Laughing About and With the Absurd in Twentieth-Century German Literature: With a Focus on Kurt Kusenberg

By combining digital humanities text-mining tools and a qualitative approach, we examine changing concepts in forestry journals in Sweden and the United States (US) in the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Our first hypothesis is that foresters at the beginning of the twentieth century were more concerned with production and less concerned with ecology than foresters at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Our second hypothesis is that US foresters in the early twentieth century were less concerned with local site conditions than Swedish foresters. We find that early foresters in both countries had broader—and often ecologically focused—concerns than hypothesized. Ecological concerns in the forestry literature have increased, but in the Nordic countries, production concerns have increased as well. In both regions and both time periods, timber management is closely connected to concerns about governance and state power, but the forms that governance takes have changed.

Mediating the Nineteenth Century:Literature, Science, and the History of Knowledge Jessica C. Resvick (bio) My research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature, media, and material culture draws from the histories of science and ideas to study how media shape what we know. I am working on two book projects, each of which explores how literature and media produce and codify new knowledge and new ways of knowing. My first book project, Recognizing Reality: German Realism and the Transmission of Knowledge, examines the media-historical and epistemological parameters of nineteenth-century German realism. I take as a starting point Aristotle's concept of recognition, understood as that "aha" moment that occupies a cornerstone of the complex plot and the basic operation that underlies the human proclivity for mimesis. In Aristotle's account, it is by recognizing the identity of a newly perceived object with known representations held in memory that one gains knowledge about the world, and this pleasurable recognitive work in fact lies at the root of literary creation. My project exploits this paradigm as it investigates the kinds of knowledge transmitted by works of nineteenth-century realism, for which mimesis becomes an especially pressing concern. Beginning with a rereading of the scar episode in the Odyssey—and of Erich Auerbach's reading of this scene—the book proposes that realist recognition short-circuits the experience of reality with knowledge about reality, with the former remaining beyond the reach of linguistic expression and the latter underpinned by specific media. [End Page 132] While recognition has always occupied a central role in literature, its status has shifted over the centuries in ways that reflect developments in media. For instance, Bertolt Brecht's epic theater strove to disrupt routinized processes of recognition to generate V-Effekte in the audience. By attending, for example, to the serial publication format, specific writing and drawing aids, or even personal doodles, I show how contemporary media in fact condition the types of knowledge conveyed in realist narratives. Moreover, I show how early theories of realism—generally understood as a prose-dominant period—drew explicitly from theatrical forms of recognition. The project, then, highlights at once the media-specificity of recognition and the epistemological influence of specific media. Finally, by tracing out the influence of nineteenth-century literature and media on early psychoanalysis, the project shows how German realism lays the groundwork not only for modern conceptions of recognition but also—and more suggestively—for new conceptions of the individual's lived experience within and of modern reality. My second book project, From Stereotype to Isotype: Media, Individuality, and Society, provides a media history of "typological" thought in the German and American contexts. Examining scientific, literary, and visual types—from the Goethean Typus to typefaces—the project illustrates how typological thought spread far beyond its original contexts. For instance, the commonplace term "stereotype" in fact originally designated a print technology that allowed for the reproduction of stock images or texts. While this association seems lost today, in the early twentieth century, the medial conception of the stereotype was still in force. Thus, in his 1912 essay "The Dynamics of Transference," Sigmund Freud could, without much justification, liken an individual's recurrent patterns of instinctual satisfaction to this print technology. The history of the term "stereotype" is, I contend, more broadly indicative of the transfer of "type" across disciplines at the turn of the century. The "social type" occupied a central role in nineteenth-century fiction, even beyond the strictures of Marxist criticism that deemed it "the central category and criterion of realist literature."1 It was above all the industrialization of print and the resultant rise of periodical literature—in which stereotype printing played a key role—that helped to solidify clichéd representations of individuals and reality more broadly.2 Typological thinking also permeated the (pseudo-) sciences of the day. Literary constructions of the social type were shaped by fields like phrenology and physiology, and so-called race science attempted to categorize humankind based on phenotypical differences.3 While links between the social type and the stereotype—understood both as a print technology and in its contemporary sense—are thus readily apparent, strategies of...

The research dives into similarities between historical events in the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries, drawing connections to Borys Hrinchenko’s inspirations which resonate with contemporary efforts in resisting russian occupation, emphasizing the struggle for Ukrainian independence, identity, and freedom through primarily ideological, cultural, national, and linguistic means. The article highlights the leading pedagogical ideas of the scientific and journalistic heritage of Borys Hrinchenko, a prominent Ukrainian linguist, writer, poet, playwright, publicist, critic, ethnographer, educator, and public figure of the late nineteenth – early twentieth centuries. The author focuses on various aspects of the scientist’s contributions, including ethnographic research and methodological systematization of Ukrainian folk art, social endeavors aimed at common societal objectives, educational perspectives, and pedagogical intentions. Additionally, the emphasis is on humanizing personal and social interactions among individuals through the promotion of universal moral ideals and spiritual values, among other aspects. The article provides characteristics of educational concepts related to the national upbringing of Ukrainian youth within Borys Hrinchenko’s scientific and journalistic heritage. It outlines the pedagogical discussions on intergenerational transmission in the realm of Ukrainian studies during the specified period. The author attempts to reinterpret the eminent thinker’s persona in intrinsic harmony with well-known figures from the intellectual elite of that era. Significant attention is devoted to the alignment of creative concepts between Borys Hrinchenko and Ivan Franko. The article highlights Kamenyar’s extensive praise for Hrinchenko, mentioning his resilience challenging criticism, often hostile, and his consistent profound love for Ukraine and “sincere democracy” in all his writings. Specific examples are presented to illustrate Hrinchenko’s aimed critique of Khrystyna Alchevska’s idleness, particularly in the context of russifying Ukrainian schools and publishing her books in russian. The research offers an entirely different interpretation of the critical perspective on certain intellectuals’ scientific and literary works from the relevant period. This perspective was aimed at the promotion of Ukrainian studies and national education. The article explores certain aspects of Hrinchenko’s role as a teacher in a rural school, drawing from historical and scholarly references. It emphasizes the strong connection between two generations of the Ukrainian national movement – Borys Hrinchenko and Dmytro Doroshenko – by analyzing their common efforts. The author highlights their effective collaboration in developing the Ukrainian independent press, public engagement, educational initiatives, and shaping the Ukrainian people’s national consciousness and identity.

Reconstructing the City, Constructing the State: Government in Valparaíso after the Earthquake of 1906

The early twentieth century was an era of rapid and drastic transformations in Chinese history mainly because of the serious survival crisis that China was experiencing, and the Chinese villagers, who formed the great majority of China’s population at that time, actively participated in such transformations. They were the ones who launched the unsuccessful Boxer Rebellion at the very beginning of the twentieth century, and they also formed the core force that brought the Communist revolution to its triumph in 1949. Villagers acted either spontaneously or at the instigation of groups of reformers and revolutionaries, most of whom were of rural origins but had received education and accepted new ideas in urban centers. Throughout the early twentieth century, village China became the setting of all kinds of reformist and revolutionary movements aimed at bringing about multifaceted changes to China in general and rural China in particular. The size of the rural population, the significant influence the Chinese villages had had on the Chinese traditional culture, as well as the important roles the villages and villagers played in the modern transformations of China, are among the factors that have made the Chinese village society in the early twentieth century a subject of a large number of political, academic, and literary writings during and after the first half of the twentieth century. Those writings focus on many different topics, including the nature, structure, and culture of the village society; the performance of China’s rural economy; the relations between the villages and the cities; the relations between the intellectuals and the peasants; and the villagers as bandits, rebels, reformers, and revolutionaries. The authors of these writings were political leaders, scholars, novelists, and others, and they wrote for different purposes. Generally speaking, most of those who wrote about the villagers and villages during the early twentieth century were motivated by an intense desire to present justifications for the reformist or revolutionary agenda they were advocating, whereas those who wrote after the early twentieth century have shown a stronger interest in seeking interpretations than providing justifications. This bibliography includes not only academic studies of the Chinese village society of the early twentieth century, but also representative political and journalistic writings that are essential for understanding the major aspects and dynamic changes of village China in the early twentieth century.

Ensemble experiments with a global coupled climate model are performed for the twentieth century with time-evolving solar, greenhouse gas, sulfate aerosol (direct effect), and ozone (tropospheric and stratospheric) forcing. Observed global warming in the twentieth century occurred in two periods, one in the early twentieth century from about the early 1900s to the 1940s, and one later in the century from, roughly, the late 1960s to the end of the century. The model's response requires the combination of solar and anthropogenic forcing to approximate the early twentieth-century warming, while the radiative forcing from increasing greenhouse gases is dominant for the response in the late twentieth century, confirming previous studies. Of particular interest here is the model's amplification of solar forcing when this acts in combination with anthropogenic forcing. This difference is traced to the fact that solar forcing is more spatially heterogeneous (i.e., acting most strongly in areas where sunlight reaches the surface) while greenhouse gas forcing is more spatially uniform. Consequently, solar forcing is subject to coupled regional feedbacks involving the combination of temperature gradients, circulation regimes, and clouds. The magnitude of these feedbacks depends on the climate's base state. Over relatively cloud-free oceanic regions in the subtropics, the enhanced solar forcing produces greater evaporation. More moisture then converges into the precipitation convergence zones, intensifying the regional monsoon and Hadley and Walker circulations, causing cloud reductions over the subtropical ocean regions, and, hence, more solar input. An additional response to solar forcing in northern summer is an enhancement of the meridional temperature gradients due to greater solar forcing over land regions that contribute to stronger West African and South Asian monsoons. Since the greenhouse gases are more spatially uniform, such regional circulation feedbacks are not as strong. These regional responses are most evident when the solar forcing occurs in concert with increased greenhouse gas forcing. The net effect of enhanced solar forcing in the early twentieth century is to produce larger solar-induced increases of tropical precipitation when calculated as a residual than for early century solar-only forcing, even though the size of the imposed solar forcing is the same. As a consequence, overall precipitation increases in the early twentieth century in the Asian monsoon regions are greater than late century increases, qualitatively consistent with observed trends in all-India rainfall. Similar effects occur in West Africa, the tropical Pacific, and the Southern Ocean tropical convergence zones.

Reviewed by: Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return Ann Sherif (bio) Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return. By Miryam Sas. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass., 2011. xvii, 275 pages. $39.95. In this engaging book, Miryam Sas guides the reader through the complex world of the experimental arts in Japan of the 1960s and after. In contrast to Sas’s emphasis on literary texts in her first book, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford University Press, 1999), this [End Page 207] volume focuses on experimental theater, performance, butō, video, and film. The author offers compelling, close readings of experimental art through the lens of its age and in the spirit of artists such as Terayama Shūji, Betsuyaku Minoru, Hijikata Tatsumi, Moriyama Daidō, Hosoe Eikoh, Jōnouchi Motoharu, and Lee U-Fan. Sas classifies the art she studies as experimental rather than avant-garde. Particularly when applied to post–World War II art, the term avant-garde has come to be used to refer to virtually any cultural form that is not strictly mass-market entertainment. Historical studies of the avant-garde, furthermore, often critique the claims to radicalism or vanguard status of the postwar “neo-avant garde” as both compromised by its proximity to commercialism and overly complacent in liberal democratic contexts. Critics compare the postwar “avant-garde” to the epoch-making innovations of the historical avant-garde (Dada, surrealism, futurism) in an age of world war and revolution in the early twentieth century, a global movement that shook the art establishment with its radical challenge of the very notion of art, proposal of a new relationship between art and everyday life, and dismantling of many sacred concepts and institutions of high art. In contrast, the term experimental art has been more comfortably associated with art after World War II, often situated in the very institutional contexts and mechanical media that the prewar avant-garde sought to challenge. Much of the art that Sas studies exemplifies the postwar spirit of “irreverence and defiance” inspired by Sakaguchi Ango’s foundational 1946 essay “Darakuron.” Postwar experimental art, Sas highlights, continues the historical avant-garde emphasis on breaking down the hierarchy of genres and working in a variety of media and genres. The experimental art of Terayama, Betsuyaku, and others is highly conceptual while deeply engaged with the philosophical currents and the ethical dilemmas of the day. For this reason, Sas highlights the artists’ critical writings, which are integral to understanding their work. Evidence for their conceptual approaches is also found in what books they were reading (popular at the time or mentioned by the artist), their interactions with other artists and thinkers, and, to a lesser extent, the historical contexts of their art. Sas structures Experimental Arts around three key concepts: engagement (angajuman), encounter (deai), and return/origins. These ideas resonate strongly with the political and artistic milieux of post-1950s experimental art. These are not random tropes manifested in experimental art but instead ideas that developed and became influential in philosophical and ideological discourses of the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the importance of understanding such highly conceptual modes of creativity in relation to philosophical and ethical debates grounded in specific historical and political dilemmas is one of the key points of Sas’s book. [End Page 208] In contrast to the popular meanings of angajuman as “marching in the streets,” “political protest” (p. xiv), Sas examines in detail the profound presence in experimental art of the idea of engagement, as theorized by Jean-Paul Sartre as a process that entailed acknowledging responsibility for the political consequences of one’s art and the importance for artists and intellectuals to speak out and act on urgent issues of the age. Sas regards engagement as bridging “theoretical, aesthetic, and political questions” (p. xiv). Engagement here is a complex notion, which means not only political critique but also transformation of consciousness and vision. Terayama Shūji, for example, uses his art to invite his audience to “a specific kind of vision . . . giving ourselves over to the gaze of others” (p. 61). Sartre, in his renowned What...

Riding to Learn, Learning to Ride: Early School-busing in Connecticut, 1900–1945

A Psychoanalysis of Milk: The Case of Alfred Hitchcock

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

History, a Literary Artifact? The Traveling Concept of Narrative in/on Historiographic Discourse

Chapter 1 - Moving Beyond the Bureaucratic Model

Graphs of quantitative data are analytical tools that facilitate visual thinking. In many disciplines, the use of graphs was preceded by tables summarizing quantitative data. Graphs known by North American archaeologists as “battleship curves” are temporal frequency distributions of relative abundances of specimens in each of several artifact types. They are unimodal frequency distributions known as spindle graphs. In the early 1950s, it was suggested that the idea of spindle graphs was borrowed by archaeologists from paleontology. Archaeologists occasionally used bar graphs and line graphs to diagram change in artifact inventories in the early twentieth century. The questions addressed in this volume are: (i) did North American archaeologists borrow the idea of spindle graphs from paleontology, and (ii) what was the frequency of use by North American archaeologists of each of the various graph types to diagram culture change during the early and middle twentieth century?

Strega Nona is the main character of many picture books published by renowned Italian-American author Tomie dePaola. This chapter uses Strega Nona as the vehicle to explore the ebbs and flows of the identity formation of two generations in comparison (children of immigrants of the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries). That is, it examines the ramifications of stories of mobility and migrations in different eras and analyzes similarities and differences in processes of identity building and ethnic belonging in the U.S. The chapter concludes that language, as a highly distinctive identity marker, is the crucial difference between the two generations under analysis. In the early twentieth century, social, political, and economic constraints forced children of immigrants to neglect the language of their families, contributing to the creation of hyphenated identities.

When the artistic canon of the Southern Levant coalesced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars thought of the region, then Ottoman Palestine, as the locus of the Bible. The small-scale nature of the archaeological finds as well as their relative dearth reinforced a reliance on biblical narratives as a framework for understanding the culture of the region. Moreover, early scholarship did not recognize the complex regionalism of the Southern Levant or the diversity of its populations. Consequently, the artistic canon that developed did not represent the historical and archaeological realities of the region. This chapter examines the history of how the artistic canon of the Southern Levant formed over the past century of scholarship, why various scholars of the early and middle twentieth century included particular items in the canon, and why these now entrenched representations may or may not be helpful to the discipline’s future.