Christoph Bode

Crossing and Re-crossing Borders: The Ethical Aporia of Anomy in Wordsworth’s The Borderers

Abstract This article offers the sketch of a re-reading of William Wordsworth’s drama The Borderers (composed 1796-1799, published 1842), which at the same time opens up new vistas for discussions of the more general topic of the dialectics of transgression and affirmation, of deviance and defiance. Drawing upon the sociological concept of anomy as well as on recent developments in theory (Luhmann, Foucault, Derrida), this article focuses on The Borderers as a radically self-reflexive dramatic text that thematises and negotiates the modern dilemma, or ethical aporia, of individual conscience in a functionally differentiated society.

Unfit for an English Stage? Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows and Kotzebue’s Das Kind der Liebe

This article discusses the major differences between Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows and August von Kotzebue’s Das Kind der Liebe in order to assess in a comparative way what exactly it was that made Kotzebue’s original play, to Inchbald’s mind, so “unfit for an English stage.” The essay focuses on the dramatic differences and tries to assess in how far they can be read as signs of other differences, differences of a cultural, political, or ideological kind.

‘Imaginary circles round the human mind’: Bias and Openness in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)

Christoph Bode offers a fresh reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), one of the most celebrated and best-known British romantic-period engagements with Scandinavia. Bode focuses on the generic tension in Letters between an attempt to provide credible witness to Scandinavia and the attempt to forge a ‘romantic’ persona. Wollstonecraft’s narrative, Bode concludes, involves less a description than an aesthetics of appropriation, an aesthetics which marks Wollstonecraft’s Letters as surprisingly and distinctly unrepresentative of the larger cultural patterns of exchange which we discern in this volume.

Anglia 1933-45

Abstract Surveying the 11 volumes of Anglia published under Nazi rule, this article investigates in how far this scholarly journal of international renown was politically compromised during that period and to what degree it could steer clear of pro-Nazi ideology or could even incorporate potentially subversive tendencies. The picture that emerges is far more differentiated than former general assessments suggest, but it also raises disturbing questions about continuities and discontinuities in our discipline.

Neuere Publikationen zur Rock-Lyrik und Rock-Musik

Am 16. Mai 1980 erschien im Times Literary Supplement unter der Uberschrift “The Soft Generation” eine Rezension, deren erster Satz bereits einen gnadenlosen Verris ahnen lies: “There is a form of pop writing which mistakes poor grammar for astounding insight.” Der Rezensent, Craig Brown, hatte sich David Pichaskes A Generation in Motion: Popular Music and Culture in the Sixties (New York: Schirmer Books, 1979) vorgenommen — ein Buch, uber dessen Ziel, Anlage und Inhalt man allerdings in Browns Besprechung nur wenig erfahrt, weil es ihm offenbar vordringlich scheint, den Autor personlich zu diffamieren: “It is written by David Pichaske who, we learn, has worked as a librarian, camp counsellor, garbage collector, factory worker, government bureaucrat, civil rights volunteer, church organist and teacher. Frighteningly, he is now Associate Professor of English at Bradley University. He is the author of Beowulf to Beatles: Approaches to Poetry. Hard as it is to believe, he has also written a book called Writing Sense.” So wird der Leser, ohne das sich der Rezensent auch nur den Anschein gibt, objektiv vorgehen zu wollen, plump darauf vorbereitet, das das besprochene Werk — “an apologia for the hippies”, wie es Brown kurzerhand nennt — gar keine ernstzunehmende Studie sein kann: “A Generation in Motion is nonsense: gullible, pretentious and ugly to read. Nevertheless, as a case history of the ideas of one who inherits the worst characteristics of a culture, it is not without interest.”