Ritchie Robertson

Mock-epic poetry from Pope to Heine

Abbreviations Introduction 1. Epic: a genre in stasis? 2. Elements of mock epic 3. Popes Dunciad and its Successors 4. Voltaires La Pucelle 5. The Fairy Way of Writing: Wieland 6. Mock Epic Domesticated: Goethes Herrmann und Dorothea 7. Puritans into Revolutionaries: Butlers Hudibras and Ratschkys Melchior Striegel 8. Heroes in their Underclothes: Blumauers travesty of the Aeneid 9. Wars in Heaven: Parnys La Guerre des Dieux 10. Byrons Don Juan 11. The Last Mock Epic? Heines Atta Troll 12. Epilogue Select Bibliography

W. G. Sebald as a critic of Austrian literature

Rejecting the conservative study of German literature that he encountered as a student, Sebald found inspiration in Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School. He re-reads Austrian literature as an expression not of conservative attachment to a home, but of displacement from any home. He also explores the instabilities of the bourgeois age as revealed in fiction by Sealsfield, Stifter, Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, and places their narratives within a wider history of colonial exploitation and ecological destruction. He then argues that the dislocation of language by schizophrenics like the poet Ernst Herbeck discloses a primitive substratum prior to the estrangement from nature and subjection to the administration of modernity. Reflections, especially Kafka’s, on the death of the individual, humanity and ultimately the universe itself, lead Sebald to empathize with the messianic images found in Benjamin and other Austrian writers.

A history of Austrian literature 1918-2000

20th-century Austrian literature boasts many outstanding writers: Schnitzler, Musil, Rilke, Kraus, Celan, Canetti, Bernhard, Jelinek. These and others feature in broader accounts of German literature, but it is desirable to see how the Austrian literary scene -- and Austrian society itself -- shaped their writing. This volume thus surveys Austrian writers of drama, prose fiction, and lyric poetry; relates them to the distinctive history of modern Austria, a democratic republic that was overtaken by civil war and authoritarian rule, absorbed into Nazi Germany, and re-established as a neutral state; and examines their response to controversial events such as the collusion with Nazism, the Waldheim affair, and the rise of Haider and the extreme right. In addition to confronting controversy in the relations between literature, history, and politics, the volume examines popular culture in line with current trends. Contributors: Judith Beniston, Janet Stewart, Andrew Barker, Murray Hall, Anthony Bushell, Dagmar Lorenz, Juliane Vogel, Jonathan Long, Joseph McVeigh, Allyson Fiddler. Katrin Kohl is Lecturer in German and a Fellow of Jesus College, and Ritchie Robertson is Taylor Professor of German and a Fellow of The Queens College, both at the University of Oxford.

Reflections of Realism: Paradox, Norm, and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century German Prose

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Myth vs. Enlightenment in Kafka's Das Schloß

Das Schloß shows many of the features commonly considered characteristic of “late style,” such as a distance from conventional narrative methods, a reliance on enigmatic forms of expression, and a prominence given to symbolic objects such as the castle of the title. However, the kind of myth-criticism that flourished in North America from roughly the 1940s to the 1960s has not produced very convincing results when applied to this text. Myth is present in Das Schloß rather as the mythic consciousness possessed by the villagers but questioned by the aggressively rational K. The novel as a whole, however, is not a rationalistic attack on religion: rather, it shows the villagers engaging in a range of religious practices and acknowledges a lingering desire for transcendence which, however, has now to be satisfied within, not beyond, everyday life. (RR)

‘Jewish Self-Hatred’? The Cases of Schnitzler and Canetti

The concept of ‘Jewish self-hatred’ is controversial: hence the quotation marks and question mark in my title. If there is such a thing, however, its locus classicus must be the chapter ‘Das Judentum’ in Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903). Admittedly Weininger claims to be describing a spiritual tendency of which Jews furnish only the most dramatic illustration. This distinguishes his approach from that of Theodor Lessing, whose famous book Der judische Selbsthaβ (Jewish Self-Hatred, 1930) takes for granted that Jewishness, and consequently a propensity to self-hatred, are innate. Weininger undermines his claim, however, by the famous footnote acknowledging his own Jewish ancestry: if he were really describing a spiritual tendency, his own Jewish origins would be logically irrelevant. He undermines his claim further by trotting out many familiar anti-Semitic stereotypes. Jews are materialistic: they constantly seek to acquire movable property; they are attracted to scientific doctrines of materialism. They are not wicked but amoral, as incapable of morality as they are of nobility. There cannot be a Jewish ‘gentleman’, says Weininger, using the English word,1 although soon afterwards he describes how much the shallow and materialistic English resemble the Jews. Jews have no character. They alternate between arrogance and obsequiousness. Indeed they have no self: a gathering of Jews is not a collection of individuals but ‘a single connected plasma spreading over a wide surface’ (p. 415); this image anticipates Nazi propaganda by representing the Jews as a non-human, alien growth.

The Rural Enlightenment of Johann Heinrich Voss

Abstract Statements by Heine and Goethe show that they considered Voss a highly significant figure for German culture, as a model citizen and as an interpreter of Greek literature. In his socially critical idylls, Voss brought a new realism and a concern for liberty into German rural poetry, continued in his satire ‘Junker Kord’. Having produced much-admired translations of Homer, he adapted Homeric diction in his idyllic mock-epic Luise to depict harmonious domestic and social relations, in a way that deserves to be defended against imputations of Philistinism. Much later, he polemicized against the conversion to Catholicism of his old acquaintance Friedrich von Stolberg in a text that, though highly eccentric, attests his independence of mind.

“The Past is a Foreign Country:” Constructions of History in Novels by Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Döblin, and Arnold Zweig

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” This opening sentence from L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1953) has become almost proverbial as an expression of the difference between the past and the present. That difference can be felt not only in the memories of an individual, like the narrator of Hartley’s novel as he recalls a traumatic experience from his boyhood, but also in the history of a society. The relation between a society’s past and its present, however, may sometimes be felt as continuity, sometimes as involving a break or breach, and in the latter case the alterity of the past can appear as a disconcerting estrangement. Such an estrangement from the past was widely felt after the caesura represented by the First World War. In its aftermath, and after the collapse of European empires that only a few years previously had seemed unshakeable, traditional constructions of history invited scepticism (Midgley 2000, 141–146). Grand narratives of progress appeared to have been brutally falsified by events. There was more appeal in doctrines which saw history as a meaningless process without direction, or, at best, a cyclical process in which states rose and fell. Oswald Spengler in Der Untergang des Abendlandes [The Decline of the West] (1919, 1922) interpreted history in biological terms, describing the growth, flourishing, withering, and death of civilizations. During the War itself, Theodor Lessing published Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen (1916), putting forward the Nietzschean argument that meaning is imposed retrospectively in order to console oneself for the damage done by history by constructing pseudo-explanations. He repudiates all ideas of development, teleology, and progress. The meaningless ebb and flow of combat, and the senseless destruction it wreaks, seem to him typical of the historical process:

Raabe und Shakespeare

In Großbritannien erzählt man noch heute eine Anekdote von einem König, vielleicht Georg dem Dritten, der einer Aufführung von Hamlet beigewohnt and darüber gestaunt haben soll, dass der Text so voller Zitate sei. Dass die Literatur ihrer Natur nach auf frühere Literatur und daher auf Zitate angewiesen ist, wissen wir schon seit jeher. In der letzten Zeit hat der Poststrukturalismus sogar verkündet, dass der literarische Text ein Gewebe aus lauter Zitaten sei. Wie es nichts Neues unter der Sonne gibt, so ist schon vor fast zwei Jahrhunderten eine ähnliche Meinung geäußert worden, und zwar von dem englischen Romantiker Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Laut Coleridge hat die Dichtkunst seit Homer fast alle möglichen Gedanken und Gedankenverbindungen (also Metaphern) schon unzählige Male variiert und abgewandelt, so dass die Möglichkeit kaum mehr besteht, überhaupt etwas zu dichten, ohne unwillkürlich frühere Dichter zu wiederholen. Darum sei die Dichtung heute äußerst schwer, eben weil sie so leicht geworden sei:

CHILDHOOD’S END: THE EARLY POETRY OF FRANZ WERFEL (1890–1945)

Abstract Although Kurt Pinthus’s anthology of Expressionist poetry, ‘Menschheitsdämmerung’, draws heavily on Werfel’s later hymnic and ecstatic poems, those that first aroused the admiration of contemporaries were comparatively low-key, often charming evocations of everyday life, especially of childhood. These poems were admired, and some published, by Karl Kraus, but Werfel’s subsequent development towards hymnic verse struck Kraus as bombastic and led him to criticize Werfel through parody.