German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene (eBook)

Caroline Schaumann, Heather I. Sullivan (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: PDF

2017 | 1st ed. 2017
XI, 348 Seiten
Palgrave Macmillan US (Verlag)
978-1-137-54222-9 (ISBN)

Infos

This book offers essays on both canonical and non-canonical German-language texts and films, advancing ecocritical models for German Studies, and introducing environmental issues in German literature and film to a broader audience. This volume contextualizes the broad-ranging topics and authors in terms of the Anthropocene, beginning with Goethe and the Romantics and extending into twenty-first-century literature and film. Addressing the growing need for environmental awareness in an international humanities curriculum, this book complements ecocritical analyses emerging from North American and British studies with a specifically German Studies perspective, opening the door to a transnational understanding of how the environment plays an integral role in cultural, political, and economic issues.

Caroline Schaumann is Associate Professor of German Studies at Emory University, USA. She is the author of Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany's Nazi Past in Recent Women's Literature and co-editor of Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to Twenty-First Century.

 

Heather I. Sullivan is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Trinity University, Texas, USA. She co-edited The Early History of Embodied Cognition, has been a contributing editor to publications such as New German Critique, Colloquia Germanica, and ISLE, and is author of The Intercontextuality of Self and Nature in Ludwig Tieck's Early Works.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments 6
Contents 7
List of Figures 10
Preface: The Anthropocene and the Challenge of Cultural Difference 11
Note 16
Works Cited 16
Introduction 17
Notes 29
Works Cited 30
Part I: Ecological Systems and Place in the Anthropocene 32
The Dark Pastoral: A Trope for the Anthropocene 33
Notes 49
Works Cited 49
Goethe’s Faust and the Ecolinguistics of < Here>
The Ecolinguistics of Here 55
Here Is a Good Place to Be 58
The Accursed Here 62
Homunculus and the “All-Here” 68
Notes 71
Works Cited 71
Adalbert Stifter’s Alternative Anthropocene: Reimagining Social Nature in Brigitta and Abdias 73
The Conquest of Nature as Utopia in Brigitta 77
In a World of Sight and Blindness: Abdias 84
Conclusion 88
Notes 89
Works Cited 91
The Senses of Slovenia: Peter Handke, Stanley Cavell, and the Environmental Ethics of Repetition 94
Coming to the Senses1 94
Acceptance 98
Rescue of Language 104
Neighboring 107
The Creation of the World 109
Notes 111
Works Cited 113
Part II: Vibrant Matter: Rocks, Mines, Air, and Food 116
“Mines aren’t really like that”: German Romantic Undergrounds Revisited 117
Notes 132
Works Cited 132
(Bad) Air and (Faulty) Inspiration: Elemental and Environmental Influences on Fontane 135
Notes 147
Works Cited 149
Performing Hunger: Fasting in Franz Kafka’s Hunger Artist as Poetic Practice 152
Food as a Cultural System 155
Performing the Fast 161
Death by Non-consumption 165
Works Cited 167
Speaking Stones: Material Agency and Interaction in Christian Enzensberger’s Geschichte der Natur 170
Notes 184
Works Cited 186
Part III: Catastrophe, Crisis, and Cultural Exploitation 188
When Nature Strikes Back: The Inconvenient Apocalypse in Franz Hohler’s Der Neue Berg 189
Notes 205
Works Cited 207
National Invective and Environmental Exploitation in Thomas Bernhard’s Frost 209
Notes 227
Works Cited 228
German Film Ventures into the Amazon: Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo as Prelude to Micha? Marczak’s Eco-documentary 232
Notes 246
Works Cited 247
Assessing How We Assess Environmental Risk: Kathrin Röggla’s Documentary Film The Mobile Future 249
Notes 264
Works Cited 264
Part IV: Genres in the Anthropocene 266
Writing After Nature: A Sebaldian Ecopoetics 267
Complicity: Writing the Anthropocene 272
Silent Mutations 276
Reduced Ecologies 283
Future Landscapes 286
Notes 288
Works Cited 289
Telling the Story of Climate Change: The German Novel in the Anthropocene 293
Literature and Literary Criticism in the Anthropocene 293
Climate Fiction as a Twenty-First-Century Genre 299
Challenges of Form in Narrating Climate Change: Ilija Trojanow’s EisTau and Cornelia Franz’s Ins Nordlicht blicken in Comparison 303
Works Cited 310
Literary Texts 310
Secondary Literature 311
The Anthropocene in Contemporary German Ecothrillers 315
The Anthropocene Discourse and Its Impact on the Environmental Humanities 316
The Ecothriller Genre 318
Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm (The Swarm) as Apocalyptic Precautionary Novel 321
Dirk C. Fleck’s Ecothrillers: GO! Die Ökodiktatur (1993) and The Tahiti-Project (2007) 324
Conclusion 328
Works Cited 329
Notes on Contributors 332
Index 337

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.4.2017
• Reihe/Serie: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment
• Reihe/Serie: Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment
• Zusatzinfo: XI, 348 p. 4 illus.
• Verlagsort: New York
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: Anthropocene • Ecocriticism • English literature • Environment • Environmental Humanities • Europe • Film • film and television • Film History • German • German Literature • German, Swiss, and Austrian literature • History • History of Literature • Literature • Twentieth century • urban ecology
• ISBN-10: 1-137-54222-5 / 1137542225
• ISBN-13: 978-1-137-54222-9 / 9781137542229