Richard T. Gray

"Included are more than 800 alphabetically arranged entries on his works, characters, themes, family members, acquaintances, and other topics, such as: Abraham, absurd, animals, bureaucracy, colonialism, death, Don Quixote, Sigmund Freud, guilt, irony, Judaism, K., Thomas Mann, nihilism, and many more. Entries often cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography."--BOOK JACKET.

A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia

Clayton Koelb

Ruth V. Gross

Rolf J. Goebel

Known for depicting alienation, frustration, and the victimization of the individual by impenetrable bureaucracies, Kafka's works have given rise to the term Kafkaesque. This encyclopedia details Kafka's life and writings. Included are more than 800 alphabetically arranged entries on his works, characters, family members and acquaintances, themes, and other topics. Most of the entries cite works for further reading, and the Encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography.

The study presents a thorough investigation of Kafka's aphoristic writings, examining them in terms of the history of the aphorism in Germany, and paying special regard to Kafka's contemporary Austrian aphorists. Emphasis is placed on the role of the aphorism in the development of Kafka's literary creativity. Aphoristic discourse presented itself to Kafka as a possible manner of resolving specific conflicts in his life and art, above all the crisis of communication the individuality of the self. Aphoristic structure provides the transitional link between Kafka ́s early perspectivistic narratives and the parables of the later period.

Kafka's Aphorisms, Literary Tradition, and Literary Transformation

Constructive Destruction

In Money Matters, Richard Gray investigates the discourses of aesthetics and philosophy alongside economic thought, arguing that their domains are not mutually exclusive. The transition in Germany from an agrarian or proto-industrial economy to a capitalist industrial economy, which was paralleled by a shift from the exchange of money in coin to the use of paper currencies, occurred simultaneously with an efflorescence of German-language literature and philosophy. Based on close readings of canonical literary and philosophical texts, Gray explores how this confluence led to a rich cross-fertilization between economic and literary thought in Germany during this period. Money Matters documents the surprising degree to which literature and philosophy participated in the creation of modern economic paradigms, as well as the extent to which economics influenced literature and philosophy. The cultural artifacts of the period demonstrate the existence of an "economic unconsciousness" persistent notions of value and exchange that inflect the aesthetic and thematic dimensions of literary and philosophical texts. This book offers a thought-provoking and original analysis of literature and ideas in the critical transition period from Kant and Goethe, through the German Romantics, to Marx.

Economics and the German Cultural Imagination, 1770-1850

Money Matters

Michael A. Rosenthal

Klaus Vieweg

Nicholas Halmi

Gary J. Handwerk

The dialectic between reason and imagination forms a key element in Romantic and post- Romantic philosophy, science, literature, and art. Inventions of the Imagination explores the diverse theories and assessments of this dialectic in essays by philosophers and literary and cultural critics. By the end of the eighteenth century, reason as the predominant human faculty had run its course, and imagination emerged as another force whose contributions to human intellectual existence and productivity had to be newly calculated and constantly recalibrated. The attempt to establish a universal form of reason alongside a plurality of imaginative capacities describes the ideological program of modernism from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day. This collection chronicles some of the vicissitudes in the conceptualization and evaluation of the imagination across time and in various disciplines.

Romanticism and Beyond

Inventions of the Imagination

Ghostwriting provides the first comprehensive analysis of the fictional prose narratives of one of contemporary Germany's most recognized authors, the émigré writer W. G. Sebald. Examining Sebald's well-known published texts in the context of largely unknown unpublished works, and informed by documents and information from Sebald's literary estate, this book offers a detailed portrait of his characteristic literary techniques and how they emerged and matured out of the practices and attitudes he represented in his profession as a literary scholar. The title “Ghostwriting” signals the convergence in Sebald's works of a set of diverse historical questions, philosophical views, and literary practices. Many historical ghosts haunt Sebald's narratives on the level of story. Moreover, Sebald's narrator plays the role of a ghostwriter in the profound sense that his stories fictionally re-enact the histories of obscure, but once-living individuals whose lives they revitalize, and whose fates are tied up with the most virulent historical conjunctures of the modern world. This study thus seeks to comprehend the constitutive elements of Sebald's “poetics of history,” his implementation of literary tools for effective historical memorializing.

W. G. Sebald’s Poetics of History

Ghostwriting

A sociohistory of German bourgeois literature from 1770-1914 based on detailed readings of six cononical literary texts.

Contestation and Ideological Legitimation in German Bourgeois Literature, 1770-1914

Stations of the Divided Subject

The study presents a thorough investigation of Kafka's aphoristic writings, examining them in terms of the history of the aphorism in Germany, and paying special regard to Kafka's contemporary Austrian aphorists. Emphasis is placed on the role of the aphorism in the development of Kafka's literary creativity. Aphoristic discourse presented itself to Kafka as a possible manner of resolving specific conflicts in his life and art, above all the crisis of communication the individuality of the self. Aphoristic structure provides the transitional link between Kafka´s early perspectivistic narratives and the parables of the later period.

Kafka's Aphorisms: Literary Tradition and Literary Transformation

A provocative and original analysis of the impact of literature on the values and ideas of economics (and vice versa) in Germany 1770-1850.

Reclams Einzelinterpretationen erschließen wichtige Werke der deutschen Literatur. Sie sind von Fachwissenschaftlern verfasst und eignen sich zur Vorbereitung von Referaten und Hausarbeiten. Sie enthalten eine Werkinterpretation und Literaturhinweise zur weiterführenden Lektüre.

Reclam Interpretation

Interpretation. Franz Kafka: Das Urteil

A critical history of physiognomic thought in German-speaking Europe that traces the roots of twentieth-century racial profiling to the Enlightenment.

German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz

About Face

More than 800 alphabetically arranged entries detail the life and works of one of the most enduring authors of world literature.

Richard T. Gray

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