Northwestern University Press Research Articles

Kafka’s Blues: Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic by Mark Christian Thompson

Reviewed by: Kafka’s Blues: Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic by Mark Christian Thompson Jeff Fort Thompson, Mark Christian. Kafka’s Blues: Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. 172pp. $34.95 paperback. Was Kafka black? The question startles, even more so than other, more empirical questions that have arisen about the Czech writer (such as: Was Kafka gay?—this being the title of a German newspaper article from some years ago). Thompson’s central question is not that blunt, of course, but it leads us to such a notion, and Kafka’s Blues provides a no less startling and convincing answer: Yes. In a way—indeed in multiple ways—we can say that Kafka was black. Or rather, to put a finer point on this deliberately provocative statement, and to do better justice to the remarkable thinking and scholarship on display throughout this book, we can say something like this: Kafka’s writing and artistry are deeply and extensively traversed by an engaged meditation on racial blackness, a meditation which is far from incidental, along with a constitutive becoming black or “becoming Negro”—as Thompson titles his first chapter, using the word one finds, in English, in Kafka’s novel Der Verschollene. The argument may provoke some resistance. Do the few mentions in Kafka of African, Afro European, or African American people, culture, and history add up to a serious preoccupation? While Thompson’s analysis builds on these mentions, in fact more numerous than one might think, it goes far beyond an assemblage of explicit references; nor is it limited to any claims regarding Franz Kafka’s self-conscious intentions or subjective attitudes. The blackness in question is ultimately defined less in empirical or subjective terms— though these certainly remain operative—than as historical, discursive, and structural formations. One could perhaps even call them, in a preliminary and qualified manner, transcendental, in a mode of the transcendental that is qualified (precisely) by the body. It is to this depth, by the end, that Thompson’s readings appear to take us. But they begin in each case, as they must, with Kafka’s texts. Perhaps aware of the possible skepticism his thesis might meet, Thompson carefully lays out the broad outlines in the first sentences of the book, worth quoting here as a concise overview: This book shows that many of Kafka’s major works engage in a coherent, sustained meditation on racial blackness and in several instances metaphorically portray bodily transformation from white European into what Kafka refers to as the ‘Negro’—a term he used in English. Kafka’s thinking of racial blackness is integral to his work in terms of thematic progression and aesthetic form. Indeed, this book demonstrates that the creation of a work of art is, for Kafka, impossible without passage through a contextual and corporeal state of being ‘Negro.’ Kafka represents this passage in various ways—from reflections on New World slavery and black music, to evolutionary recapitulation theory and ethnography, to biblical allusion. (3) Interpreting and expanding on Kafka’s use of the word “Negro,” the name that Karl Rossmann gives himself when signing up for the “Nature Theater of Oklahama” (sic), Thompson draws this word through Kafka’s text like a powerful magnet, pulling toward it an unforeseen and coherent constellation of material. The chapter titles are strikingly minimal, showing the structural centrality of this heavily charged word; I list them here along with the German title of the text each one focuses on (Thompson always gives Kafka’s titles in German): “Becoming Negro” (“Das Urteil”); “Being Negro” (Der Verschollene); “Beyond Negro” (Die Verwandlung); “Negro’s Machine” (“In [End Page 141] der Strafkolonie”); “Negro’s Manumission” (“Bericht für eine Akademie”); “Negro’s Martyrdom” (“Ein Hungerkünstler”). While one may find some associations more immediately persuasive than others, the book becomes progressively more convincing with each chapter, as it places each of these major narrative works within the contexts most relevant to its concerns, while also drawing on pertinent passages from the diaries and letters. These chapters move from the biblical reference to Noah’s nakedness and the...

Archaeologies of Modernity: Avant-Garde Bildung by Rainer Rumold

Reviewed by: Archaeologies of Modernity: Avant-Garde Bildung by Rainer Rumold Cathryn Setz Archaeologies of Modernity: Avant-Garde Bildung. Rainer Rumold. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Pp. 344. $99.95 (cloth); $34.95 (paper); $34.95 (eBook). Paris, circa 1924. The German Jewish expressionist extraordinaire Carl Einstein urges transition editor Eugène Jolas to head to Weimar Berlin, a cultural moment on its last legs. Though Jolas would not visit Berlin for half a decade, despite translating such writers as Carl Sternheim, Georg Trakl, and Gottfried Benn, the paramountcy of Einstein's counsel would prove more than revelatory for the young journalist. Einstein was profoundly troubled by a younger generation of poets living in Germany during those crisis years—artists, who, he prophetically felt, were under threat of stagnancy, almost a decade before the rise of Nazism. A mere echo, he'd announce, of a once-vibrant aesthetic formation. Ever buoyant, however, Einstein and his informal editorship knew no bounds. In a spirit of revolt that we need to understand today, he and others in the transition circle dreamt up Parisian plaquettes for Germany and manifestoes that never came to pass. "Let's hurl something in their faces," he would say to Jolas, gesturing to Berlin from their "Boisserie" at Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, "The two or three poets left there will thank us!"1 Einstein—the anarcho-syndicalist author of such wild tracts as "Totalität" in Die Aktion, in 1914 and 1916 and "Aphorismes Méthodiques" in Georges Bataille's Documents, in 1929, as well as of powerful explorations of African art, interventions in neo-Kantian and Bergsonian aesthetic theory, and playful Goethe-bashing in transition—is a figure we simply cannot ignore. Archaeologies of Modernity builds on Rumold's previous valiant editorial efforts (and those of Germanist colleagues) to bring Einstein's still somewhat occluded presence to an Anglophone scholarly readership, including key texts and discussion in a 2004 special edition of October, and of course his pioneering study, The Janus Face of the German Avant-Garde: From Expressionism toward Postmodernism (2002). Indeed, thanks to such recovery work, Einstein's role in the history of the avant-garde has been shown to be pivotal. With this latest work, we can hear Einstein's critical voice among those of other key artists and theorists of the early to mid-twentieth century, including, among others, Franz Kafka, Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. To be sure, Archaeologies of Modernity is not an easy read: like Einstein's own works, it offers a demanding and invigorating journey through an aesthetic physiognomy of the image, the archaic, and even, as we might put it, the dream of a lightness of spirit in interwar German culture. Rumold asks us to think about ways in which we might reconstellate editorial and artistic voices in order to better understand an essential marker of philosophical reflection, whether it was an archaic to be embraced, torn down, or even—as in Jolas's case—taken as part of a neo-metaphysical Weltanschauung that veered problematically close to protofascistic nihilism. To begin, then, Rumold lays out the polysemic beauty of the German language, orienting his discussion toward one central, proliferating, word: Bildung. Although itself a traditional idea, Bildung—self-formation, an Innerlichkeit (inwardness), a logic, or an "image zone," to gesture to Benjamin—becomes, for Rumold, a critical lens. This allows for explorations of other forms of Bildung: Goethe's organic concept of Bildung, the bourgeois educational idea of the Bildungsbürger, Wilhelm von Humboldt's concept of self-education, Friedrich Schiller's self-cultivation, or in terms of further compounds such as Bildungsphilister, Wirklichkeitbildung, and Bildtotalität. Rumold identifies the historiographic specificities of the word in order to approach a greater understanding of relations between earlier Romanticism and a modernist response. Rather than theorize this intellectual history as a break—à la Peter Bürger or Andreas Huyssen—Rumold offers a reconfiguration in which the "dream of Bildung," to use Adorno's [End Page 421] words of 1956, or what Rumold calls a "second innocence," stayed alive in the minds of some of the century's most significant European critics and artists (14).2 The...

City of Bones: A Testament

directed to the poet’s mother by her husband , the poet’s father. In the second, it is directed to the poet-speaker by her own husband, and, both times, it is a prologue to the husbands’ confessions to infidelity. Figuratively, the poet-speaker may be heard whispering the same sentence—telling herself and her readers some things. A short excerpt from “Garage Door” illustrates both the tone and the unvarnished veracity of the collection. “I watch you spread the ladder’s legs far enough // to support your hulking frame. And, as you balance / on your good shoes, the ones you like so much, // I almost wish you wouldn’t fall.” Despite centering on formidable subjects such as racism, motherhood, and the suffering of children, the poems never stoop to melodrama. Instead, they are exquisitely crafted, often shockingly honest evaluations of the poet’s interior landscape , delivered in a singular voice sometimes tinged with the sardonic but never with self-pity. For example, in “Wait for It,” the poetspeaker watches her son catch, then eat, a crab, “snapping off / its pereopods to suck at their hinges, cracking open / the propodus so he can dig at the meat.” The primal violence is palpable; the speaker discloses that when watching her son she “shudder(s) at this creature I couldn’t have made.” In a poem set early in the collection, the lion’s heart of the collection reveals itself, although readers might not fully recognize this poem’s importance until the second reading. “And, afterward, poking through the smoking / ash heap of this conflagration, / I will search for remnants of my humanity / I might salvage, still.” Leona Sevick chaperones her readers through an emotional and psychological journey that makes us better human beings for having accompanied her. Jeanetta Calhoun-Mish Oklahoma City University Kwame Dawes. City of Bones: A Testament. Evanston, Illinois. Triquarterly Books / Northwestern University Press. 2017. 218 pages. City of Bones: A Testament is an impressive collection of poems, divided into four parts, which employs a structure that subverts linearity through a constant movement from the past to the present moment. The parts are interconnected through a recurrence of imagery, symbols, and voices that speak to the complexities of the present moment and to the traumas of the past condition. The book is part of the continuum within Kwame Dawes’s body of work concerned with exploring the contemporary Caribbean cultural experience through the lenses of the legacy. Yet it marks a departure from his previous works in placing the poems in conversation with the work of the African American playwright August Wilson. There are many allusions to Wilson’s A Gem of the Ocean, a play written in 2004 that tells the story of the Middle Passage and describes “the city of bones” in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean through the voice of Esther, one of the major characters. The very title of this collection alludes to the “city of bones” that Wilson’s play evokes. While Dawes draws on characters, voices, and places from Wilson’s work, he artfully reinvents them by drawing on his personal experience and adding other spatial frameworks and other resonances such as blues and reggae music as well as references from the Bible. The character of Esther, for instance, is reinvented through the voice of Mama Ola, through whom Dawes conveys his vison of the future. While familiarity with Wilson’s work can enhance the reading of this collection, it is not indispensable to engage with this collection. Moving from poem to poem, the reader is taken into different time spans and spaces, creating a sense of a “journey” to Ivailo Petrov Wolf Hunt Trans. Angela Rodel Archipelago Books Set against the backdrop of a Bulgaria under Soviet communism, six neighbors embark on a hunting trip that becomes a collision of passions and histories. With powerfully pragmatic prose, Ivailo Petrov’s tragic work details the deep wounds inflicted on rural Bulgarian communities by the Soviet regime, using the stories of these six men as an intensely personal example. Alfredo de Palchi Nihil Trans. John Taylor Xenos Books / Chelsea Editions This stunning collection by Italian poet Alfredo de Palchi pairs autobiographical poetic...

Nabokov's Canon: From Onegin to Ada. By Marijeta Bozovic . Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2016. x, 230 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $39.95, paper.

Nabokov's Canon: From <i>Onegin</i> to <i>Ada</i>. By Marijeta Bozovic . Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2016. x, 230 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $39.95, paper.

Kafka and Wittgenstein: The Case for an Analytic Modernism by Rebecca Schuman

Reviewed by: Kafka and Wittgenstein: The Case for an Analytic Modernism by Rebecca Schuman Jennifer L. Geddes Kafka and Wittgenstein: The Case for an Analytic Modernism. By Rebecca Schuman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 220. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-0810131842. Cloth $99.95. ISBN 978-0810131460. In Kafka and Wittgenstein, Rebecca Schuman argues that the search for what Kafka means is "sorely mistaken" (5). In fact, "the problems and illusions we portend to uncover, the important questions we attempt to answer—Is Josef K. guilty? If so, of what? What does Gregor Samsa's transformed body mean? Is Land Surveyor K. a real land surveyor or not?—themselves presuppose a bigger delusion: that such questions can be asked in the first place" (5). This exposure of the bigger delusion hiding behind the smaller, more obvious one, and of questions that cannot be asked, is a common thread Schuman finds in the works of Kafka and Wittgenstein—the unusual pairing that structures this book. By reading the two alongside each other and breaking down the usual divide between analytic philosophy and literature, Schuman argues that, "Kafka undermines several pretenses about prose narration in much the same way Wittgenstein undermines the pretense of philosophical progress" (11). In doing so, Schuman makes a convincing case for a new way of thinking about modernism that brings together arguably the most important philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century with the most important literary author of that same time period to show that "logical modernism belongs with modernist studies" (39). If one has a strong aversion to the likes of symbolic logic, it will be hard to muster the openness needed to follow Schuman's lead, and yet, she offers ways of reading Kafka that are strikingly new and worth considering, opening up unseen paths to follow from the very points at which studies of his work have been treading the same ground over and over, for example, pondering the question of whether Josef K. is guilty. The book is divided into two main sections, each with its own theme. The first focuses on logical modernism, bringing the early Wittgenstein's philosophy on the logical analysis of language in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1918) together with Kafka's earlier works: The Trial (1925), "The Metamorphosis" (1915), and "The Judgment" (1913). The second moves to the later Wittgenstein of the [End Page 657] Investigations (1953) and Kafka's The Castle (1926), "In the Penal Colony" (1919), and his last story, "Josefine the Singer" (1924), to focus on the theme of analytic skepticism. As the book's subtitle suggests, Schuman wants to offer up for thought the idea of an analytic modernism, or "a literary modernism that shares the ideology—intentionally or not—of the early analytic tradition in philosophy" (6). For those not familiar with Wittgenstein's philosophy, the book will be at times a tough read—Wittgenstein's writings are notoriously difficult—but Schuman presents helpful synopses of his ideas at various points in the book for newcomers to his work. Schuman's own excitement about the ways in which Wittgenstein's complex ideas find their parallels in Kafka's literary works propels the reader to continue: for example, she writes, "I have found that three of Kafka's most famous stories … do nothing less than dramatize Wittgenstein's most important findings about logic and language on the fictional plane, in a fictional reality, with fictional facts" (37). Schuman sums up her accomplishment in the book as "six works, six questions, and six ways that Wittgenstein has helped us to see that [these questions] cannot actually be asked" (194). Really? Thankfully Schuman herself poses the question one might ask after reading such a summary at the end of a dense book: "what has been the point of such an exploration for Kafka studies?" (194). To show that the questions readers and scholars have been asking about Kafka's stories and novels for several decades cannot actually be asked leaves the reader standing as if at the checkout counter with nothing in one's basket, despite having spent hours in the store, poring over goods and prices, analyzing cost-per...

The Birth of Theater from the Spirit of Philosophy: Nietzsche and the Modern Drama by David Kornhaber

Reviewed by: The Birth of Theater from the Spirit of Philosophy: Nietzsche and the Modern Drama by David Kornhaber Mary Ann Frese Witt David Kornhaber, The Birth of Theater from the Spirit of Philosophy: Nietzsche and the Modern Drama Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2016. In this well-written and original book, David Kornhaber correctly maintains that Nietzsche's interest in drama and theater has until recently been neglected by scholars. Even most of those who acknowledge an influence of Nietzsche on modern drama tend to see it as philosophical rather than theatrical. Rarely is The Birth of Tragedy read as a text about theater. Kornhaber, highlighting the convergence of philosophy and theater, examines in the first half of the book Nietzsche's profound interest in and debt to drama and theater from The Birth of Tragedy through The Case of Wagner. In the second half, he reads the work of three modern dramatists—Strindberg, Shaw, and O'Neill—in the light of their reception of Nietzsche's theories of the theater. In his thorough and well-informed interpretation of The Birth of Tragedy, along with other early writings by Nietzsche, Kornhaber convincingly demonstrates the young philologist's passionate interest in both drama and performance. Not only did Nietzsche read the classical German drama and theories of theater by Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing, he attended the theater frequently and wrote numerous theater [End Page 371] reviews himself. In The Birth, the actor embodies the Dionysian and the dramatic poet the Apollonian. Drama cannot be separated from performance: both are necessary to the spirit of tragedy. For Kornhaber, "the first tragic philosopher," as Nietzsche called himself, might today be designated a performance theorist. His view of tragedy is also philosophical in that in performance genuine tragedy points toward metaphysical truths that cannot be shown in mere words. Nietzsche's story of the birth of tragedy is also to a large extent concerned with tragedy's demise. Socrates's rationality and Euripides's emphasis on page over stage abandon the Dionysian and thus the crucial metaphysical component of tragedy. In calling for a "music-making Socrates," Nietzsche is also calling for a rebirth of tragedy in Europe in his own time. As is well-known, in 1876 he saw Richard Wagner's opera as hailing this rebirth, only to completely reverse himself a decade later. "I am essentially anti-theatrical," he wrote in The Gay Science in 1887. "I regard the theatre with deep contempt." In The Case of Wagner, Wagner's music-drama appears as a spectacle for the masses. And yet, Kornhaber convincingly argues, Nietzsche's proclaimed anti-theatricality does not signify an abandonment of his essential positions in The Birth. Anti-theatricality, as Martin Puchner has shown, can in fact open the way for a new kind of theater. To a certain extent, Nietzsche considered himself (inspired by Bizet rather than Wagner) as a music-making Socrates, particularly in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Although he disparaged the plays being produced on European stages, he continued to hope for a birth of the modern theater he had envisioned. To what extent did the modern drama by playwrights aware of Nietzsche's writing on theater fulfill his hope for a rebirth of tragedy? The question is probably unanswerable. In his introduction, Kornhaber attempts a very brief survey of modern dramatists under the impact of Nietzsche, mentioning Ibsen, Yeats, Pirandello, and Genet. A broader and more exact survey would have been helpful. There is little to suggest that Pirandello was well-acquainted with Nietzsche's works or wanted to write modern tragedy in a Nietzschean vein. His contemporary Gabriele D'Annunzio, however, read Nietzsche extensively and explicitly attempted to introduce in his own modern tragedies a rebirth of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Genet was indeed a great admirer of Nietzsche, but the most important French man of the theater to mention would be Antonin Artaud, whom Kornhaber discusses in his Epilogue. Whereas there is no explicit justification for the choice to focus on Strindberg, Shaw, and O'Neill, the chapters on each of them are revealing in that they trace what each dramatist found in reading Nietzsche and how their plays incorporate...

Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present by Kirk Wetters

Kirk Wetters. Demonic History: From to the Present. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. 253 pp.Disciples of the demonic will know that Kirk Wetters's book is not the only recent study of this notoriously slippery topic: Angus Nicholls's monograph Goethe's Concept of the Demonic: After the Ancients (Camden House, 2006) investigated its ancient roots in Platonic philosophy and traced its development in the poetics of the Sturm und Drang and Romanticism. The title of Wetters's new Demonic History: From to the Present, could give the impression that he has written a study that commences where Nicholls leftoff. This could not be further from the truth, for as Wetters convincingly argues, das Damonische is not a concept, and it does not, strictly speaking, have a history that predates Goethe. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg's Arbeit am Mythos, Wetters describes it as a stand-in for variable unknowns and . . . for the unknown (8). The demonic is a meta-metaphor whose history can be aligned with modernity alone. While Wetters dispenses with the significance of Socratic daemons for Goethe's demonic, the virtue of his reading, ironically enough, is its Socratic stance: he refuses to claim a unified theory for a principle that amounts to something of a conceptual black hole, yet in the course of discussing that which by its own definition is unknowable, he generates a remarkably illuminating account of it. Wetters achieves this via painstaking readings in which he upholds his promise to allow the individual moments of the presentation to exist simultaneously, paratactically, each with its own implications, none definitively reducible to the others (5). This makes for difficult but rewarding reading.Wetters charts metamorphoses of the demonic in chapters on Spengler, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Doderer, and though he claims not to have written a Goethe book, he begins the volume with three dazzling chapters on that are invaluable for understanding the later history. These include a terrifically productive reading of Orphisch, which, as he goes on to show, constitutes a paradigmatic but not exclusive rubric for conceiving the demonic in Goethe's oeuvre (he includes a translation of Goethe's cycle and commentary in an appendix); a subsequent chapter on morphology, in which he uses his reading of Urworte to reveal fundamental linkages in Goethe's philosophies of science and religion; and, finally, a chapter on Dichtung und Wahrheit, in which he demonstrates the misprision (embodied by Gundolf's Goethe) of equating das Damonische with the Damon of Urworte and thereby exposes the fallacy of reading Goethe's autobiography as the fateful narrative of a great man coming inevitably into his own. No doubt these chapters will spur vigorous discussion among those for whom the demonic is an object of study, but they introduce such dynamic lines of inquiry into so many dimensions of Goethe, including the poetic, scientific, religious, and autobiographical, that they will undoubtedly prove fecund for scholars at large. …

The Inability to Love: Jews, Gender, and America in Recent German Literature by Agnes C. Mueller

Reviewed by: The Inability to Love: Jews, Gender, and America in Recent German Literature by Agnes C. Mueller Laura Deiulio The Inability to Love: Jews, Gender, and America in Recent German Literature. By Agnes C. Mueller. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Pp. viii + 178. Cloth $89.95. ISBN 978-0810130173. In The Inability to Love, Agnes C. Mueller examines the representations of Jews and of German memories of National Socialism in a range of fictional works published after the unification of East and West Germany. She deliberately selects novels and short stories that have achieved popularity or critical acclaim, arguing that they may represent attitudes held by a wide swath of the German readership. Mueller's analysis locates either a disturbing absence of Jewish characters in recent fiction, or else a depiction of Jewishness distorted by stereotypes. She diagnoses this situation as revealing, in her title formulation, an "inability to love" either the Jewish other or the German self (20). Of course, she builds here on the influential book by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn (1967). In each of four chapters, Mueller shows how, in works by first-, second-, and third-generation postwar writers, the inability to love is passed down from generation to generation because of an incapacity to come to terms with the past. The first chapter examines works from each generation of postwar writers: Günther Grass's Im Krebsgang (2002), Martin Walser's Tod eines Kritikers (2002), Bernhard Schlink's "Das Mädchen mit der Eidechse" (2000), and Tanja Dückers's Himmelskörper (2003). Mueller argues that Im Krebsgang and Tod eines Kritikers both revolve around symbolic murders of a Jewish male by a non-Jewish German male, interpreting these violent acts as representative of the absence of Jews in postwar German literature. She identifies a similar absence even in the younger writers' works. In Schlink's story, for instance, the only Jewish "character" is a figure in a painting that is later burned by the narrator. Likewise, Dückers's novel also emphasizes the plight of the narrator's grandparents at the expense of exploring the fate of victims [End Page 703] of the Holocaust. Mueller argues that the novel encompasses "a void of the memory of Jews so vast and intense that it leads not only to the erasure of the memory of the Jews … but it also propagates a filling of this void—with German memories" (44). Mueller builds on this insight in the remainder of her book, which explores tropes and stereotypes that distort the representation of Jewishness. She interrogates the gendered tropes of the belle Juive and the Jewish mother. In Schlink's story "Die Beschneidung" (2000), for instance, the American girlfriend of the narrator appears as a beautiful but unsettling seductress whom the German male ultimately fails to understand and love. Similarly, when reading Peter Schneider's Eduards Heimkehr (1999), Mueller offers an interpretation of Eduard's wife as a beautiful Jewish woman whose inability to orgasm threatens Eduard's confidence. In Julia Franck's Die Mittagsfrau (2007), Mueller argues that the figure of the Jewish mother appears "disturbing, negative, and deranged" (68). Rather than representing an excess of love, as in popular cultural stereotypes, Franck's mother figures suffer from an inability to love (68). The third chapter specifically examines representations of masculinity. In "Die Beschneidung" and in Susanne Riedel's Eine Frau aus Amerika (2003), Mueller argues that German, non-Jewish masculinity is threatened when confronted with the female, Jewish other. On the other hand, she finds that in Die Mittagsfrau and Katharina Hacker's Die Habenichtse (2006) Jewish men are depicted as different, emasculated, or absent. Such stereotypes displace the locus of suffering onto the German masculine subject, which accords with the absence of the Jewish experience that Mueller has identified. Finally, Mueller explores America as a space for the displaced other in recent novels. This chapter is thought provoking, but also a bit chaotic, as she links the nineteenth-century Karl May with postunification authors, while also mentioning numerous examples that challenge her argument. Mueller acknowledges that German cultural discourse contains conflicting images of America but strives to tease out how...

Goethe and Judaism: The Troubled Inheritance of Modern Literature by Karin Schutjer

Reviewed by: Goethe and Judaism: The Troubled Inheritance of Modern Literature by Karin Schutjer Jonathan M. Hess Karin Schutjer. Goethe and Judaism: The Troubled Inheritance of Modern Literature. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. 264 pp. Schutjer's monograph tackles a topic that has been a subject of debate for more than a century and puts forth a powerful, original, and sophisticated argument grounded in both careful, conscientious close readings of texts by Goethe [End Page 293] and a deep sense of historical context. Over the decades, numerous scholars have cataloged, categorized, and studied Goethe's various statements on Jews and Judaism, typically evaluating them in biographical terms to argue whether Goethe was anti-Semitic or philo-Semitic. Schutjer certainly integrates biographical approaches into her study, but she steers clear of the pitfalls of linking Goethe to later forms of anti- and philo-Semitism or studying Goethe in the shadow of the Holocaust. Indeed, her study is the antithesis of the sort of scholarship that cherry-picks statements to make a polemical case about Goethe's relation to Jews and Judaism. Schutjer studies the dynamic and systematic role that reflections on Judaism played in both Goethe's worldview and his massive literary oeuvre, laying bare the central role that Goethe's ideas about Judaism played in his work as a whole. Rather than simply indicting Goethe for his anti-Jewish views (he was, among other things, a clear opponent of Jewish emancipation) or seeking to acquit him of prejudice by stressing his long-standing interests in the Hebrew Bible, Schutjer explores how Goethe's conception of the modern world was inextricable from his conception of Judaism. The contradictory elements in his comments on Jews and Judaism, in other words, are certainly important in their own right, but they also shed light on major tensions in Goethe's own thinking more generally. Goethe finds in Judaism—or, rather, as Schutjer demonstrates, his own, at times idiosyncratic, understanding of Judaism—an attractive, distinctly modern posture toward the world that he deems more attractive than that of Christianity. Yet Goethe also engages in a struggle with Judaism precisely because he finds so much affinity with it, casting Judaism as an object of competition, a force that must be cleared from the playing field to make way for his own, Goethean vision of modernity. Approaching Goethe in this way, Schutjer is able to make sense of Goethe's pro-Jewish tendencies as well as the elements in his oeuvre that seem anti-Semitic, making clear how Goethe could oppose political emancipation for his Jewish contemporaries at the same time as he celebrated Judaism—particularly the Hebrew Bible—for a type of freedom and heterodoxy he contrasted with Christianity. Goethe found himself attracted to the Jewish ban on images for its opposition to dogmatic metaphysics; he discovered in the Hebrew scriptures a type of diasporic nationhood and peoplehood linked to a book rather than a state that he deemed particularly relevant for modern Germany; and perhaps more than anything else, he was fascinated by Judaism's activism and striving focused on the immanent, historical world. In this context, Schutjer does not just concern herself with Goethe's worldview. Her analysis cuts to the heart of Goethe's literary work, showing how all these elements of his fascination with Judaism come together in the topos of "wandering." Through exemplary discussions of major and minor works by Goethe, Schutjer demonstrates that Goethe's encounter with the Hebrew Bible, from his youth on, decisively shaped not just the topos of wandering but his entire literary program. This is a new and bold argument, and it is one that Schutjer formulates with eloquence and elegance. Her work is extremely well grounded in Goethe scholarship, as one would expect. It also draws on a deep familiarity with scholarship on the Hebrew Bible and biblical criticism as well as the text of the Bible itself. When Schutjer argues, for instance, that the peculiar form and texture of the Hebrew Bible, and Genesis in particular, provided an ongoing source of fascination and inspiration for Goethe's experimental literary style, she makes this claim with a deep literary appreciation of Goethe's work...

Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture by Sean Franzel

Reviewed by: Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture by Sean Franzel Ellwood Wiggins Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture. By Sean Franzel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Pp. 292. Paper $39.95. ISBN 978-0810129337. Lectures are cool again. After decades of detraction from opponents of passive learning and teacher-centered education, the lecture is experiencing a revival. Online tools, podcasting technology, and social media are allowing this authoritative, top-down mode to become a more interactive form of pedagogy. The revolution is everywhere: iTunes U allows millions to audit lecture courses from elite universities free of charge. Giving a TED Talk is a badge of success in any field. Anonymous student bloggers calling themselves the “Münkler-Watch” at the Humboldt University in Berlin have paralyzed a respected professor and created a public furor by posting what they consider objectionable comments from his classroom lectures. This rediscovered aura of the lecture hearkens back to the heyday of a similar media revolution around 1800, when the idea of education and the institution of the university were undergoing radical transformation. Sean Franzel’s book provides an insightful, engaging history of this important shift in the culture of knowledge, while always remaining critically alive to the implications for contemporary issues in media and pedagogy. It will be of high interest to historians, philosophers, and literary scholars. It tells its gripping tale in clear and accessible language that people outside the academy will appreciate. The book complements other valuable studies of the history of learning cultures, such as William Clark’s Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (2006), but in choosing to view this pivotal era through the lens of the lecture, Franzel’s monograph achieves a focus that more sprawling histories lack. This focus is by no means limiting, however, as the lecture proves to be a convergence point for the most pressing cultural and intellectual issues of romanticism. The well argued book consists of six case studies. The first three chapters outline the changing relation of scholar to the state in Kant, Karl Philip Moritz, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Chapters 4–6 then explore the “dialogic” ideal of lecturing in August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Adam Müller, and Fichte. Each of the chapters traces the development of four “inflationary concepts and/or metaphors [that] define the Romantic lecture as such” (9). These four themes distinguish the axis around 1800 from previous attitudes toward knowledge, and persist in some form today. 1) The cult of originality and the expectation that scholars should produce new knowledge were perhaps the most salient features of the era. 2) The desideratum for popularity was a particularly complex and fraught shift. Franzel convincingly ties this to an upheaval in the conceptions of public/private and shows how it imbricates and compromises the processes of national identity formation in Germany. 3) Franzel critiques the idealized metaphor of dialogue as an essential principle of the lecture. [End Page 183] 4) He also demonstrates how the ephemeral lectures were monumentalized in print and other material forms of memorialization with sometimes dire cultural and political consequences. The book’s first chapter lays out Kant’s surprising conceptions of public and private. The rest of the book shows how Kant’s romantic followers were largely responsible for our modern ideas of the dichotomy, which have become so entrenched that we now find Kant’s notions counterintuitive. For Kant, the private sphere refers to an individual’s personal duties to the state. Hence a university professor’s teaching syllabus and lecture schedule are functions of her private self. Her research agenda and publication of new knowledge, in contrast, are public concerns. Kant argued that the scholar should be entirely free and uncensored in her public person (after all, he reassured the Prussian king, the majority of people will have no desire to read or capacity to understand the technical and theoretical arguments of public discourse). In her private capacity as a teacher, however, the lecturer is bound by what the state prescribes to educate useful citizens. For this reason, Kant never disseminated his own...

Nabokov's Canon: From Onegin to Ada by Marijeta Bozovic

BOZOVIC, MARIJETA. Nabokov's Canon: From Onegin Ada. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016. 230 pp. $39.95 paperback; $39.95 e-book; $120.00 hardcover. This book rethinks Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor (1969) and annotated translation (1964) of Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1825-1832) as stages in the project promote a canon rivaling that codified by Anglophone modernists and their heirs among the New Critics. In the 1960s, Bozovic argues, the newly famous writer attempted redefine the legacy of transnational in alternative, continental and multi-lingual canon bringing together array of Anglophone, Russian, and French authors and positing the Russian novel as a central element of the resultant transnational canon. In the Onegin commentary, Bozovic claims, Nabokov identified transnational modernism--Chateaubriand, Byron, and Pushkin. Ada continued the project, locating the next cohort of (Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoy) and outlining the canon of modernist writing proper, centered on Proust and Joyce, whose artistic legacy Nabokov deemed resistant the test of time--a quality he also bestowed upon his own oeuvre, including himself in the canon as a natural heir all those and contemporaries, than the outsider figure any national (5). Bozovic begins by surveying Pushkin's novel with eye on perennial Russian anxiety about cultural centers and peripheries, especially when it comes Russian literature's belatedness and the concomitant fear of unoriginality and marginality. She proceeds by examining Nabokov's exegesis of Eugene Onegin as a masterpiece of appropriation and adaptation and a model for how make new out of old, advanced out of belated, and central out of marginal (12). The Onegin commentary constructs an international romantic tradition as the precursor [Nabokov's] particular style of modernism (48), mitigating his obsessive (in Bozovic's view) concern with cultural provincialism, and providing Nabokov with a weapon to wage his own cultural capital wars (43). The study then turns Ada as allegory about literary canons whose amalgamation of national traditions--Russian, English, and French--levels the literary playing field for emigre author threatened by cultural marginalization. For Bozovic, Ada's intertextuality subsumes the artistic legacies of Proust and Joyce, transformed here into signs visible elite community of readers-cum-carriers of superior cultural knowledge--a procedure reiterating the instrumentalization of Byron and Chateaubriand in Eugene Onegin, according Nabokov's exegesis. Bozovic then addresses Ada's treatment of modernist attitudes toward time, venturing that Nabokov parodies rather than perpetuates these attitudes. The last point allows the scholar claim that Ada not a late modernist monument at all but a novel about modernism that underscores the distance between its author and his literary precursors (158). In the coda her study, Bozovic ventures that Nabokov's canon-formation project became his most important legacy for a number of writers inspired by his work--Azar Nafisi, Orhan Pamuk, J. M. Coetzee, and W. G. Sebald (165). These authors, Bozovic insists, saw in Nabokov's project emancipatory elements for their own self-fashioning as transnational writers. Unfortunately, she does not take this claim much farther, since the ensuing cursory survey of Nabokov's putative children lacks in analytical depth, appearing more as afterthought the main body of the monograph than its logical culmination. Bozovic's thought-provoking take on Nabokov's late writings at the intersection of several literary and cultural studies fields will undoubtedly prod Nabokov scholars and lay readers alike revisit their oft-dismissive attitudes toward the post-Pale Fire stage in the author's career. Hers is a productive and intellectually stimulating first step toward such a revision. …

Lush

Lush Jonathan Moody (bio) On the rooftop of our hotel, purple stage lighting is a cocktail convincing Madrid’s night sky to use the crescent moon as a strap-on. & coming out of the speakers is Prince’s edgy voice: so spiritual & seductive in its yearning that the sweat emerging on my glass volunteers to chaperone. But it’s oblivious to Madrid’s night sky: the way she dances close & slow with a dove; the way she savors flight’s tangy aftertaste. Shadé kisses me, & I’m paranoid her mouth hears my fantasy; let’s just say it involves plenty of sugar & a hot-air balloon. My hand on Shadé’s waist is an invitation for her sundress to take a hike & buy the owner of this ultra-chic rooftop bar a drink. His wife, Cindy Crawford, was Prince’s muse for the song, giving this cosmopolitan crowd eargasms— a song he wrote after he & Cindy moved & grooved on a dancefloor. He sings about how Cindy’s furrymelting little thing awaits him & his six-string, & I’m convinced no woman should know what a man thinks while they’re dancing unless that man is Prince, who, even after his death, makes the Madrid night sky feel comfortable with taking charge of her sexuality. In Memoriam: Prince (1958–2016) [End Page 325] Jonathan Moody Jonathan Moody is the author of Olympic Butter Gold, winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize. He lives in Fresno, Texas, with his wife and son. Copyright © 2017 Jonathan Moody

The pirate in the pump: children's views of objects as imaginary friends at the start of school

ABSTRACTThe main aim of this paper is to use a phenomenological approach (Merleau-Ponty, 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Merleau-Ponty. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Evanston: Northern University Press) to contribute a new theoretical understanding of what imaginary friends mean for children in the context of starting school. The paper addresses the specific area of ‘object-friends’ and draws on examples from an empirical and consultative study of a small sample of five and six-year-old children’s everyday experiences of friendship in school. The paper argues that if practitioners consider embodiment approaches and listen attentively to the knowledge and information that children share about their imaginary friends, this could be used to nurture children’s early learning.

Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: A Biography by Elizabeth Maslen

Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: Biography, by Elizabeth Maslen. Northwestern University Press, 2014. 556 pages. After decades of neglect, at best making cameo appearances in lists of little-read writers of the or as a star in recovery scholarship, Storm Jameson might well be on the cusp of a true revival. As part of Northwestern University Press's series Cultural Expressions of II, the second major biography of this always engaging, never flawless, luminary of twentieth-century British letters and political activism may hopefully accelerate a growing wave of critical evaluation to match the historical interest. Jameson was a vital part of world historical events of the 1930s and 1940s, working diligently through the interwar years in the peace movement and serving as a Sponsor in the Peace Pledge Union. In the years leading up to the Second War, she began assisting political refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe, the most famous of these being Czeslaw Milosz, who would be a friend to the end of her life. During the war, Jameson was elected president of PEN, the international organization of writers that, under her leadership, changed from being avowedly apolitical to becoming directly engaged with advocating for social justice against fascist regimes. It was at her behest that PEN would publish An Appeal to the Conscience of the World (1940), urging allied countries and all PEN centers to fight for universal free speech. And it was as PEN's president, though not officially speaking on its behalf, that she would publish her pamphlet End of This War (1941), the document that announced her formal break with the absolute pacifism that was crucial to her activist politics after the Great War. This impressive resume of political activity during a much studied time in European history might have been enough to merit biographical scrutiny, but Jameson was first and foremost a writer, the staggeringly prolific author or editor of seventy books of fiction, criticism, drama, politics, and memoir. Her productivity was spurred along partly by financial need, but unlike other highly productive writers--Georgette Heyer, say, or Jameson's much admired Georges Simenon--she never quite managed to make formulaic genre fiction a forte. Her letters often show a desire to have either more time to spend on a big serious novel or the capacity to crank out hack work that could readily sell. She would have neither. Reading Maslen's biography, one finds a lifelong saga of mixed reviews that fail to fully comprehend the complex, formally experimental, politically engaged fiction that it seems Jameson could not help but write. She also never seemed to be a truly rapid writer, revising heavily and spending fourteen-hour days with her fiction as well as her political activities, along with, as Maslen notes, keeping house for her husband and son. All of Jameson's Yorkshire-bred hardiness and work ethic combines with a distinct challenge for any biographer--the thicket of harsh self-criticism that pervades her letters and her monumental autobiography Journey from the North (published in Britain in two volumes, 1969-1970). Maslen is an adept reader of Jameson's writings, both the published works and the archival materials, and throughout her biography there are signs of the combative approach Maslen takes to her subject, a necessary measure it one does not wish to accept Jameson's nearly constant self-deprecation as fact. For instance, her novel That Was Yesterday (1932), which she sometimes regarded as her first mature work, begins with this disclaimer on the copyright page: A few sentences in this book, chiefly conversational, have been lifted with slight alterations from an earlier novel of the writer's. This earlier book was fortunately not much read: even more fortunately it was printed on quickly perishable paper. The pity is that it was printed at all. This, one thinks, would not inspire confidence in the prospective reader. …

Armed Ambiguity: Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe. By Julie Koser. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2016. x + 250 pages. $99.00 hardcover, $34.95 paperback.

Armed Ambiguity: Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe. By Julie Koser. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2016. x + 250 pages. $99.00 hardcover, $34.95 paperback.

Goethe and Judaism: The Troubled Inheritance of Modern Literature. By Karin Schutjer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. xiii + 245 pages + 5 b/w illustrations. $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback.

Goethe and Judaism: The Troubled Inheritance of Modern Literature. By Karin Schutjer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. xiii + 245 pages + 5 b/w illustrations. $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback.

Komaromi, Ann Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence (review)

SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 734 Aleksei Semenenko’s concluding summary outlines Aksenov’s role as a prominent, synthetically- (if not synaesthetically-) bound cultural persona of specific prominence deserving of further study. The volume’s successful mixture of Romantic, baroque and avant-garde perspectives offers the precise creative model that is typologically relevant for analysing Ivan Aksenov’s cultural output in all its splendid complexity. University of Ghent Dennis G. Ioffe Komaromi, Ann. Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2015. x + 254 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95 (paperback). This is an exceptionally stimulating monograph which sheds much new light on the role and significance of tamizdat and samizdat in what turned out to be the last two decades of the USSR. The author bases her discussion on three major works of prose fiction written or completed in the aftermath of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia (this had a much greater impact on Russian writing that the brutal 1956 crushing of the Hungarian Revolution): Vasilii Aksenov’s Ozhog (1969–75), Andrei Bitov’s Pushkinskii dom (1964–71) and Veniamin Erofeev’s Moskva-Petushki (probably 1969). All three works, first published abroad and fairly quickly translated into English and other languages, were finally published in the USSR shortly before it collapsed. As Ann Komaromi reminds us, post-Stalin dissidence gradually developed from ‘Cultural Opposition’ into ‘Political Opposition’ (p. 133) — perhaps, one could add, reflecting the difference between the dissenters (like the three writers mentioned above, who strove for professional autonomy) and the dissidents. Like, for instance, Pasternak and Siniavskii, most of the literary dissenters (and many other Soviet citizens) had ‘stylistic differences’ with the Communist regime, but were not very anxious to participate in political activities and ‘merely’ wanted to engage in their chosen profession. This distinguishes them from dissidents like Vladimir Bukovskii, who can be (and has been) described both as a ‘Soviet dissident’ and as an ‘anti-Soviet dissident’. Much depends on how we define homo sovieticus, bearing in mind that in the USSR the sovety had less influence and power than councils in many other countries than the organs of the CPSU. Of course, some of the most active dissenters, such as Natal´ia Gorbanevskaia, whose consciences forced them to become dissidents, also had no wish to become politicians — they ‘merely’ wanted to help to ‘convert’ the USSR into a more tolerant, liberal and democratic country, giving up on its imperialistic and messianic ambitions. REVIEWS 735 The three authors to whom much of this book is devoted were (in one case he still is) more concerned about the parlous state of Russian society than about any attempt to replace those who rule over it. ‘Bitov [b. 1937], like Aksenov, directed his critique at his generation and people around him in Soviet society at least as much as he indicted the regime’ (p. 73). Komaromi quotes Lidiia Ginzburg as summarizing the main characteristics of the previous generation to Bitov’s as ‘accommodation, justification, and indifference’ (p. 78), apparently inherited by many or most of Bitov’s coevals. Perhaps only ‘a change of consciousness could furnish the building blocks of a new society’ (p.22). The USSR’s official philosophy and ideology were based on a very dogmatic atheism. The after-effects of this are only too apparent in today’s Russian society, which in some ways is more neo-Soviet than post-Soviet. Komaromi periodically touches on this, but one aspect of the juvenile nature of Soviet society which she might have said more about is the predilection for referring to the protagonists of the three novels (if Moskva-Petushki is best considered as a novel) by diminutives of their first names — Tolia (Toliachka) Von Shteinbok, L´eva Odoevtsev and Venichka (Venia) Erofeev. Naturally, diminutives are often used in the literature and life of other countries, and the current President of Russia is often called disrespectfully by one or another familiar version of his given name, but I think there is something significant behind Aksenov’s, Bitov’s and Erofeev’s use of this device. These characters are men who have...

Sociability and Its Enemies: German Political Theory After 1945.By Jakob Norberg. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. 240 pages. $80.00 hardcover, $39.95 paperback.

<b>Sociability and Its Enemies: German Political Theory After 1945.</b><i>By Jakob Norberg. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. 240 pages. $80.00 hardcover, $39.95 paperback.</i>

Poetry As a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century.By Gabriel Trop. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. xii+388 pages. $89.95.

<b>Poetry As a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century.</b><i>By Gabriel Trop. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. xii</i>+<i>388 pages. $89.95.</i>

Muslims in Kenyan Politics: Political Involvement, Marginalization, and Minority Status. By Hassan J. Ndzovu. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. 232p. $79.95 cloth.

Muslims in Kenyan Politics: Political Involvement, Marginalization, and Minority Status. By Hassan J. Ndzovu. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. 232p. $79.95 cloth.