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Persons Unknown
Jake Adam York
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010
Library of Congress PS3625.O747P47 2010 | Dewey Decimal 811.6

In this stunning continuation to the poetry collection A Murmuration of Starlings, dedicated to those who lost their lives during the Civil Rights movement, Jake Adam York presents another set of searing portraits of these martyrs—men whose murders haunt America’s history. These elegiac and documentary poems seek justice and understanding for such sacrifices as Mack Charles Parker, lynched in Mississippi in 1959, his body disposed of in the waters of the Pearl River; Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, abducted into the depths of the Homochitto Forest, beaten, and drowned in the Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan; and Medgar Evers, dedicated activist, whose assassination outside his home in 1963 sent shockwaves throughout the South. Drawing on photographs, articles, legal documents, and other cultural artifacts, York deftly weaves history and memory into a lyrical reckoning for these often-overlooked victims of the bitter struggle for Civil Rights.

A Natural History of Mississippi

A blade of rust from the ocean

and from the air a rumor

that corrodes the earth in tongues,

lichen, moss, magnolia,

until each gossip’s true.

Things go this way,

each green repeating its fact

of sun and wind and rain,

its dialect, its blade,

while beneath each leaf

a quiet cuts between the veins.

Laced, pale wings open

to learn the particular weather,

the place or part of speech

that will darken

and give them a name.

So each sugar furls

to burn and bitter

against whatever mouths

might swallow,

each skin becomes

the history of its harbor,

another word for here.

This hatch of bark and shade

hangs like a photograph

of all it covers, so perfect,

so still, its edges

blur, then disappear.

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Ignatz
Monica Youn
Four Way Books, 2010
Library of Congress PS3625.O76I38 2010 | Dewey Decimal 811.6

Ignatz takes the form of a cycle of love poems—in radical variations—based on Ignatz Mouse, the rodent anti-hero and love-object of George Herriman’s classic comic strip Krazy Kat. For decades, Krazy Kat rang the changes on a quirky theme of unrequited love: cat loves mouse; mouse hates cat; mouse hits cat with brick; cat mistakes brick for love; and so on, day after day. The backgrounds of the strip were in constant inexplicable flux: a desiccated specimen of Arizona flora morphs in the next panel into a crescent moon, then into a snowcapped butte, while the characters chatted obliviously on, caught up in their own obsessive round.

Moving through pacy, overflowing sentences, enigmatic aphoristic observations, and pointed imagistic vignettes, Youn’s second collection vividly captures the way the world reorients around an object of desire: the certainty that your lover “will appear in the west, backlit by orange isinglass,” the ability to intuit a lover’s presence from the way “unseen flutes / keep whistling the curving phrases of your body.” Youn skillfully draws on the repeating narrative motifs and haunting landscapes of Krazy Kat as she tests and surpasses the limits of lyric to explore the cyclical elements of romanticized love. Youn speaks to and with her poetic forbears, whether St. John Perse, whose phrase “robed in the loveliest robe of the year” (T.S. Eliot’s translation) recurs in several love songs to Ignatz, or Geoffrey Hill, whose Mercian Hymns these poems recall in their serial structure and their commingling of the contemporary and classical. Ignatz is a poignant foray into the inventive possibilities of obsession and passion.

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neckbone: visual verses
avery r. young; foreword by Theaster Gates
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Library of Congress PS3625.O935A6 2019 | Dewey Decimal 811.6

The “blk alter” of Avery R. Young’s poetic vision makes its stunning debut in a multidisciplinary arsenal entitled, neckbone: visual verses. Young’s years of supernatural fieldwork within the black experience and the gospel of his transitions between poetry, art and music, become the stitch, paint brush, metaphor, and narrative of arresting visual metaphors of childhood teachings and traumas, identity, and the personal reverence of pop culture’s beauty and beast. A mastermind in a new language of poetry, that engages and challenges readers to see beyond the traditional spaces poems are shaped and exist, Young’s neckbone extends tentacles in literature, art, and activism--redefining the collective and the sermon of the “blk” experience.

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The Halo
C. Dale Young
Four Way Books, 2016
Library of Congress PS3625.O96A6 2016 | Dewey Decimal 811.6

The Halo is quasi-autobiography about a man who has wings and wants desperately to simply be human. Tracking from adolescence through adulthood, it explores an accident that temporarily paralyzes him and exposes him to human weakness all the way to his transformation into something more powerful than even he realizes. It explores a personal evolution from being prey to becoming the hunter. Praise for C. Dale Young “Young's poems are so fierce and serrated.” —Jeff Gordinier, New York Times Book Review “Young is a doctor as well as a poet, and [his work] demonstrates a skilled physician's combination of empathy and formal precision.” —David Orr, NPR “Sometimes the ability to convey information compactly and quickly has moral grace. [Young's] writing can put garrulous narration or evasive speechifying to shame.” —Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post “[W]e cannot rely on art to tell us the whole truth or even depend upon those who are supposed to protect us. And yet, [C. Dale Young] is compelled to make visible the darkness around us. Whether or not that itself is an act of tenderness, Young refuses to say for certain. And that is what makes his poetry a crucible where readers must confront their own beliefs—about poetry, society, and themselves.” —Christopher Hennessy, Ploughshares

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The Affliction: A Novel in Stories
C. Dale Young
Four Way Books, 2018
Library of Congress PS3625.O96A6 2018 | Dewey Decimal 813.6

A novel told in short stories, The Affliction is an astounding fiction debut by an award-winning poet full of memorable characters across America and the Caribbean. Young beautifully weaves together the elaborate stories of many while holding together a clear focus: people are not always as they seem.

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The Day Underneath the Day
C. Dale Young
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Library of Congress PS3625.O96D39 2001 | Dewey Decimal 811.6

Winner of 2002 Norma Farber First Book Award Finalist

Gifted with a vivid and exact skill, C. Dale Young's writing resembles an intricate anatomy lesson. His powers of observation probe the small energies of the natural world. Again and again the ordinary details of life transform themselves under the delicate pressure of his words--the movement of birds' wings, the color and texture of tropical flowers, the study of the ocean waves, the "scalpel of light" cutting through the beginning of the day. The language of Young's poems evokes an ultimate sense of place through a gorgeous marriage of tone and diction that echoes James Merrill and Amy Clampitt. As he meticulously maps out human passions and emotions, he explores both the surfaces and depths of everything that he surveys. His confident and polished verse unfolds intricate layers of landscape, seeking the order that lies beneath the unruly patterns of our lives.

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Prometeo
C. Dale Young
Four Way Books, 2021
Library of Congress PS3625.O96P76 2021 | Dewey Decimal 811.6

An unflinching reckoning with the traumas of one’s life and those inherited through a history of exacted injustices

“Some men find nothing, and others / find omens everywhere,” writes C. Dale Young in Prometeo, a collection whose speaker is a proverbial “child of fire.” In poems that thrive off of their distinct voice, the speaker confronts generational and lived trauma and their relationship to his multi-ethnicity. We are presented with the idea of the past’s burial in the body and its constellatory manifestations—both in the speaker and those around him—in disease and pain, but also in strength and a capacity for intimacy with others and nature. Grounded in precise language, Young’s examination of the past and its injuries turns into a celebration of the self. In stark, exuberant relief, the speaker proclaims “…I was splendidly blended, genetically engineered / for survival.” Resilient, Young’s poems find beauty in landscape, science, and meditation.

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Torn
C. Dale Young
Four Way Books, 2011
Library of Congress PS3625.O96T67 2011 | Dewey Decimal 811.6

In Torn, C. Dale Young continues his earnest investigations into the human, depicted as both spiritual being and a process, as “the soul and its attendant concerns” and as a device that “requires charge, small / electrical impulses / racing through our bodies.” What Young tells and shows us, what his poems let us hear, does not aim to reassure or soothe. These are poems written from “white and yellow scraps / covered with words and words and more words— // I may never find the right words to describe this.”

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Day of the Border Guards: Poems
Katherine E. Young
University of Arkansas Press, 2014
Library of Congress PS3625.O96545A6 2014 | Dewey Decimal 811.6

2014 finalist, Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize

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Night Radio
Kim Young
University of Utah Press, 2012
Library of Congress PS3625.O96546N54 2012 | Dewey Decimal 811.6

Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize

Set against the sprawling backdrop of Los Angeles, Night Radio excavates the kidnapping and sexual assault of a young girl and the resulting layers of trauma exacted upon her and her family. Working within the paradox of the insufficiency of language and the necessity of expression, these poems elevate overwhelming experiences into near-mythic narrative. Night Radio’s attempt through art to “make sense” of a seemingly senseless world raises troubling and timeless questions about the value, necessity, and futility of the aesthetic act. At the heart of the book is a journey toward reconciliation—wherein one discovers an abiding though hard-won faith within a complex, overwhelming, and, at times, frightening universe.

Finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

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Medicine Show
Tom Yuill
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Library of Congress PS3625.U35M43 2010 | Dewey Decimal 813.11

In Medicine Show, inner conflict is wonderfully realized in the clash of down-home plain speech and European high culture utterances. Freely translating and adapting Catullus (Latin), Villon (Middle French), Corbiere (French), Hikmet (Turkish), and Orpheus (Greek), and placing them alongside Jagger and Richards, skinheads, and psalms, Tom Yuill’s book mirrors an old-style hawking of wares, with all the charm and absurdity that results when high culture meets pop, when city meets small town, and when provincialism confronts urbanity. Here, the poems talk to one another, one poem nudging the cusps of many others, those poems touching still others' circumferences. Yuill, by invoking the Rolling Stones as muses and as background music, offers cover versions of Shakespeare, Keats, and Dylan Thomas, ultimately giving us a new kind of verse, funneled through the languages and rhythms of his masters' voices.

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I Always Carry My Bones
Felicia Zamora
University of Iowa Press, 2021
Library of Congress PS3626.A6278I18 2021 | Dewey Decimal 811.6

The poems in I Always Carry My Bones tackle the complex ideation of home—the place where horrid and beautiful intertwine and carve a being into existence—for marginalized and migrant peoples. Felicia Zamora explores how familial history echoes inside a person and the ghosts of lineage dwell in a body. Sometimes we haunt. Sometimes we are the haunted. Pierced by an estranged relationship to Mexican culture, the ethereal ache of an unknown father, the weight of racism and poverty in this country, the indentations of abuse, and a mind/physicality affected by doubt, these poems root in the search for belonging—a belonging inside and outside the flesh. This powerful collection is a message of longing for a sanctuary of self, the dwelling of initial energy needed for the collective fight for human rights.

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Four Days in Michigan: A Novel
Philip Zazove
Gallaudet University Press, 2012
Library of Congress PS3626.A96F68 2012 | Dewey Decimal 813.6

As a young, deaf Jewish woman living in a small town in Michigan in 1942, Sandra Horowitz felt deeply frustrated by her limited prospects. Even though she had just graduated from junior college, she knew that she had two strikes against her in fulfilling her dream to become a veterinarian. Better to marry Jacob Winter, her parents urged her, a deaf Jewish man who made a good living. Then, Sandra met Rudy Townsend, a hearing soldier on leave before shipping out to the war in Europe.

In just four days, both Sandra and Rudy’s worlds were turned upside down. Sandra’s parents feared him for being hearing and a Gentile, while Rudy’s parents expressed openly their bias against her ethnic background and her deafness. Even so, Sandra and Rudy soon realized that they had fallen in love, deeply and passionately. As they shared the brief time they had together, they learned about each other’s dreams for the future — Sandra’s desire to be a vet and Rudy’s determination to serve in Congress. Then, Rudy had to leave for the war.

Philip Zazove’s novel Four Days in Michigan captures perfectly the power of irrepressible love between two individuals from opposite backgrounds. The struggles they encounter in an era when such differences were never more sharply drawn also reveal great detail about deaf and hearing life. Despite all, their triumph comes ultimately because of their long-lasting individual respect and love.

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When: Stories
Katherine Zlabek
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Library of Congress PS3626.L33A6 2019 | Dewey Decimal 813.6

A bull’s heart simmers in a crockpot, echoing the household’s tension in a retelling of Biblical Jacob’s trials. A priest observes his congregation’s descent into madness and wonders at his own role. An elderly woman imagines herself into her boomtown’s history and eventual abandonment at the height of the Gold Rush. Towns and people vanish, daughters return, women prepare escapes, and animals invade. In this collection of stories situated within the mythology of the Midwest, the past is always present, tangible and unrelenting, constantly asking these characters whether they will be a sacrifice or a martyr, daring them to give in without a fight. Here, transcendence is a tonic hard-earned by the battered soul.
The atmospheric stories in When illuminate the customs of rural America, a part of this country that’s been asked to risk the best of itself in order to survive, revealing with humor and weight fears about wealth, worth, and the dignity of home.

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Barren Island
Carol Zoref
New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2017
Library of Congress PS3626.O74B37 2017 | Dewey Decimal 813.6

How does one remember a world that literally no longer exists? How do the moral imperatives to do so correspond to the personal needs that make it possible? Told from the point-of-view of Marta Eisenstein Lane on the occasion of her 80th birthday, Barren Island is the story of a factory island in New York’s Jamaica Bay, where the city’s dead horses and other large animals were rendered into glue and fertilizer from the mid-19th century until the 1930’s. The island itself is as central to the story as the members of the Jewish, Greek, Italian, Irish, and African-American factory families that inhabit it, including those who live their entire lives steeped in the smell of burning animal flesh. The story begins with the arrival of the Eisenstein family, immigrants from Eastern Europe, and explores how the political and social upheavals of the 1930’s affect them and their neighbors in the years between the stock market crash of October 1929 and the start of World War II ten years later. Labor strife, union riots, the New Deal, the World’s Fair, and the struggle to save European Jews from the growing threat of Nazi terror inform this novel as much as the explosion of civil and social liberties between the two World Wars. Barren Island, finally, is a novel in which the existence of God is argued with a God that may no longer exist or, perhaps, never did.

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Detailing Trauma: A Poetic Anatomy
Arianne Zwartjes
University of Iowa Press, 2012
Library of Congress PS3626.W37D48 2012 | Dewey Decimal 811.6

In a series of linked lyric essays, Detailing Trauma explores in vivid, sometimes graphic detail the many types of wounds from which the human body and spirit may suffer—and heal. Mapping the diseases and injuries that can afflict the body, the author asks how we can continue to live and love in the face of the great potential for suffering and loss.

She names each section of the book for body parts or processes, then juxtaposes the functions and failures of human anatomy with experiences in her own life and those of people she knows and loves, meticulously stitching together life’s fractures and ruptures with skillful narrative. Each essay offers glimpses of hope and reasons for living with the likelihood of chaos and pain, reasons for choosing to love despite the risks.

Zwartjes’s beautifully crafted poetic prose humanizes the technical descriptions of medical conditions and illuminates the scientific understanding of emotional states. Far more than a popularization of science, Detailing Trauma explores the wondrous anatomy and physiology of the human body, a geography of our human frailties—and also our wealth, as humans, of love and hope and the capacity for meditative thought.

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These Dark Skies: Reckoning with Identity, Violence, and Power from Abroad
Arianne Zwartjes
University of Iowa Press, 2022
Library of Congress PS3626.W37T44 2022 | Dewey Decimal 814.6

In These Dark Skies, Arianne Zwartjes interweaves the experience of living in the southern Netherlands—with her wife, who is Russian—and the unfolding of both the refugee crisis across Europe and the uptick in terrorist acts in France, Greece, Austria, Germany, and the Balkans. She probes her own subjectivity, as a white American, as a queer woman in a transcultural marriage, as a writer, and as a witness.

The essays investigate and meditate on a broad array of related topics, including drone strikes, tear gas, and military intervention; the sugar trade, the Dutch blackface celebration of Zwarte Piet, and constructions of whiteness in Europe and the U.S.; and visual arts of Russian avant-garde painters, an Iraqi choreographer living in Belgium, and German choreographer Pina Bausch.

This is a lyrical, timely book deeply salient to the political moment we continue to find ourselves in: a moment of incredible anti-refugee and anti-immigrant sentiment, a moment of xenophobic and misogynistic violence.

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The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces
Henry James
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Library of Congress PS21122011 | Dewey Decimal 813.4

This collection of prefaces, originally written for the 1909 multi-volume New York Edition of Henry James’s fiction, first appeared in book form in 1934 with an introduction by poet and critic R. P. Blackmur. In his prefaces, James tackles the great problems of fiction writing—character, plot, point of view, inspiration—and explains how he came to write novels such as The Portrait of a Lady and The American. As Blackmur puts it, “criticism has never been more ambitious, nor more useful.”

The latest edition of this influential work includes a foreword by bestselling author Colm Tóibín, whose critically acclaimed novel The Master is told from the point of view of Henry James. As a guide not only to James’s inspiration and execution, but also to his frustrations and triumphs, this volume will be valuable both to students of James’s fiction and to aspiring writers.

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The Annotated Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Harvard University Press, 2015
Library of Congress PS26032015 | Dewey Decimal 818.309

Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps America’s most famous writer. Adapted many times to the stage and screen and an inspiration to countless illustrators, graphic novelists, and musicians, his tales and poems remain a singular presence in popular culture. (His most famous poem inspired the name of the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens.) And then there is the matter of Poe’s literary influence. “How many things come out of Poe?” Jorge Luis Borges once asked. And yet Poe remains misunderstood, his works easily confused with the legend of a troubled genius. Now, in this annotated edition of selected tales and poems, Kevin J. Hayes debunks the Poe myth, enables a larger appreciation of Poe’s career and varied achievements, and investigates his weird afterlives.

With color illustrations and photographs throughout, The Annotated Poe contains in-depth notes placed conveniently alongside the tales and poems to elucidate Poe’s sources, obscure words and passages, and literary, biographical, and historical allusions. Like Poe’s own marginalia, Hayes’s marginal notes accommodate “multitudinous opinion”: he explains his own views and interpretations as well as those of other writers and critics, including Poe himself. In his Foreword, William Giraldi provides a spirited introduction to the writer who produced such indelible masterpieces as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Black Cat.”

The Annotated Poe offers much for both the professional and the general reader—but it will be especially prized by those who think of themselves as Poe aficionados.

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Leaves of Grass, 1860: The 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition
Whitman, Walt
University of Iowa Press, 2009
Library of Congress PS32012009 | Dewey Decimal 811.3

In May 1860, Walt Whitman published a third edition of Leaves of Grass. His timing was compelling. Printed during a period of regional, ideological, and political divisions, written by a poet intimately concerned with the idea of a United States as “essentially the greatest poem,” this new edition was Whitman’s last best hope for national salvation. Now available in a facsimile edition, Leaves of Grass, 1860 faithfully reproduces Whitman’s attempt to create a “Great construction of the New Bible” to save the nation on the eve of civil war and, for the first time, frames the book in historical rather than literary terms.

In his third edition, Whitman added 146 new poems to the 32 that comprised the second edition, reorganized the book into a bible of American civic religion that could be cited chapter and verse, and included erotic poetry intended to bind the nation in organic harmony. This 150th anniversary edition includes a facsimile reproduction of the original 1860 volume, a thought-provoking introduction by antebellum historian and Whitman scholar Jason Stacy that situates Whitman in nineteenth-century America, and annotations that provide detailed historical context for Whitman’s poems.

A profoundly rich product of a period when America faced its greatest peril, this third edition finds the poet transforming himself into a prophet of spiritual democracy and the Whitman we celebrate today—boisterous, barbaric, and benevolent. Reprinting it now continues the poet’s goal of proclaiming for “the whole of America for each / individual, without exception . . . uncompromising liberty and equality.”

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Contemporary German Editorial Theory
Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1995
Library of Congress PT74.H45 1995 | Dewey Decimal 801.959094309045

Over the past decade, Anglo-American notions of textual construction and editorial theory have begun major paradigm shifts. Many of the key emergent issues of Anglo-American debate--such as theories of versions--are already familiar in German theory. In other respects, including systematic reflection on the design and function of editorial apparatus, the German debate has already produced paradigms and procedures as yet unformulated in English.
Contemporary German Editorial Theory makes available for the first time in English ten major essays by seven German theorists, together with an original introductory meditation by Hans Walter Gabler, editor of the celebrated edition of James Joyce's Ulysses. The volume thus participates in the paradigm shift in editorial theory that has led both to theoretical reconception of the field and to groundbreaking practical results. Topics discussed include the distinction between historical record and editor's interpretation, the display of multiple versions, concepts of authorization and intention, and the relations of textual theory to approaches like deconstruction and semiotics. The book also includes suggestions for further reading in both languages and a glossary of technical terms.
Contributors are Hans Zeller, Miroslav Cervenka, Elisabeth Höpker-Herberg, Henning Boetius, Siegfried Scheibe, and Gerhard Seidel.
Bringing together the heretofore separate Anglo- American and German approaches will strengthen each separately and prepare the way for a new hybrid combining the advantages of both orientations. This book will interest not only students of Anglo-American or German literature, but all who study cultural construction and transmission.
Hans Walter Gabler is Professor of English Literature, University of Munich. George Bornstein is Professor of English, University of Michigan. Gillian Borland Pierce is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature, University of Michigan.

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Imperial Fictions: German Literature Before and Beyond the Nation-State
Todd Kontje
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Library of Congress PT91.K66 2018 | Dewey Decimal 830.9

Imperial Fictions explores ways in which writers from late antiquity to the present have imagined communities before and beyond the nation-state. It takes as its point of departure challenges to the discrete nation-state posed by globalization, migration, and European integration today, but then circles back to the beginnings of European history after the fall of the Roman Empire. Unlike nationalist literary historians of the nineteenth century, who sought the tribal roots of an allegedly homogeneous people, this study finds a distant mirror of analogous processes today in the fluid mixtures and movements of peoples. Imperial Fictions argues that it is time to stop thinking about today’s multicultural present as a deviation from a culturally monolithic past. We should rather consider the various permutations of “German” identities that have been negotiated within local and imperial contexts from the early Middle Ages to the present.

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A New History of German Literature
David E. Wellbery, Editor-in-ChiefJudith Ryan, General EditorHans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Anton Kaes, Joseph Leo Koerner, Dorothea E. von Mücke, Editors
Harvard University Press, 2004
Library of Congress PT91.N49 2004 | Dewey Decimal 830.9

The revolutionary spirit that animates the culture of the Germans has been alive for at least twelve centuries, far longer than the dramatically fragmented and reshaped political entity known as Germany. German culture has been central to Europe, and it has contributed the transforming spirit of Lutheran religion, the technology of printing as a medium of democracy, the soulfulness of Romantic philosophy, the structure of higher education, and the tradition of liberal socialism to the essential character of modern American life.

In this book leading scholars and critics capture the spirit of this culture in some 200 original essays on events in German literary history. Rather than offering a single continuous narrative, the entries focus on a particular literary work, an event in the life of an author, a historical moment, a piece of music, a technological invention, even a theatrical or cinematic premiere. Together they give the reader a surprisingly unified sense of what it is that has allowed Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, Luther, Kant, Goethe, Beethoven, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Jelinek, and Sebald to provoke and enchant their readers. From the earliest magical charms and mythical sagas to the brilliance and desolation of 20th-century fiction, poetry, and film, this illuminating reference book invites readers to experience the full range of German literary culture and to investigate for themselves its disparate and unifying themes.

Contributors include: Amy M. Hollywood on medieval women mystics, Jan-Dirk Müller on Gutenberg, Marion Aptroot on the Yiddish Renaissance, Emery Snyder on the Baroque novel, J. B. Schneewind on Natural Law, Maria Tatar on the Grimm brothers, Arthur Danto on Hegel, Reinhold Brinkmann on Schubert, Anthony Grafton on Burckhardt, Stanley Corngold on Freud, Andreas Huyssen on Rilke, Greil Marcus on Dada, Eric Rentschler on Nazi cinema, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl on Hannah Arendt, Gordon A. Craig on Günter Grass, Edward Dimendberg on Holocaust memorials.

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The Making of a Terrorist: On Classic German Rogues
Jeffrey Champlin
Northwestern University Press, 2015
Library of Congress PT111.C47 2015 | Dewey Decimal 830.93552

In The Making of a Terrorist, Jeffrey Champlin examines key figures from three canonical texts from the German-language literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Goethe’s Gotz von Berlichingen, Schiller’s Die Rauber, and Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas. Champlin situates these readings within a larger theoretical and historical context, exploring the mechanics, aesthetics, and poetics of terror while explicating the emergence of the terrorist personality in modernity. In engaging and accessible prose, Champlin explores the ethical dimensions of violence and interrogates an ethics of textual violence.

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Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk
B. Venkat Mani
University of Iowa Press, 2007
Library of Congress PT123.T8M36 2007 | Dewey Decimal 830.989435043

When both France and Holland rejected the proposed constitution for the European Union in 2005, the votes reflected popular anxieties about the entry of Turkey into the European Union as much as they did ambivalence over ceding national sovereignty. Indeed, the votes in France and Holland echoed long standing tensions between Europe and Turkey. If there was any question that tensions were high, the explosive reaction of Europe’s Muslim population to a series of cartoons of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper put them to rest. Cosmopolitical Claims is a profoundly original study of the works of Sten Nadonly, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Feridun Zaimoglu, and 2006 Nobel prize in literature recipient Orhan Pamuk. Rather than using the proverbial hyphen in “Turkish-German” to indicate a culture caught between two nations, Venkat Mani is interested in how Turkish-German literature engages in a scrutiny of German and Turkish national identity.
Moving deftly from the theoretical literature to the texts themselves, Mani’s groundbreaking study explores these conflicts and dialogues and the resulting cultural hybridization as they are expressed in four novels that document the complexity of Turkish-German cultural interactions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His innovative readings will engage students of contemporary German literature as well as illuminate the discussion of minority literature in a multicultural setting.
As Salman Rushdie said in the 2002 Tanner Lecture at Yale, “The frontier is an elusive line, visible and invisible, physical and metaphorical, amoral and moral. . . . To cross a frontier is to be transformed.” It is in this vein that Mani’s dynamic and subtle work posits a still evolving discourse between Turkish and German writers.

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Un/Translatables: New Maps for Germanic Literatures
Edited by Bethany Wiggin and Catriona MacLeod
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Library of Congress PT125.U58 2016 | Dewey Decimal 830.9

The term "Untranslatables" is rooted in two explorations of translation written originally in German: Walter Benjamin's now ubiquitous "The Task of the Translator" and Goethe's extensive notes to his "tradaptation" of mystical Persian poetry. The essays collected in Un/Translatables unite two inescapable interventions in contemporary translation discourses: the concept of "Untranslatables" as points of productive resistance, and the Germanic tradition as the primary dialogue partner for translation studies. The essays collected in the volume pursue the critical itineraries that would result if "Untranslatables," as discussed in Barbara Cassin's Dictionary of Untranslatables, were returned, productively estranged, to their original German context. Thus, these essays explore Untranslatables across Germanic literatures—German, Yiddish, Dutch, and Afrikaans—and follow trajectories into Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, English, and Scots.

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Aberrations of Mourning
Laurence A. Rickels
University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Library of Congress PT129.R47 2011 | Dewey Decimal 830.9353

Aberrations of Mourning, originally published in 1988, is the long unavailable first book in Laurence A. Rickels’s “unmourning” trilogy, followed by The Case of California and Nazi Psychoanalysis.

Rickels studies mourning and melancholia within and around psychoanalysis, analyzing the writings of such thinkers as Freud, Nietzsche, Lessing, Heinse, Artaud, Keller, Stifter, Kafka, and Kraus. Rickels maintains that we must shift the way we read literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to go beyond traditional Oedipal structures.

Aberrations of Mourning argues that the idea of the crypt has had a surprisingly potent influence on psychoanalysis, and Rickels shows how society’s disturbed relationship with death and dying, our inability to let go of loved ones, has resulted in technology to form more and more crypts for the dead by preserving them—both physically and psychologically—in new ways.

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Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present
Kirk Wetters
Northwestern University Press, 2014
Library of Congress PT134.D456W48 2014 | Dewey Decimal 830.937

In this ambitious book, Kirk Wetters traces the genealogy of the demonic in German literature from its imbrications in Goethe to its varying legacies in the work of essential authors, both canonical and less well known, such as Gundolf, Spengler, Benjamin, Lukács, and Doderer. Wetters focuses especially on the philological and metaphorological resonances of the demonic from its core formations through its appropriations in the tumultuous twentieth century.

Propelled by equal parts theoretical and historical acumen, Wetters explores the ways in which the question of the demonic has been employed to multiple theoretical, literary, and historico-political ends. He thereby produces an intellectual history that will be consequential both to scholars of German literature and to comparatists.

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At the Limit of the Obscene: German Realism and the Disgrace of Matter
Erica Weitzman
Northwestern University Press, 2021
Library of Congress PT143.R4W45 2021 | Dewey Decimal 830.912

As German-language literature turned in the mid-nineteenth century to the depiction of the profane, sensual world, a corresponding anxiety emerged about the terms of that depiction—with consequences not only for realist poetics but also for the conception of the material world itself. At the Limit of the Obscene examines the roots and repercussions of this anxiety in German realist and postrealist literature. Through analyses of works by Adalbert Stifter, Gustav Freytag, Theodor Fontane, Arno Holz, Gottfried Benn, and Franz Kafka, Erica Weitzman shows how German realism’s conflicted representations of the material world lead to an idea of the obscene as an excess of sensual appearance beyond human meaning: the obverse of the anthropocentric worldview that German realism both propagates and pushes to its crisis. At the Limit of the Obscene thus brings to light the troubled and troubling ontology underlying German realism, at the same time demonstrating how its works continue to shape our ideas about representability, alterity, and the relationship of human beings to the non-human well into the present day.

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The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory
Stanley Corngold
Duke University Press, 1994
Library of Congress PT148.S34C67 1994 | Dewey Decimal 830.9353

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 Lévi-Strauss—have in various ways proclaimed the death of the subject, often turning to German intellectual tradition to authorize their views. Stanley Corngold’s 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—Hölderlin, 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.

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Lost in Time: Locating the Stranger in German Modernity
June J. Hwang
Northwestern University Press, 2014
Library of Congress PT148.S77H93 2014 | Dewey Decimal 830.9353

June J. Hwang’s provocative Lost in Time explores discourses of timelessness in the works of central figures of German modernity such as Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Helmuth Plessner, as well as those of Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, and Hugo Bettauer. Hwang argues that in the Weimar Republic the move toward ahistoricization is itself a historical phenomenon, one that can be understood by exploring the intersections of discourses about urban modernity, the stranger, and German Jewish identity.

These intersections shed light on conceptions of German Jewish identity that rely on a negation of the specific and temporal as a way to legitimize a historical outsider position, creating a dynamic position that simultaneously challenges and acknowledges the limitations of an outsider’s agency. She reads these texts as attempts to transcend the particular, attempts that paradoxically reveal the entanglement of the particular and the universal.

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German Orientalisms
Todd Kontje
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Library of Congress PT149.A2K66 2004 | Dewey Decimal 830.9325

Todd Kontje's German Orientalisms offers a fresh examination of the role of the East in the "Kontje has pulled off the amazing feat of a grand narrative: from the epic literature of the Middle Ages to very recent texts on the emerging multicultural Germany. Kontje's grand narrative, it should be noted, is not at all simplistic or reductionistic. He gets at the individual texts in complex ways, and he can tease out multidimensional features of the German texts' treatments of the 'East.' Nonetheless, he displays an enviable erudition and scholarship, tracing lines through centuries when most scholars today limit themselves to narrow specialties."
-Russell Berman, Stanford University

"Intellectually rigorous and conceptually nuanced, Todd Kontje's German Orientalisms is a valuable contribution to the debate on identity politics in German cultural history. Through an erudite and insightful analysis of the German fictions of a broadly defined 'Orient' from the Middle Ages to the present, Kontje illustrates how German literature situated itself within a 'symbolic geography,' whose coordinates are defined by both its representations of the Orient and its affiliation with the Occident. German Orientalisms offers not only an admirable synthesis of the scholarship on German linguistic and cultural nationalism but also sophisticated interpretive strategies for a better understanding of our perceptions and misconceptions of alterity."
-Azade Seyhan, Bryn Mawr College

"This is a fascinating topic, and the book opens new scholarly vistas. In an age of increased specialization, Kontje takes a macro view, looking at German literature almost
from its beginnings to the present, from Wolfram to Özdamar. He also has the courage to link his well-researched work to topics like globalization, the culture wars, and canon formation. He doesn't merely proclaim literature's importance, he shows by example how the literary imagination-creative as it is, dodging dogmatism, and able to confound ideologies-can thrive in an era of cultural studies."
-Sara Friedrichsmeyer, University of Cincinnati

Todd Kontje's German Orientalisms offers a fresh examination of the role of the East in German literary imagination, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present. In its wide historical sweep, this book offers important new insights into many of the most famous writers in the German language, from Goethe to Thomas Mann to Günter Grass.

Building on Edward Said's Orientalism-which defined Orientalism as a form of Western knowledge directly linked to imperial power-Kontje offers a more nuanced version as seen through the lens of German literature of the last thousand years.

Said's focus was on British and French Orientalists-two nations with colonial interests in the East. Germany was different in that it had no stake in the Orient. Far from diminishing an Orientalist perspective, however, the absence of a German empire in the East produced a peculiarly German brand of Orientalism, one in which German writers alternated between identification with the rest of Europe and allying themselves with parts of the East against the West.

Above all, Kontje asks how German writers conceived of their place in "the land of the center" (das Land der Mitte) and how their literary works help to create the imagined community of the German nation.

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White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture
Priscilla Layne
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Library of Congress PT149.B55 | Dewey Decimal 830.9896

Analyzing literary texts and films, White Rebels in Black shows how German authors have since the 1950s appropriated black popular culture, particularly music, to distance themselves from the legacy of Nazi Germany, authoritarianism, and racism, and how such appropriation changes over time. Priscilla Layne offers a critique of how blackness came to symbolize a positive escape from the hegemonic masculinity of postwar Germany, and how black identities have been represented as separate from, and in opposition to, German identity, foreclosing the possibility of being both black and German. Citing four autobiographies published by black German authors Hans Jürgen Massaquo, Theodor Michael, Günter Kaufmann, and Charly Graf, Layne considers how black German men have related to hegemonic masculinity since Nazi Germany, and concludes with a discussion on the work of black German poet, Philipp Khabo Köpsell.

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The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture
Martha B. Helfer
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Library of Congress PT149.J4H45 2011 | Dewey Decimal 830.93529924

The publication of Martha B. Helfer’s The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture marks a stunningly original new direction in the interpretation of canonical works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature.

Between 1749 and 1850—the formative years of the so-called Jewish Question in Germany—the emancipation debates over granting full civil and political rights to Jews provided the topical background against which all representations of Jewish characters and concerns in literary texts were read. Helfer focuses sharply on these debates and demonstrates through close readings of works by Gotthold Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, Achim von Arnim, Annette von Droste- Hülshoff, Adalbert Stifter, and Franz Grillparzer how disciplinary practices within the field of German studies have led to systematic blind spots in the scholarship on anti-Semitism to date.

While all the authors discussed are well known and justly celebrated, the particular works addressed represent an effective mix of enduring classics and less recognized, indeed often scandalously overlooked, texts whose consideration leads to a reevaluation of the author’s more mainstream oeuvre. Although some of the works and authors chosen have previously been noted for their anti-Semitic proclivities, the majority have not, and some have even been marked by German scholarship as philo-Semitic—a view that The Word Unheard undertakes not so much to refute as to complicate, and in the process to question not only these texts but also the deafness of the German scholarly tradition. With implications that reach into many disciplines, The Word Unheard will be a foundational study for all scholars of modern Germany.

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The Inability to Love: Jews, Gender, and America in Recent German Literature
Agnes C. Mueller
Northwestern University Press, 2015
Library of Congress PT149.J4M84 2014 | Dewey Decimal 830.93529924

The Inability to Love borrows its title from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s 1967 landmark book The Inability to Mourn, which discussed German society’s lack of psychological reckoning with the Holocaust. Challenging that notion, Agnes Mueller turns to recently published works by prominent contemporary German, non-Jewish writers to examine whether there has been a thorough engagement with German history and memory. She focuses on literature that invokes Jews, Israel, and the Holocaust. Mueller’s aim is to shed light on pressing questions concerning German memories of the past, and on German images of Jews in Germany at a moment that s ideologically and historically fraught.

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Ottoman Eurasia in Early Modern German Literature: Cultural Translations (Francisci, Happel, Speer)
Gerhild Scholz Williams
University of Michigan Press, 2021
Library of Congress PT149.T9 | Dewey Decimal 830.935856015

Even a casual perusal of seventeenth-century European print production makes clear that the Turk was on everyone’s mind. Europe’s confrontation of and interaction with the Ottoman Empire in the face of what appeared to be a relentless Ottoman expansion spurred news delivery and literary production in multiple genres, from novels and sermons to calendars and artistic representations. The trans-European conversation stimulated by these media, most importantly the regularly delivered news reports, not only kept the public informed but provided the basis for literary conversations among many seventeenth-century writers, three of whom form the center of this inquiry: Daniel Speer (1636-1707), Eberhard Werner Happel (1647-1690), and Erasmus Francisci (1626-1694). The expansion of the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offers the opportunity to view these writers' texts in the context of Europe and from a more narrowly defined Ottoman Eurasian perspective.

Ottoman Eurasia in Early Modern German Literature: Cultural Translations (Francisci, Happel, Speer) explores the variety of cultural and commercial conversations between Europe and Ottoman Eurasia as they negotiated their competing economic and hegemonic interests. Brought about by travel, trade, diplomacy, and wars, these conversations were, by definition, “cross-cultural” and diverse. They eroded the antagonism of “us and them,” the notion of the European center and the Ottoman periphery that has historically shaped the view of European-Ottoman interactions.

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The Virginal Mother in German Culture: From Sophie von La Roche and Goethe to Metropolis
Lauren Nossett
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Library of Congress PT151.M65N67 2019 | Dewey Decimal 830.935252

The Virginal Mother in German Culture presents an innovative and thorough analysis of the contradictory obsession with female virginity and idealization of maternal nature in Germany from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Lauren Nossett explores how the complex social ideal of woman as both a sexless and maternal being led to the creation of a unique figure in German literature: the virginal mother. At the same time, she shows that the literary depictions of virginal mothers correspond to vilified biological mother figures, which point to a perceived threat in the long nineteenth century of the mother’s procreative power.

Examining the virginal mother in the first novel by a German woman (Sophie von La Roche), canonical texts by Goethe, nineteenth-century popular fiction, autobiographical works, and Thea von Harbou’s novel Metropolis and Fritz Lang’s film by the same name, this book highlights the virginal mother at pivotal moments in German history and cultural development: the entrance of women into the literary market, the Goethezeit, the foundation of the German Empire, and the volatile Weimar Republic. The Virginal Mother in German Culture will be of interest to students and scholars of German literature, history, cultural and social studies, and women’s studies.

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Armed Ambiguity: Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe
Julie Koser
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Library of Congress PT151.W7K675 2016 | Dewey Decimal 830.9352042

Armed Ambiguity is a fascinating examination of the tropes of the woman warrior constructed by print culture—including press reports, novels, dramatic works, and lyrical texts—during the decades-long conflict in Europe around 1800.

In it, Julie Koser sheds new light on how women’s bodies became a battleground for competing social, cultural, and political agendas in one of the most pivotal periods of modern history. She traces the women warriors in this work as reflections of the social and political climate in German-speaking lands, and she reveals how literary texts and cultural artifacts that highlight women’s armed insurrection perpetuated the false dichotomy of "public" versus "private" spheres along a gendered fault line. Koser illuminates how reactionary visions of "ideal femininity" competed with subversive fantasies of new femininities in the ideological battle being waged over the restructuring of German society.

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With or Without: Reading Postwar German Women Poets
Charlotte Ann Melin
Northwestern University Press, 2013
Library of Congress PT167.M36 2013 | Dewey Decimal 831.914099287

With or Without explores the role of German women’s poetry in the contemporary literary discourse of the latter half of the twentieth century. Melin highlights the significant role that women played in the shaping of postwar German poetry as a whole and also their deep engagement with the broader issues of modernism, postmodernism, and related discourses about the relationship between individual experience, communal ideals, and interpersonal expression. Melin shows that for German writers poetry became the genre that had the capacity to project subjectivity, voice, and authenticity.

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The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins
Leslie Morris
Northwestern University Press, 2018
Library of Congress PT169.M67 2018 | Dewey Decimal 830.98924

The Translated Jew brings together an eclectic set of literary and visual texts to reimagine the transnational potential for German Jewish culture in the twenty-first century. Departing from scholarship that has located the German Jewish text as an object that can be defined geographically and historically, Leslie Morris challenges national literary historiography and redraws the maps by which transnational Jewish culture and identity must be read.

Morris explores the myriad acts of translation, actual and metaphorical, through which Jewishness leaves its traces, taking as a given the always provisional nature of Jewish text and Jewish language. Although the focus is on contemporary German Jewish literary cultures, The Translated Jew also turns its attention to a number of key visual and architectural projects by American, British, and French artists and writers, including W. G. Sebald, Anne Blonstein, Hélène Cixous, Ulrike Mohr, Daniel Blaufuks, Paul Celan, Raymond Federman, and Rose Ausländer.

In thus realigning German Jewish culture with European and American Jewish culture and post-Holocaust aesthetics, this book explores the circulation of Jewishness between the United States and Europe. The insistence on the polylingualism of any single language and the multidirectionality of Jewishness are at the very center of The Translated Jew.

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