Browsing by Subject "German Literature"

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    Interrogating utopia: the science fiction of the German Democratic Republic in an age of globalization.
    (2012-04) David, Thomas P.
    The science fiction of the GDR addresses the nature of the technologically-advanced society that has emerged since the end of the Cold War and the concomitant economic, social, and political processes that today are collectively designated by the concept of globalization. It does so, because science fiction is a genre of modernity that innately considers issues of technology, science, and progress through the technique of temporal dislocation. GDR science fiction is one national variant of this modern genre that maintains the prerequisites and conventions that define it across national borders and on the global scale that is this genre's traditionally acknowledged ambit. This dissertation comparatively investigates the thematic and formal ways in which specific science fiction novels and short stories from the period 1979 - 2000 by GDR authors narrativize key elements of the discourse of globalization. By examining the correspondence in theoretical understanding of the genre between East and West, and providing comparative literary examples, it shows how these works are representative examples of the SF genre that utilize the concepts of temporal contraction and technological dependence that are also manifest in the discourse of globalization. Systematically treating both discourses through the juxtaposition of science fiction text and globalization theory, it demonstrates how these socialist narratives both foreshadow and explore the discourse of globalization from the local perspective of the GDR in a global world that was not yet determined by the events of 1989 and the end of the Cold War. The dissertation consists of three core chapters in which a specific GDR story is examined in relation to a particular aspect of globalization. These aspects are surveillance, access, and annexation. Alternately, they could be described as globalization as a political project, as a chimerical projection, and as an imperialistic project of transnational Americanization. Through close textual analysis that employs examples from the commercial media landscape, it illustrates the ways in which these themes are manifested in GDR SF and examines how science fiction has become a customary practice and general hallmark of the era. Science fiction and globalization are not only mutually compatible, but are also logically analogous.
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    Narrative Arrangement in 16th-Century Till Eulenspiegel Texts: The Reinvention of Familiar Structures
    (2018-06) Schendel, Isaac
    The popular trickster character Till Eulenspiegel first appeared in the prose novel Ein kurtzweilig Lesen von Dil Ulenspiegel (1511/1515). Once in printed form, he caught the attention of two German-language authors, Hans Sachs and Johann Fischart. The former wrote comical poems and Shrove Tuesday plays centered on Eulenspiegel; the latter devoted an epic, Eulenspiegel reimenweis (1572), to the character. In all three cases, a proper understanding of the adaptation of Eulenspiegel-stories depends on a knowledge of the current literary contexts. Lesen holds a superficial resemblance to fool literature, but Eulenspiegel’s modus operandi is more reminiscent of trickster narratives as known from all over the world. His biography is a similar case of misdirection: although the chapter arrangement derives from hagiographic tradition, the redactor of S1515 uses the tactic to create a book meant to be flipped through at leisure, like a modern joke collection. Sachs’s and Fischart’s adaptions are also instances of authorial bait-and-switch: Sachs adopts Eulenspiegel as a tool to introduce other characters or themes, and Fischart’s Eulenspiegel reimenweis reinvents a biographical form developed in his earlier polemics. In all three examples, the traditional stories of Eulenspiegel serve as the basis for experimentation with an established narrative structure. Eulenspiegel, as a character, is never explored in depth: instead, the authors use familiar pranks as raw material to attract the readers’ interest and reinvent a storytelling form for their own purposes. Eulenspiegel is a case of design irony, of the use of known structures in experimental ways. Such findings are important for the history of fiction, as they reveal a new understanding of character as a means to address formal phenomena.