Suchergebnisse

The interview with the German author Elisabeth Alexander discusses her controversial role among the generation of women authors in post-war German literature. The author talks about her own personal and intellectual development, the cultural differences between Germany and America, her relationship to Germany's fascist past, her strong but ambivalent involvement with Germany's student movement, feminism, and the Catholic church. A substantial part of the interview focuses on her own work, discussing its recurring themes of sexuality, pornography, gender trouble, men as such, and the role of women, especially mothers, in modern society. (FAL)

Preliminary Material /M. Williams and D. Stahl -- Introduction /David C. Stahl and Mark B. Williams -- Chapter One. Catastrophe, Memory, And Narrative: Teaching Japanese And Jewish Responses To Twentieth-Century Atrocity /Alan Tansman -- Chapter Two. Murakami Haruki And The War Inside /Jay Rubin -- Chapter Three. To Make Gods And Demons Weep: Witnessing The Sublime In "Death In Midsummer" And "Patriotism" /Dennis Washburn -- Chapter Four. Writing The Traumatized Self: Tenkō In The Literature Of Shiina Rinzō /Mark Williams -- Chapter Five. Okuizumi Hikaru And The Mystery Of War Memory /Angela Yiu -- Chapter Six. Victimization And \'Response-Ability\': Remembering, Representing, And Working Through Trauma In Grave Of The Fireflies /David C. Stahl -- Chapter Seven. Fractious Memories In Medoruma Shun's Tales Of War /Davinder L. Bhowmik -- Chapter Eight. Framing The Ruins: The Documentary Photographs Of Yamahata Yōsuke (Nagasaki, August 10, 1945) /Mark Silver -- Chapter Nine. Responsibility And Japanese Literature Of The Atomic Bomb /Karen Thornber -- Chapter Ten. Of Brutality And Betrayal: Youthful Fiction And The Legacy Of The Asia Pacific War /Christine E. Wiley -- Chapter Eleven. Contesting Traumatic War Narratives: Space Battleship Yamato And Mobile Suit Gundam /William Ashbaugh -- Index /M. Williams and D. Stahl.

This report will analyze postwar Italian literature from 1945 to 1990. It will look at how Italian society dealt with the events of the war and how the idea of national unity and the nation were compromised during and after the Second World War and the internal Civil War (1943-1945). I will analyze various Italian authors who contributed to different perspectives on postwar Italy, such as Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, Alberta Moravia, Elsa Morante, Ada Gobetti, Natalia Ginzburg, and Maria Occhipinti. An analysis of nationalism, gender, and memory will form the backbone of this report. Literature holds the key to understanding Italian society in the postwar world because of the freedom and vastness that writing provided Italians who had previously sought refuge from the persecution of their faith, gender, or political standing. Various questions emerge when studying this period; questions that are worthy of analysis. How did partisans attempt to understand their role in a larger struggle for their nation? Could women push through the paternalistic hierarchies established by fascism and emerge stronger? To what extent do these authors challenge the landscape of Italian memory studies? The answers to these questions lie in the words of postwar Italian literature.

If game theory, the mathematical simulation of rational decision-making first axiomatically established by the Hungarian-born American mathematician John von Neumann, is to prove worthy of literary hermeneutics, then critics must be able to apply its models to texts written without a working knowledge of von Neumann's discipline in mind. Reading such iconic novels as Fahrenheit 451, In Cold Blood, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye from the perspective of the four most frequently encountered coordination problems - the Stag Hunt, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and Deadlock, Game Theory and Postwar American Literature illustrates the significant contribution of mathematical models to literary interpretation. The interdisciplinary approach of this book contributes to an understanding of the historical, political, and social contexts that surround the texts produced in the post-Cold War years, as well as providing a comprehensive model of joining game theory and literary criticism. Michael Wainwright is Associate Lecturer of English and Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

"Within the past ten years, the field of contemporary American literary studies has changed significantly. Following the turn of the twenty-first century and mounting doubts about the continued explanatory power of the category of "postmodernism," new organizations have emerged, book series have been launched, journals have been created, and new methodologies, periodizations, and thematics have redefined the field. Postmodern/Postwar--and After aims to be a field-defining book--a sourcebook for the new and emerging critical terrain--that explores the postmodern/postwar period and what comes after. The first section of essays returns to the category of the "post-modern" and argues for the usefulness of key concepts and themes from postmodernism to the study of contemporary literature, or reevaluates postmodernism in light of recent developments in the field and historical and economic changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays take the contemporary abandonments of postmodernism as an occasion to assess the current states of postmodernity. After that, the essays move to address the critical shift away from postmodernism as a description of the present, and toward a new sense of postmodernism as just one category among many that scholars can use to describe the recent past. The final section looks forward and explores the question of what comes after the postwar/postmodern. Taken together, these essays from leading and emerging scholars on the state of twenty-first-century literary studies provide a number of frameworks for approaching contemporary literature as influenced by, yet distinct from, postmodernism. The result is an indispensable guide that seeks to represent and understand the major overhauling of postwar American literary studies that is currently underway"--

This article examines reworkings of Alice in Wonderland in works by postwar authors writing in German. While writers of both genders use Lewis Carroll's fictional character to question the expressive capacities of language, Rose Ausländer, Sarah Kirsch, Elisabeth Plessen, and Angelika Mechtel optimistically interpret her protean character as essential to poetic creativity and psychological autonomy. H.C. Artmann and Jürg Federspiel, by contrast, associate Alice with a postmodern loss of coherence in identity and narrative form. (CM)

This paper looks at some literary representations of the 'pan-pan girls' in postwar Japan. 'Pan-pan' is a derogatory term for street prostitutes who (mostly) served the soldiers of the occupying forces. Immediately after World War II, the Japanese government established the RAA (Recreation Amusement Association) and employed several thousand women to provide sexual services for foreign soldiers, ostensibly to protect Japanese women of middle and upper classes from rape and other violence. When the RAA was closed down in 1946 due to the US concern over widespread VD, many of the women who lost their jobs went out on the street and became private and illegal prostitutes – the pan-pan girls. With their red lipstick, cigarettes, nylon stockings and high-heel shoes, often holding onto the arms of tall, uniformed American GIs, the 'pan-pan girls' became a symbol of the occupation, and have been textually reproduced throughout the postwar period. This paper analyses the images and representations of the 'pan-pan girls' in postwar Japanese literature, to consider how the 'pan-pan girls' have functioned as a metaphor for the occupation and contributed to the public memory construction of the occupation. I identify some major codes of representations (victimisation, humiliation, and national trauma; eroticism and decadence; sexual freedom and materialism) and argue that the highly gendered and sexualised bodies of the 'pan-pan girls' have continued to allow simplistic and selective remembering of the occupation at the expense of recalling the pivotal role of Japanese patriarchy in the postwar period.

This paper looks at some literary representations of the 'pan-pan girls' in postwar Japan. 'Pan-pan' is a derogatory term for street prostitutes who (mostly) served the soldiers of the occupying forces. Immediately after World War II, the Japanese government established the RAA (Recreation Amusement Association) and employed several thousand women to provide sexual services for foreign soldiers, ostensibly to protect Japanese women of middle and upper classes from rape and other violence. When the RAA was closed down in 1946 due to the US concern over widespread VD, many of the women who lost their jobs went out on the street and became private and illegal prostitutes – the pan-pan girls. With their red lipstick, cigarettes, nylon stockings and high-heel shoes, often holding onto the arms of tall, uniformed American GIs, the 'pan-pan girls' became a symbol of the occupation, and have been textually reproduced throughout the postwar period. This paper analyses the images and representations of the 'pan-pan girls' in postwar Japanese literature, to consider how the 'pan-pan girls' have functioned as a metaphor for the occupation and contributed to the public memory construction of the occupation. I identify some major codes of representations (victimisation, humiliation, and national trauma; eroticism and decadence; sexual freedom and materialism) and argue that the highly gendered and sexualised bodies of the 'pan-pan girls' have continued to allow simplistic and selective remembering of the occupation at the expense of recalling the pivotal role of Japanese patriarchy in the postwar period.

In recent years, scholars of German literature have increasingly pointed to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's theory of "minor literature" as a crucial framework for understanding the development of minority cultural production in a variety of twentieth-century contexts (Teraoka, 1987; Suhr, 1989; Spector, 2000). Deleuze and Guattari propose that any minority group writing in a major language produces what they term minor literature, which has the capacity to destabilize and undermine the dominant language, culture, and discourse in which its authors operate (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986, pp. 16-27). This specific confluence of identities, texts, and locations, they suggest, calls into question the very foundations of the majority's world view and self-understanding. Deleuze and Guattari's model marks one of the first efforts by Western theorists to conceptualize cultural work that has traditionally been rendered invisible by classical literary writing and established categories of genre, style, and type.