Poetic Writing And The Vietnam War In West Germany

In the 1960s and 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), or West Germany, newspaper readers and television viewers were appalled by terrible images of fires burning half a world away. The Vietnam War was a decisive catalyst for the era’s wider protest movements and gave rise to an ardent anti-war discourse. This discourse privileged writing in many forms. Within it, poetry and poetic writing were key; and because coverage of the conflict in Vietnam often focused on spectacular, destructive conflagrations ignited by hi-tech machines of war, their dominant trope was fire. Hundreds of poems and related writings about Vietnam circulated in the FRG, yet they are almost entirely forgotten today. Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany uncovers and explores some of this rich production in order to present a new history of engaged poetic writing in the FRG in the 1960s and 1970s, and to draw out distinctive characteristics of wider protest culture. In doing so, it makes the case for attending to marginal, non-canonical or neglected literary and cultural forms, and for critical thinking about why they might, over time, have been obscured. This book offers, too, a case study for reflection on the representation of war, on ways in which German oppositional culture could imagine its others, and the ways in which other voices could speak to it in turn, and on the relationship of poetry to the historical world.

An examination of the largely forgotten anti-war writing from West Germany spurred by the Vietnam War. Though the Vietnam War did not directly involve West Germany, it was nonetheless a decisive catalyst for the era's wider protest movements in that country, and it gave rise to an ardent anti-war discourse. Poetry and poetic writing were key to anti-war work. Hundreds of poems and related writings about Vietnam circulated in West Germany, yet they are almost entirely forgotten today. Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany uncovers and explores some of that rich artistic production in order to present a new history of engaged poetic writing in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s and to draw out distinctive characteristics of wider protest culture. In doing so, it makes the case for attending to marginal, non-canonical, or neglected literary and cultural forms, and for critical thinking about why they might, over time, have been obscured. The book also offers a case study for reflection on the representation of war, on ways in which German oppositional culture could imagine its others, and on the relationship of poetry to the historical world.

"Explores what postwar German representations of violence in other places and times tell us about Germany. Germany's 20th-century history has made imagining and representing violence in German culture especially challenging: it has made certain constructions of violence unspeakable, even unthinkable. As a result, new ways of thinking about violence in postwar German culture are needed. One such approach is critical analysis of "violence elsewhere," that is, representations in literature, art, and film of violence in distant, imagined or temporally distinct times and places. Such representations have offered Germans a stage on which to imagine violence. Moreover, German representations of "violence elsewhere" are simultaneously images of Germany itself, revealing something about otherwise submerged or deeply encoded meanings and functions of violence in German culture. This volume explores what representations of "violence elsewhere" tell us about Germany. Its essays consider cultural products that arose from East, West, and reunified Germany and that imagine violence in Latin America, Vietnam, Cambodia, the USA, and the Middle East, as well as in the respective "other" German state and in the German past. Drawing on film, literary, gender, cultural, and postcolonial studies as well as visual culture, history, and life writing, they also introduce theoretical perspectives that are transferable beyond German Studies. As such, they allow us to reflect more broadly on relationships between violence, culture, community, and the creation of identities. Edited by Clare Bielby and Mererid Puw Davies. Contributors: Seán Allan, Martin Brady, Evelien Geerts, Katharina Karcher, J.J. Long, Ernest Schonfield, and Katherine Stone. On publication the chapter "Problematizing Political Violence in the Federal Republic of Germany: A Hauntological Analysis of the NSU Terror and a Hyper-Exceptionalized "9/11" is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND"--

A vibrant history of the renowned and often controversial Iowa Writers’ Workshop and its celebrated alumni and faculty As the world’s preeminent creative writing program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has produced an astonishing number of distinguished writers and poets since its establishment in 1936. Its alumni and faculty include twenty-eight Pulitzer Prize winners, six U.S. poet laureates, and numerous National Book Award winners. This volume follows the program from its rise to prominence in the early 1940s under director Paul Engle, who promoted the “workshop” method of classroom peer criticism. Meant to simulate the rigors of editorial and critical scrutiny in the publishing industry, this educational style created an environment of both competition and community, cooperation and rivalry. Focusing on some of the exceptional authors who have participated in the program—such as Flannery O’Connor, Dylan Thomas, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Smiley, Sandra Cisneros, T. C. Boyle, and Marilynne Robinson—David Dowling examines how the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has shaped professional authorship, publishing industries, and the course of American literature.

Originally published in 1986, this book is an interpretative survey of the development of political writing in the former Federal Republic of Germany. It illustrates how intertwined writing is with politics, whether by the political commitment of writers like Grass or the analysis of Böll, by the exclusion of writers from political debate under Adenauer or their insistence on involvement in the years of the SPD. So many themes central to German life are themselves political – the division of the German state, the interpretation of the German character, the Green Movement. This wide-ranging and thorough study discusses a central issue of European politics and culture.

In this unique and significant addition to Vietnam studies, Memories of a Lost War analyzes the poems written by American veterans, protest poets, and Vietnamese, within political, aesthetic, and cultural contexts. Drawing on a wealth of material often published in small presses and journals, the book highlights the horrors of war and the continuing traumas of veterans in post-Vietnam America. In its inclusion of Vietnamese perspectives, the book marks a departure from earlier works that have largely concentrated on Vietnam as a war rather than a country.

This work is the first volume of critical essays devoted to the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Although Jeffers was likened to some of the greatest figures in the literary world, his work was controversial. His preoccupation with violence and sexuality was denounced by some, his alleged blasphemy by others. Condemned by moralists, Marxists, and Cold Warriors alike, Jeffers fell into obscurity until his death in 1962. Included are nine original essays by leading Jeffers scholars.