RESUMEN Este artículo, después de situar, etimológica e históricamente, los conceptos de utopía y distopía realiza un breve vistazo a la doctrina pesimista de Schopenhauer, para luego mostrar cómo Émile Zola la articula y la despliega en una distopía, en ciertos pasajes de La alegría de vivir. Se concluye, a través de varias preguntas, cómo Zola ficciona, en la figura de su personaje Pauline, una pequeña isla de felicidad dentro de un enorme océano pesimista, inquietante y malévolo: la utopía y (...) la distopía surgen entrelazadas en una ficción que, historiando y politizando la cuestión, muestra cómo lo filosófico aparece en la ficción novelesca cuando ha sido colocado allí a propósito. ABSTRACT This reflective article, after situating, etymologically and historically, the concepts of utopia and dystopia, takes a brief look at Schopenhauer's pessimistic doctrine, to then show how Émile Zola articulates and deploys it in a dystopia, in certain excerpts from The Joy of Living. It is concluded, through several questions, how Zola fictionalizes, in the figure of his character, Pauline, a small island of happiness within a huge pessimistic, disturbing, and malevolent ocean: utopia and dystopia emerge intertwined in a fiction that, historically, and politicizing the issue, shows how the philosophical appears in fictional fiction when it has been placed there on purpose. (shrink)

Resumen El lamento por el fin de la utopía que expresa la novela futurista, Cría terminal (2014), expone la crisis de un ideal ético: la pérdida de la posibilidad de un mundo mejor. Las bases del contrato moral implícitas en la amenaza de su disolución en un futuro cercano serán el objeto de indagación de este trabajo, que toma a la filosofía de Hans Jonas como principal referencia teórica. Se buscará, por consiguiente, precisar la relación entre la barbarización de la (...) cultura (con sus comportamientos y personajes modélicos) y los procesos económico-políticos tendientes a la dominación biotecnológica del medio humano. La perspectiva modalizadora de la acción y la intriga narrativas y su adecuación a un interés de tipo ético por establecer un modelo de vida óptimo para la sociedad, defraudado por la civilización técnica del futuro, serán motivo de análisis. Abstract The lament for the end of utopia which expresses the futuristic novel, Cría Terminal (2014), exposes the crisis of an ethical ideal: the loss of the possibility of a better world. The bases of the moral contract implicit in the threat of its dissolution in the near future will be the object of investigation of this work, which considers the philosophy of Hans Jonas as the main theoretical reference. Therefore, it will be sought to specify the relationship between the barbarization of culture (with its exemplary behaviors and characters) and the economic-political processes tending to the biotechnological domination of the human environment. The modalizing perspective of the narrative action and intrigue and its adaptation to an ethical interest in establishing an optimal life model for society, disappointed by the technical civilization of the future, will be the subject of analysis. (shrink)

Drawing on Clare Hemmings’ work on feminist narratives, this article explores attitudes to the future in recent German-language pop-feminist volumes, including, amongst others, Meredith Haaf, Susanne Klingner and Barbara Streidl’s Wir Alpha-Mädchen: Warum Feminismus das Leben schöner macht [We Alpha-Girls: Why Feminism Makes Life More Beautiful] and the feminist memoir Neue deutsche Mädchen [New German Girls] by Jana Hensel and Elisabeth Raether. After analysing the rhetoric of linear progress deployed in these texts and the ways in which their (...) authors consign second-wave feminism to the past in the name of a normative future, I go on to examine future-thinking in two complex first-person novels: Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill and Antonia Baum’s Vollkommen leblos, bestenfalls tot [Completely Lifeless, Preferably Dead]. I demonstrate how these novels invoke a sense of disorientation and asynchronous temporality that is productively queer. Their disruptions of time and space, of language and form, combine with decentred central protagonists to throw doubt on the figure of the coherent sovereign subject who lurks persistently behind the new German feminists’ configuration of the self-empowered “individual.” Finally, this paper contends that the queer refusal of normative futures enacted by the novels allows the opportunity to imagine alternative modes of being that are potentially politically transformative. (shrink)

The structure of traditional fiction is essentially linear or serial. No matter how complex a given work may be, it presents information to its reader successively, one element at a time, in a sequence determined by its author. By contrast, interactive fiction is parallel in structure or, more accurately, dendritic or tree-shaped. Not one, but several possible courses of action are open to the reader. Further, which one actually happens depends largely, though not exclusively, upon the reader’s own (...) choices. To be sure, the author is still in overall control, since it is she who has set up the particular nexus of events, but the route up the narrative tree, the actual sequence of events, is generally affected, if not completely determined, by the reader’s responses to that particular reader’s specific situation. In an adventure, the sequence of action frequently depends upon the reader’s decision to go in one geographical direction rather than another. In the eliza sample, the content of the “story” depends on such particulars as whether this reader has a brother or not, whether she fears her father, and why she has consulted the terminal. In general, the text presented to the eliza-reader depends on what that reader has already said and how the computer has interpreted and stored it, and this is generally true of interactive fiction.Further, interactive fiction is, in principle , open-ended—infinite. A conversation with eliza could go on for as long as one with Woody Allen’s psychoanalyst—in principle, forever. It has no necessary terminus. The program will go one writing texts and answers on the screen as long as the reader or player chooses to supply responses. Further, the computer can act as a metafictional narrator like John Barth or Thomas Pynchon who can create a story within a story or a story that generates another story within itself which generates another story within itself and so on, fictions dizzying and dazzling. One senses one’s essential humanity wobbling in the midst of the infinite paradoxes of existence and meaning. Anthony J. Niesz, assistant professor of German at Yale University, is the author of Dramaturgy in German Drama: From Gryphius to Goethe . He is interested in the phenomenon of the meta-theater, especially in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German drama, as well as in the literature and cultural policies of the German Democratic Republic. Norman N. Holland is Milbauer Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida. He is the author of Laughing and The I. (shrink)

Pierre Olivier distinguishes between two radically different concep-tions of legal fictions: on the one hand, the conception of legal fiction developed by the commentators of the Middle Ages, which culminates in Bartolus’s defini-tion; on the other hand, the conception developed by the 19th Century German scholar Gustav Demelius, who was followed, among others, by Joseph Esser. The main difference between the two approaches is individuated by Olivier in the fact that, while the former consider legal fictions as essentially (...) implying an actual fic-tional element, the latter deny this. In other words, according to Demelius and those who follow him, the term “legal fiction” is a misnomer. In this article, I first provide an example of a legal fiction. In the second and third section, I rely on this example to analyze and assess the two competing accounts. Finally, in the fourth part, I advance a syncretistic account of legal fictions, which should thus point to a possible middle ground between the two competing positions. As it is often the case, there is probably some truth to both accounts; the problem – I will argue – is that both theories tell only a part and not the whole of the story. More precisely, it will be argued that legal fictions essentially involve the structure of “as if”-statements, and that the one-sidedness of the two competing accounts derives from the fact that one focuses too much on the “if”-component (the assumption), whereas the other focuses too much on the “as”-component (the comparison). (shrink)

This study shows how Goethe's Die pilgernde Torin, Kleist's Die Marquise von O..., Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and James' Daisy Miller can appeal to the reader who identifies a message friendly towards woman and her plight, whether the message was the author's intention or not.

The German relationship to the Greeks was central to German self-understanding. It defined German identity culturally through the exclusion of democracy from the idealized image of Greece and through the emphasis on Greek originality that served to devalue the Roman, Latin and Renaissance translations of the Greek heritage. Hostility to the legacy of the Latin spirit, to legal thought and to rationality, reinforced the German rejection of French intellectual and cultural hegemony. These German fictions about (...) the Greeks were closely linked with reflections on modernity, the death of the Christian God and a disenchanted Cartesian universe. They led Nietzsche and Heidegger to more `original' interpretations of the Greeks as the source of German rebirth. (shrink)

In Consciousness Explained and other works, Daniel Dennett uses the concept of phenomenology (along with his variant, called heterophenomenology) in almost complete disregard of the work of Husserl and his successors in German and French philosophy. Yet it can be argued that many of the most important ideas of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and others (and not just the idea of intentionality) reappear in Dennett's work in only slightly altered form. In this article I try to show this in two ways, (...) first by talking in a general way about Dennett's phenomenology, and second by examining his treatment of the concept of the self. In both cases I argue that Dennett should have read his Husserl and Merleau-Ponty more carefully, since in the end his (hetero-) phenomenology is methodologically incoherent and suffers from something like a weakness of will. This emerges especially in his use of the notion of fiction. (shrink)

A media archaeology that traces connections between new media technologies and distinct cultural realms, considering topics that range from Kant's philosophy to somnambulist clairvoyants.

Existentialism is a philosophy that flourishes in extreme situations. Identified with the period of the French Resistance when Frenchmen were held as political prisoners by the Germans, existentialism, with its call for an uncompromised allegiance to a leftist system of values, served to boost the sagging morale of French political prisoners who had witnessed during the Occupation the subversion of their nation's democratic principles by German totalitarianism.

The author engages a question raised about theories of nonexistent objects. The question concerns the way names of fictional characters, when analyzed as names which denote nonexistent objects, acquire their denotations. Since nonexistent objects cannot causally interact with existent objects, it is thought that we cannot appeal to a `dubbing' or a `baptism'. The question is, therefore, what is the starting point of the chain? The answer is that storytellings are to be thought of as extended baptisms, and the details (...) of this response receive attention in the paper. Once the storytelling is complete, and the characters have been baptized, a priori metaphysical principles linking the storytelling with the realm of nonexistent objects provide the referential, non-causal connection between the names used in the storytelling and the objects denoted by such names. [This is the original English version of an article that first appeared in German translation, translated into German by Arnold Günther and published in the Zeitschrift für Semiotik 9/1-2 (1987): 85-95. The version that appears here is, for the most part, unaltered.]. (shrink)

Complex Pleasure deals with questions of literary feeling in eight major German writers—Lessing, Kant, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Musil, Kafka, Trakl, and Benjamin. On the basis of close readings of these authors Stanley Corngold makes vivid the following ideas: that where there is literature there is complex pleasure; that this pleasure is complex because it involves the impression of a disclosure; that this thought is foremost in the minds of a number of canonical writers; that important literary works in the (...) class='Hi'>German tradition—fiction, poetry, critique—can be illuminated through their treatment of literary feeling; and, finally, that the conceptual terms for these forms of feeling continually vary. The types of feeling treated in Complex Pleasure include wit (the startling perception of likeness) and the disinterested pleasure of aesthetic judgment; Hölderlin’s “swift conceptual grasp,” in which “the tempo of the process of thought is stressed”; “artistic imagination,” mood, sadistic enjoyment, rapturous distraction, homonymic dissonance, and courage as a mode of literary experience. At the same time, through the deftness, range, and surprise of its execution, the book itself conveys complex pleasure. The reader will also find fascinating, hitherto untranslated material by Nietzsche (“On Moods”) and Kafka (important sections from his journals and from his unfinished novel The Boy Who Sank Out of Sight). (shrink)

ABSTRACTOne prestudy based on a corpus analysis and four experiments in which participants had to invent novel names for persons or objects investigated how the valence of a face or an object affects the phonological characteristics of the respective novel name. Based on the articulatory feedback hypothesis, we predicted that /i:/ is included more frequently in fictional names for faces or objects with a positive valence than for those with a negative valence. For /o:/, the pattern should reverse. An analysis (...) of the Berlin Affective Word List – Reloaded yielded a higher number of occurrences of /o:/ in German words with negative valence than in words with positive valence; with /i:/ the situation is less clear. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants named persons showing a positive or a negative facial expression. Names for smiling persons included more /i:/s and fewer /o:/s than names for persons with a negative facial expression. In Experiments 3 and 4, participant... (shrink)

This introduction to a special issue of Thesis Eleven devoted to science fiction begins by exploring the way the genre has been handled by German and French critical theory and their Anglophone equivalents. It proceeds to a discussion of the historical sociology of the genre and, thence, to an account of what it terms the dialectic of science fiction endangerment. Finally, it concludes with a brief overview of the various contributions to the issue.

One of the psychological responses to audiovisual fictions that has been receiving more attention recently is appreciation, defined as a reflexive eudaimonic gratification obtained from a meaningful entertainment mode. Appreciation is the perception that the media experience has a profound meaning, has taught or revealed something. This study seeks to advance on the understanding of appreciation by youngsters. It translates and adapts the Oliver and Bartsch’s questionnaire for teenagers of three European countries. A total of 213 Italians, 55 Spaniards and (...) 42 Germans watched a drama film and immediately afterwards answered the questionnaire. The results of confirmatory factor analysis suggest the existence of four first-order factors for each country. The multi-group analysis shows the questionnaire is not invariant across groups. Thus, the concept of appreciation in its current formulation is not universal. Instead, it seems to be dependent on the cultural aspects of the audience. This article discusses the implications of such results for the understanding of appreciation and of teenagers’ media responses. It also reports mean comparisons for the invariant parameters. (shrink)

Este artículo ofrece una aproximación al papel de la historia en los proyectos narrativos de Juan José Saer y Germán Espinosa. Para el caso del primer autor, se plantea un análisis crítico de la novela El entenado, debido a su particular naturaleza metaficcional, así como de algunos de los textos recogidos en su libro de ensayos El concepto de ficción (1997). En lo que respecta a Germán Espinosa, el paralelo será establecido primordialmente a partir de su ensayística, sin olvidar, desde (...) luego, las oportunas reflexiones que sobre la historia y la literatura aparecen contenidas en un notable acervo de entrevistas y en su extenso libro de memorias. This article offers an approach to the role of history in the narrative projects of Juan José Saer and Germán Espinosa. In the case of the first author, this article poses a critical analysis of the novel The Step Brother, given its particular metafictional nature, as well as some of the texts compiled in his book of essays The Concept of Fiction (1997). With regard to Germán Espinosa, a parallel will be drawn primarily with his essays, without forgetting, of course, the proper reflections upon history and literature that appear in his remarkable body of extensive interviews and memoirs. (shrink)

Friedrich Schlegel’s remarks about poetry and reality are notoriously baffling. They are often regarded as outlandish, or “poetically exaggerated” statements, since they are taken to suggest that there is no difference between poetry and reality or to express the view that there is no way out of linguistic and poetic constructions (Bowie). I take all these responses to be mistaken, and argue that Schlegel’s remarks are philosophical observations about a genuine confusion in theoretical approaches to the distinction between fiction (...) and reality. The confusion at stake involves the assumption that this distinction is and must be fixed independently of the ordinary practices of using these terms to mean certain things in specific situations. And this assumption itself is grounded fundamentally in a confused picture about the way language works. I argue that this confused understanding of the distinction between fiction and reality is not an object of the past, but a picture that is still shaping a central strand in the contemporary debate in philosophical aesthetics about our emotional responses to fiction. And while I do not use Schlegel’s approach to argue against this contemporary view directly, I suggest that his philosophical method includes the resources for unraveling a central confusion in this contemporary debate. (shrink)

For the first time, this book reconstructs the fascinating story of a series of anonymous "dialogues of the dead" published in Germany in the early eighteenth century. The texts stage fictional debates between some of the most famous thinkers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, such as Descartes, Leibniz, Thomasius and Bekker. The dialogues were originally published as cheap prints and very few copies now survive; until today the links between these texts and the very existence of this textual (...) corpus have remained unknown. Starting from the little reliable information available, Riccarda Suitner conducts an exciting investigation of the authors, production, illustrations, circulation and plagiarism of these texts in the intellectual world of the early eighteenth century, proposing a new image of the German Enlightenment. The German edition of this book was awarded the prestigious Geisteswissenschaften international prize. (shrink)

This essay explores a theory of panoramas put forward by the experimental postwar German novelist and translator Arno Schmidt. Schmidt claims that panoramas were so pervasive in the visual culture of the nineteenth century that they unconsciously influenced writers of the period, so that when they wanted to describe vast landscapes they unthinkingly framed their descriptions by drawing on experience with specific panoramas. He primarily expounds the theory in his longest work of fiction, Zettel’s Traum (1970), translated as (...) Bottom’s Dream (2016), where he supports it with evidence from Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne. He also promoted the theory in later interviews, and regarded it not just as part of his fiction but as a significant discovery in its own right. This essay extracts Schmidt’s theory from its fictional context and illustrates how he thought it could be used hermeneutically to uncover submerged panoramas in the works of nineteenth century authors. We conclude by locating the theory as part of the contemporary reception history of panoramas. (shrink)

From its beginnings, some of German film's most prominent genres and directors have focused on the natural world and its transformations by humans. Heimat films, "city symphonies," mountain films, and rubble films all blend the boundary between landscape documentary and fiction film. Yet German film studies has been slow to adopt an environmental focus, concentrating (understandably) on its subject matter's political implications. This book reveals critical connections between German film, sociopolitical context, and environment, showing it to (...) have been a creative catalyst for the social and ecological transformation of the Anthropocene. The book first considers the interplay between German film and environmental history in films and discourses of Heimat. Weimar-era films such as E. A. Dupont's Die Geierwally (1921), Carl Ludwig Achaz-Duisberg's Sprengbagger 1010 (1929), and Phil Jützi's Hunger in Waldenburg (1929) document and create a forum for discussing environmental change. The book then looks at film as a visual archive of and catalyst for infrastructure development, focusing on Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), the mountain films of Arnold Fanck, and the Berlin films Stadt der Millionen (Adolf Trotz, 1925), Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), and Menschen am Sonntag (1930). Nazi-era and postwar films are also examined. By exploring German film history alongside environmental history and theory, this book provides a case study of the power of film within processes of environmental transformation. (shrink)

The presumption of innocence is not a presumption but an assumption or legal fiction. It requires agents of the state to treat a suspect or defendant in the criminal process as if he were in fact innocent. The presumption of innocence has a limited field of application. It applies only to agents of the state, and only during the criminal process. The presumption of innocence as such does not determine the amount of evidence necessary to find a defendant guilty. (...) In spite of these limits, the presumption of innocence protects suspects and defendants from specific dangers inherent in the criminal process. German procedure law is used to show these areas. (shrink)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, theorists developed approaches to Nietzsche’s philosophy that provided an alternative to the received view, some of them suggesting that his view of truth may be his most important and original contribution. It has further been argued that Vaihinger’s fictionalism is the paradigm within which Nietzsche’s view can be properly contextualized. As will be shown, this idea is both viable and fruitful for solving certain interpretive issues raised in recent Nietzsche scholarship.

I argue that sich vorstellen (‘imagine’) in German, similar to English imagine, has a use as a fiction verb and a use as a verb of thinking. I follow Vendler (Rev Métaphys Morale 84(2):161–173, 1979) in assuming that the fiction verbs like vorstellen can be used to report acts of subjective imagination (imagined inner experiences) and acts of objective imagination (imagined outer experiences). For sich vorstellen as a verb of thinking we have to distinguish between a use (...) on which it introduces an activity and takes interrogative complements and DPs on a concealed question interpretation as arguments and a use on which it introduces an attitudinal state that can be characterized as betting on the truth of a proposition in a given subject matter. Given the differences in grammar and interpretation I argue that we have to distinguish four lexical entries for German sich vorstellen: imagine$$_{{\textsc {exp}}-{\textsc {sbj}}}$$ E X P - S B J, imagine$$_{{\textsc {exp}}{-}{\textsc {obj}}}$$ E X P - O B J, imagine$$_{\textsc {prop-act}}$$ P R O P - A C T, imagine$$_{\textsc {prop-state}}$$ P R O P - S T A T E. Having laid out all the necessary distinctions to account for the data, I discuss the prospects of reducing the number of lexical entries. I propose that imagine$$_{{\textsc {exp}}-{\textsc {sbj}}}$$ E X P - S B J and imagine$$_{{\textsc {exp}}{-}{\textsc {obj}}}$$ E X P - O B J could be reduced to imagine$$_{\textsc {prop-act}}$$ P R O P - A C T if we assume that all reports of experiential imagining can be reduced to reports of propositional imagining that combine the predicate imagine$$_{\textsc {prop-act}}$$ P R O P - A C T with a question of the kind ‘what would it be like?’, following an idea in D’Ambrosio and Stoljar (Synthese 199:12923–12944, 2021). Under this assumption only two lexical entries are needed: an entry for imagine$$_{\textsc {prop-act}}$$ P R O P - A C T, a rogative predicate that introduces activities, and imagine$$_{\textsc {prop-state}}$$ P R O P - S T A T E an attitude predicate that takes propositions as arguments and introduces an attitudinal state. The overall result is that the grammar and interpretation of the fiction verb sich vorstellen is much closer to verbs of thinking than one might imagine. (shrink)

What triggers the act of creating? What role do sensory cues, environmental factors, and interdisciplinary exchanges play in this? The semiotic theories of Jacob von Uexküll, a Baltic German biologist, served as an important starting point in addressing these questions. In 1934 he proposed the concept of the Umwelt as a means to assess the behaviour of humans and animals, their realm of experience, and capacity to act. An investigation into the complexity of these Umwelten, from the natural world (...) to?inner worlds? and?time worlds?, is carried out by theorists, artists, and architects such as Andrés Jaque, Esther Venrooy, Bart Decroos, Isolde Vanhee, Joseph Kohlmaier, and more. (shrink)

The recent rise of the far-right ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ (AfD) in Germany has puzzled researchers. How did demands around cultural homogeneity and the need to be protected from ‘dangerous’ immigrants become acceptable in the mainstream when previously they were not? Crucially, understanding political change is paramount for discourse theorist Ernesto Laclau, who considers ‘demands’ as pivotal for the construction of political identities. Yet, the notion is underdeveloped in his writings. I discuss the aporias in Laclau’s understanding of demands and probe (...) how far we can take Laclau in theoretically accounting for the emergence of demands. The concepts of horizon and dislocation are most helpful in this regard. I then utilise those concepts to analyse demand emergence in the ‘Leitkultur’ (leading culture) debate. I show how the horizon on which these demands are inscripted changed over the years, with a culturalistic discourse becoming dominant. There, following a dislocatory public debate of a non-fiction bestseller by career bureaucrat Thilo Sarrazin, integration was increasingly framed as problematic and foreigners needing to shed unintegratable parts of their own culture to assimilate to a German Leitkultur. I argue that acts of mainstreaming like these allowed the AfD to make their formerly radical demands seem credible. (shrink)

Offering an ambitious study of the aesthetics of violence across art, literature, film and theatre, this volume brings together traditional German aesthetic and social theory with the modern problem of violence in art. Written in an engaging style, the book includes examples range from Homer and Shakespeare to slasher films and performance art.

In systems of meaning that run on a regular setting, allegory is about filling in or identifying the blanks that disclose the “other story.” In the modern setting that Walter Benjamin tracked , allegory must turn significance out of the blank itself, working the blank as a turning point for drawing the reading onward. The work most influential on, indeed syndicated in, Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play, as I’ve argued elsewhere, was Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of (...) My Nervous Illness.1 It is the text that hovers behind my own preoccupation with the science fiction genre as the “psy-fi” hub where bona fide science fictions, documentations of psychosis .. (shrink)

In international philosophy of music education, there are some philosophers who are important points of reference. One of them is the German Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). While his philosophy is complex, an oversimplified understanding of his ideas turned him into the “bad guy” of international music education philosophy, being in favor for instance of art for its own sake. His assumed ideas are thought to be the foundation of aesthetic education, in opposition to music education concepts promoting praxis and social (...) change. The prominent role Kant plays leads to questions: Can an eighteenth-century philosopher be blamed for twentieth-century music education concepts and their supposed aberrations? And what did Kant really say? By addressing these and related questions, this paper offers fresh perspectives on Kant’s original concept and the role his assumed ideas play in international music education philosophy, aiming at revising some discourses around them. Furthermore, Kant as a case in point, can lead to general considerations about the function of philosophy in music education philosophy. (shrink)

Dr. Max Felix Silva, dean of the Graduate School of Philosophy and the senior students’ professor of critical theory, was still engrossed in discursively analyzing the transcripts of the peace negotiations between the government panel and the representatives of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. He was trying to show his students the practical use of the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ doctrine that in order to attain optimum results in a dialogue the participants should only use statements and (...) actuations that are truthful, sincere and appropriate all of the time. “Okay, class. You can be truthful but insincere, or you can be truthful and sincere but in an inappropriate way, or you can be appropriate and sincere but not truthful. The point of Habermas is simple: failing in just one of these triple criteria can already jeopardize the outcome of any consensus building. Ako ba ay nasusundan n’yo pa?”. (shrink)

Herbert Marcuse war einer der bedeutendsten Philosophen und Sozialwissenschaftler des 20. Jahrhunderts. Die sozialphilosophischen, ästhetischen und psychologischen Auseinandersetzungen seiner Zeit wurden entscheidend durch ihn geprägt. Mehr noch: kaum ein Theoretiker hatte, bei aller kritischen Distanz, solch entscheidenden Einfluß auf die emanzipatorischen politischen Bewegungen diesseits und jenseits des Atlantiks wie er. Die Titel seiner Schriften waren Programm: "Der eindimensionale Mensch" entschleierte die selbstverschuldete Unmündigkeit der Konsumbürger; "Die Permanenz der Kunst" betonte die prinzipielle Unabgegoltenheit echter Kunstwerke; "Repressive Toleranz" zeigte, daß Toleranz nicht (...) als höchster Wert eines vernünftigen Gemeinwesens gelten darf, da sie totalitären Entwicklungen Vorschub leisten kann. Die Ausgabe im Überblick: Band 1: Der deutsche Künstlerroman. Frühe Aufsätze, 594 Seiten; Band 2: Hegels Ontologie und die Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit, 368 Seiten; Band 3: Aufsätze aus der Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1934-1941, 320 Seiten; Band 4: Vernunft und Revolution. Hegel und die Entstehung der Gesellschaftstheorie, 399 Seiten; Band 5: Triebstruktur und Gesellschaft. Ein philosophischer Beitrag zu Sigmund Freud, 232 Seiten; Band 6: Die Gesellschaftslehre des sowjetischen Marxismus, 260 Seiten; Band 7: Der eindimensionale Mensch. Studien zur Ideologie der fortgeschrittenen Industriegesellschaft, 282 Seiten; Band 8: Aufsätze und Vorlesungen 1948-1969, 319 Seiten; Band 9: Konterrevolution und Revolte; Zeit-Messungen; Die Permanenz der Kunst, 241 Seiten. (shrink)

This study represents a comparison between two radical gestures of literary self-reflexivity: romantic irony and postmodernist metafiction. It examines the impact of early German romantic theory and its central concept of irony on German and English romantic narrative fiction and relates the same to postmodernist self-reflexive novels, including its British and American variants. A primary objective of this comparison is to account for the radical skepticism that postmodernist metafiction voices with respect to the paramount philosophical question of (...) truth and reality. The immanent tension between an absolute idealistic and a radically skeptic position which romantic irony articulates and enacts is conceived of as an important and instructive link to the understanding of postmodernism. (shrink)

Reading fiction for pleasurable is robustly correlated with improved cognitive attainment and other benefits. It is also in decline among young people in developed nations, in part because of competition from moving image fiction. We review existing research on the differences between reading/hearing verbal fiction and watching moving image fiction, as well as looking more broadly at research on image/text interactions and visual versus verbal processing. We conclude that verbal narrative generates more diverse responses than moving (...) image narrative., We note that reading and viewing narrative are different tasks, with different cognitive loads. Viewing moving image narrative mostly involves visual processing with some working memory engagement, whereas reading narrative involves verbal processing, visual imagery and personal memory (Xu et al 2005). but Attempts to compare the two by creating suggest that existing research is flawed by attempts to create equivalent stimuli and task demands face a number of challenges, and we discuss these difficulties in comparative approaches. We then investigate the possibility of identifying lower level processing mechanisms that might distinguish cognition of the two media, and propose a focus on internal scene construction and on working memory as foci for future research. Although many of the sources we draw on are focussed on English speaking participants in European or North American settings, we also cover material relating to speakers of Dutch, German, Hebrew and Japanese in their respective countries, and studies of a remote Turkish mountain community. (shrink)

The article explores the possibilities of literary studies as a hermeneutics of the social by focusing on intermediations of literary and social studies in the present and in the early days of the DVjs, i.e. in the 1920s. It first investigates, how sociology interrogates itself by reading detective stories (Kracauer, Boltanski). As a testing ground for the productivity of the proposed orientation the article then takes a closer look at German crime fiction of the interwar years (Perutz, Jacques) (...) and demonstrates how these novels problematize the workings of a social imaginary in the »time of monsters«. (shrink)

Hans Vaihinger was an important and fascinating figure in German philosophy in the early twentieth century, founding the well-known journal Kant-studien. Yet he was overshadowed by the burgeoning movements of phenomenology and analytical philosophy, as well as hostility towards his work because of his defense of Jewish scholars in a Germany controlled by Nazism. However, it is widely acknowledged today that The Philosophy of 'As If' is a philosophical masterwork. Vaihinger argues that in the face of an overwhelmingly complex (...) world, we produce a simpler set of ideas, or idealizations, that help us negotiate it. When cast as fictions, such ideas provide an easier and more useful way to think about certain subjects, from mathematics and physics to law and morality, than would the truth in all its complexity. Even in science, he wrote, we must proceed "as if " a material world exists independently of perceiving subjects; in behaviour, we must act "as if " ethical certainty were possible; in religion, we must believe "as if" there were a God. He also explores the role of fictions in the history of philosophy, going back to the ancient Greeks and the work of Leibniz, Adam Smith and Bentham. The Philosophy of 'As If' was a powerful influence on the emerging philosophical movement of pragmatism and was ground-breaking in its anticipation of the central role that model-building and simulation would come to play in the human sciences. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by Michael Rosenthal, which provides a fascinating and important background to Vaihinger's life and the legacy of The Philosophy of 'As If'. (shrink)

The question of how literary fiction is used for political and ideological propaganda involves both textual and contextual comparative analysis. Using recent discussions of the literary genre of prophecy, Mehtonen explores the case of a hitherto unexplored anonymous fictional publication from 1770, which became a literary sensation and was soon translated from German into Danish, Russian, Swedish, Finnish and Dutch. Mehtonen shows how this narrative – about the 106-year-old Swiss hermit Martin Zadeck, who presented on his deathbed in (...) 1769 a prophecy about the coming of a powerful united Northern Europe – was closely attached not only to emerging ideas of Europe and its transoceanic expansion after the Seven Years War (1756–1763), but also to topical trends in the utopian fiction of the nobility and military networks in the Northern European monarchies. Mehtonen concludes that the seemingly simple prophecy by Zadeck, often catalogued as »devotion literature«, in fact addressed multiple audiences and even clashing worldviews. The monarchic and colonialist ideas of the narrative appealed to royalist patriots; the legendary and mythological layers were immediately evident to readers familiar with the Rosicrucian and Hermetic underpinnings; the millenarian vision pleased the eschatological mindset of proponents of religious awakening movements; and, ultimately, the Zadecksche Gattung was food for enlightened critiques and philosophies concerning superstition. (shrink)

Brentanos 1904 vollendete Theorie, nur Reales sei vorstellbar und könne existieren, führte auch unter seinen Schülern zu Kontroversen. Dieser Band enthält eine umfangreiche Studie, die Einleitung der Herausgeber zu diesem Problemkreis, Auszüge aus dem Briefwechsel mit A. Marty und O. Kraus sowie die einschlägigen Abhandlungen Brentanos.

Thought experiments are employed for a number of reasons and in many different disciplines. This paper explores the work of Novalis in relation to the method of thought experiments in theology, with a special focus on the encounter between Christianity and the science of his day. In a first step I revisit the ongoing philosophical discussion on thought experiments in order to highlight the lack of interest in the literary features of thought experiments. Step two is dedicated to a discussion (...) of the work of Novalis as far as his metaphysics of phantasy and imagination is concerned as it plays out in his romantic poetry. Building on the results of this discussion, in a third step I discuss the relationship (a) between thought experiments in theology and other disciplines, (b) between current discussions of thought experiments and previous periods of philosophical investigation into the ‘laboratory of the mind’, (c) between Christianity and science, and (d) between literary fiction and cognition. (shrink)

This article is concerned with writing in Poland since the collapse of Communism. It focuses mainly on the generation of Polish writers who made their debut around the time of the collapse of Communism and whose work has since begun to appear in English translation. It considers the changing focus of the post-Communist generation of writers, asks how the translations of their work represent Poland to the world and what these works might indicate about changes within contemporary Polish literary and (...) political culture. In particular the article looks at recent fiction from Polish Women Writers and themes in recent writing including the ideas of Poland as Post-Communist, Post-nationalist, Post-Jewish and Post-German. (shrink)

Photomechanical reprint of papers from 1970 to 1992 mostly in English, some in German or French: Foreword 1–4; LAW AS PRACTICE ‘La formation des concepts en sciences juridiques’ 7–33, ‘Geltung des Rechts – Wirksamkeit des Rechts’ 35–42, ‘Macrosociological Theories of Law’ 43–76, ‘Law & its Inner Morality’ 77–89, ‘The Law & its Limits’ 91–96; LAW AS TECHNIQUE ‘Domaine »externe« & domaine »interne« en droit’ 99–117, ‘Die ministerielle Begründung’ 119–139, ‘The Preamble’ 141–167, ‘Presumption & Fiction’ 169–185, ‘Legal Technique’187–198; LAW (...) AS LOGIC ‘Moderne Staatlichkeit und modernes formales Recht’ 201–207, ‘Heterogeneity & Validity of Law’ 209–218, ‘Leibniz & die Frage der rechtlichen Systembildung’ 219–232, ‘Law & its Approach as a System’ 233–255, ‘Logic of Law & Judicial Activity’ 258–288, ‘Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law’ 289–293, ‘The Nature of the Judicial Application of Norms’ 295–314; LAW AS EXPERIENCE ‘The Socially Determined Nature of Legal Reasoning’317–374, ‘The Ontological Foundation of Law’ 375–390, ‘Is Law a System of Enactments?’ 391–398, ‘The Uniqueness of National Legal Cultures’ 399–411, ‘Institutions as Systems’ 413–424; LAW AS HISTORY ‘From Legal Customs to Legal Folkways’ 427–436, ‘Anthropological Jurisprudence?’ 437–457, ‘Law as a Social Issue’ 459–475, ‘Law as History?’477–484, ‘Rechtskultur – Denkkultur’ 485–489; w/ Curriculum Vitae & Bibliography, as well as Index & Indexes of normative materials & of names. (shrink)

"The Ironic Space" is a highly original study which explores how Kantian epistemology opens a critical window onto the inner form of nineteenth-century realist texts. By tracing the outlines of German idealism, the author describes a philosophical and literary paradigm, which reveals the many contours of irony in Stendhal's "Le Rouge et le noir," Goncharov's "A Common Story," and Meredith's "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel." The readings not only illuminate surprising aspects of the novels, but also demonstrate how their (...) philosophical grounding problematizes the reading process. (shrink)

While W.E.B. Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), is set squarely in the USA, his second work of fiction, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), abandons this national framework, depicting the treatment of African Americans in the USA as embedded into an international system of economic exploitation based on racial categories. Ultimately, the political visions offered in the novels differ starkly, but both employ a Western literary canon – so-called ‘classics’ from Greek, German, English, (...) French, and US American literature. With this, Du Bois attempts to create a new space for African Americans in the world (literature) of the 20th century. Weary of the traditions of this ‘world literature’, the novels complicate and begin to decenter the canon that they draw on. This reading traces what I interpret as subtle signs of frustration over the limits set by the literature that underlies Dark Princess, while its predecessor had been more optimistic in its appropriation of Eurocentric fiction for its propagandist aims. (shrink)

This article explores shifts in feminist and postfeminist discourse on sexuality using two influential novels about women’s sexual agency and empowerment as a case in point. The first novel, Häutungen [Shedding], appeared in the mid-1970s at the peak of the New German Women’s Movement and went on to become one of the most important feminist fictional texts. The second novel, Feuchtgebiete [Wetlands] was published in 2008 in the wake of what has been called postfeminism. Both books are discovery narratives (...) about young women coming of age and both have been heralded by the media as having ruptured sexual taboos and old ways of talking about women’s bodies and sexuality. In different ways, both have also been influential in feminist and postfeminist debates about the possibilities for empowering women as sexual subjects. Both texts show how fiction can draw upon and help shape a transgressive sexual politics, making it instrumental in women’s sexual empowerment. In this article, we examine the resonances and the differences between these two texts, paying particular attention to the kind of narratives that are produced and how in each case a sexual subject is constructed in and through the text. Specific exclusions in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality are explored, as well as the sexual political strategies that each text generates with an eye toward the possibilities each creates for women’s sexual (dis)empowerment and critique of normalised sexuality. (shrink)

Biographical novels about historical women artists have been experiencing a veritable boom in recent years. Written mostly by women, they can be understood as women authors’ attempts to reach out across time to other “artistic” women whose lives “speak to us” today. It has long been a key insight of historical fiction research that a historical novel reveals more about the time in which it was written than the time in which it is set. As such, it can be (...) assumed that contemporary novels about historical women speak as much to twenty-first-century conceptions of femininity as to particular historical moments of female subjectivity. This paper will compare two novels about historical women artists: Janice Galloway’s Clara about nineteenth-century German pianist Clara Wieck-Schumann and Priya Parmar’s Exit the Actress about Restoration actress Nell Gwyn. While based on historical facts, both these novels use the greater freedom of fiction to depart from biographical conventions. It will be demonstrated that although they resemble each other on the discourse level, employing shifts in the narrative perspective, conspicuous typography, and graphic elements, they differ markedly in the biographical and fictional subgenres in which they participate and, hence, in their gender politics. (shrink)