Attention is fundamental to how we experience reality, and yet this notion has been understood and practised in very different ways across history. This interdisciplinary study explores the dynamic relationship between attention and its supposed opposite, distraction, as it unfolds from the eighteenth century to the present day. Its primary focus is on twentieth-century Germany and Austria, where matters of (in)attention gained a unique urgency during a period of social change and politica...

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) is one of the most influential of modern authors, whose darkly fascinating novels and stories - where themes such as power, punishment and alienation loom large - have become emblematic of modern life. This Introduction offers a clear and accessible account of Kafka's life, work and literary influence and overturns many myths surrounding them. His texts are in fact far more engaging, diverse, light-hearted and ironic than is commonly suggested by clichés of 'the Kaf...

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) lived through one of the most turbulent periods in modern history, witnessing a world war, the dissolution of an empire and the foundation of a new nation state. But the early twentieth century was also a time of social progress and aesthetic experimentation. Kafka's novels and short stories reflect their author's keen but critical engagement with the big questions of his time, and yet often Kafka is still cast as a solitary figure with little or no connection to hi...

"It is a simple but essential principle: education aims at the future, at a time that we as educators do not yet know and cannot foresee. The challenges that will confront the children in the future are not those of the past--of our past, of our life story and our horizon. Times change, so do the realities of life, and in our times they change quickly and dramatically. Education aims at the future and that puts us as educators in a difficult situation: this future is not--or i...

The eight papers in this volume were originally presented at the centennial conference on Franz Kafka held at the University of Calgary in October 1983. As diverse in approach and methodology as these papers are “the general drift of the volume is away from Germanistik towards ‘state-of-the-art’ methods.”The opening articles by Charles Bernheimer and James Rolleston both deal with the similarities and contrasts between Kafka and Flaubert, with Bernheimer focusing on the “I...

Analyzing features of Wittgenstein's philosophical work and including in-depth textual analyses, this study investigates the impact of Ludwig Wittgenstein's work on contemporary German and French novelists.Drawing upon aesthetics, architectural history, philosophy of science, and photography, the book seeks to explain why references both to Wittgenstein as a person, as well as to his work are more pervasive than other equally renowned twentieth century philosophers and asks why som...

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw an extraordinary flowering of arts and culture in Germany which produced many of the world's finest writers, artists, philosophers and composers. This volume, first published in 2004, offers students and specialists an authoritative introduction to that dazzling cultural phenomenon, now known collectively as German Romanticism. Individual chapters not only introduce the reader to individual writers such as Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, ...

Gerhard Richter's groundbreaking study argues that the concept of "afterness" is a key figure in the thought and aesthetics of modernity. It pursues questions such as: What does it mean for something to "follow" something else? Does that which follows mark a clear break with what came before it, or does it in fact tacitly perpetuate its predecessor as a consequence of its inevitable indebtedness to the terms and conditions of that from which it claims to have departed? Indeed, is not the v...

Although the fruits of Anthroposophy--Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, Camphill, anthroposophic medicine, and so on--are relatively well known and moderately successful, their relationship to Anthroposophy and its vehicle for transmission, the General Anthroposophical Society, and the School for Spiritual Science, remains mysterious and unclear; sadly, the same is true of the meaning and purpose of those institutions.Related to this is the fact that, though these offshoot...

Nietzsche's Mirror introduces the reader to one of the most central and pervasive themes in Friedrich Nietzsche's works-will to power. The book traces Nietzsche's use of the terms 'power,' 'will,' and 'will to power' as they are presented in both the works he authorized for publication and his literary remains, called the Nachlass. The author demonstrates that will to power as it is presented in the Nachlass differs from the way it is presented in the works Nietzsche authorized for publica...

Containing entries on over four hundred authors of fiction, poetry and drama from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, this invaluable work of reference presents material of a range and depth that no other book on the subject in English attains. For the second edition, the entries have been updated to include the most recent works of German literature. A number of new entries have been added, dealing in particular with the East German literary scene and the changing literary landscape after r...

This literary-historical study seeks to dismantle the prevailing notion that Germany, in the period following the Second World War, exhibited an “inability to mourn,” arguing that in fact this period experienced a surge of affect. Anna Parkinson examines the emotions explicitly manifested or addressed in a variety of German cultural artifacts, while also identifying previously unacknowledged (and undertheorized) affective structures implicitly at work during the country’s national crisis. ...