to understand the work of an increasing number of contemporary writers – J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, to name only a few – it is necessary to both understand the distinct linguistic and literary qualities of the present tense as well as its historical transformation into a genuine tense of contemporary storytelling. For the first time in literary scholarship, Present Tense: A Poetics offers an account of a profound development in 20th- and 21st-century fiction.

This book traces the origins and history of the Brenner and Sprenger families including an extensive DNA evaluation of their origins. The book includes numerous ancestral and geographical histories as well as many modern day descendant biographies.