Birgit Tautz

In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar. German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry, yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world. A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.

Toward a New History of German Literature Around 1800

Translating the World

By recasting instances of 'German' cultural production around the turns of centuries - 1800, 1900, 2000 - the essays in this volume examine the role that color has played in perceiving and representing ethnic difference. In innovative essays, literary scholars, historians, anthropologists and art historians support an overarching thesis: that the 'origins' of a modern, 'ethnic' imagination, inscribe patterns of seeing, whereas more recent developments involve processes of de-colorization and metaphorization. By preserving the difference in disciplinary approaches, methods and writing styles, the volume presents a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to German Studies, and is therefore of interest to Germanists, as well as to all others engaged in the study and scholarship of German Culture. Contributors: Christine Achinger, Nana Badenberg, Helen Cafferty, Fatima El-Tayeb, Gudrun Hentges, Uli Linke, Andreas Michel, Thomas Miller, Daniel Purdy, Assenka Oksiloff, Wendy Sutherland, Birgit Tautz. Der Band untersucht die Rolle der Farbe in Prozessen der Wahrnehmung und Darstellung ethnischer Unterschiede in der deutschsprachigen Kultur an drei Jahrhundertwenden: 1800, 1900, 2000. Die interdisziplinären Essays von Literaturwissenschaftlern, Historikern, Anthropologen und Kunsthistorikern bieten Lesarten, die sich auf vielfältige Phänomene beziehen und die These unterstützen, daß das Ethnische zunächst überwiegend visuell vorgestellt und versprachlicht wurde, bevor es einer zunehmenden Metaphorisierung und "Entfärbung" unterlag. Die angebotenen Deutungsmuster repräsentieren keine kohärente Wahrheit; vielmehr sind sie als Symptome unterschiedlicher Wissensformationen, d.h. unterschiedlicher Disziplinen, Methoden und "Schreibverfahren", zu sehen. Mit Beiträgen von Achinger, Badenberg, Cafferty, El-Tayeb, Hentges, Linke, Michel, Miller, Purdy, Oksiloff, Sutherland, Tautz.

Signs of Ethnic Difference

Colors 1800, 1900, 2000

Patricia Anne Simpson

A new Forum section focuses on the impact of Digital Humanities on Goethe scholarship and on eighteenth-century German Studies, alongside articles on a diverse range of authors and topics.

Birgit Tautz

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