Stanley Corngold

The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory

Much recent critical theory has dismissed or failed to take seriously the question of the self. French theorists-such as Derrida, Barthes, Benveniste, Foucault, Lacan, and Levi-Strauss-have in various ways proclaimed the death of the subject, often turning to German intellectual tradition to authorize their views. Stanley Corngolds heralded book, The Fate of the Self, published for the first time in paperback with a spirited new preface, appears at a time when the relationship between the self and literature is a matter of renewed concern. Originally published in 1986 (Columbia University Press), the book examines the poetic self of German intellectual tradition in light of recent French and American critical theory. Focusing on seven major German writers-Holderlin, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Mann, Kafka, Freud, and Heidegger-Corngold shows that their work does not support the desire to discredit the self as an origin of meaning and value but reconstructs the allegedly fragmented poetic self through effects of position and style. Offering new and subtle models of selfhood, The Fate of the Self is a source of rich insight into the work of these authors, refracted through poststructuralist critical perspectives.

Special Views on Kafka’s Cages

Germany, as the sublime commonplace has it, is “das Volk der Dichter und Denker” (the people of poets and thinkers). The Austrian writer and publicist Karl Kraus twisted the stereotype ferociously as “das Volk der Richter und Henker” (the people of judges and hangmen).2 You find this thrust in Kraus’s Spruche und Widerspruche (Dicta and contradictions), which the English translator elaborates as “The Germans. ‘Nation of bards and sages’? Cremation and bars and cages!”3

On Translation Mistakes, with Special Attention to Kafka in Amerika

›Translation‹ refers to a relation between two texts, and the history of translation theory to the continually adjusted redescription of this relation. Because texts mediate intricately associated worlds or fates or languages, accounts of translation may focus instead on the relation of worlds or fates or languages brought on by the shock of juxtaposition. Thus Walter Benjamin’s startling essay Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers disrupts the two-text model in describing translation as a relation between two languages, the goal of which is to bring to light a third language — »reine Sprache«. In this enterprise the translator’s task is least of all the salvaging of an original meaning through precise communication (»genaue Mitteilung«), for alle Mitteilung, aller Sinn, und alle Intention [trifft] endlich auf eine Schicht, in der sie zu erloschen bestimmt sind. Und eben aus ihr bestatigt sich die Freiheit der Ubersetzung zu einem neuen und hohern Rechte. Nicht aus dem Sinn der Mitteilung, von welchem zu emanzipieren gerade die Aufgabe der Treue ist, hat sie ihren Bestand.2

Potential violence in Paul De Man

PAUL DE MAN: DECONSTRUCTION AND THE CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY by Christopher Norris New York: Routledge, 1988. 218pp.

Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka

12.95 (paper)