Cornell University Press: 1150 books
Formative Fictions
Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2012
The Bildungsroman, or "novel of formation," has long led a paradoxical life within literary studies, having been construed both as a peculiarly German genre, a marker of that country's cultural difference from Western Europe, and as a universal expression of modernity. In Formative Fictions, Tobias...
Lyric Orientations
Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community
Language: English
Release Date: November 8, 2016
In Lyric Orientations, Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge explores the power of lyric poetry to stir the social and emotional lives of human beings in the face of the ineffable nature of our mortality. She focuses on two German-speaking masters of lyric prose and poetry: Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843)...
Form as Revolt
Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art
Language: English
Release Date: January 22, 2016
The German writer and art critic Carl Einstein (1885–1940) has long been acknowledged as an important figure in the history of modern art, and yet he is often sidelined as an enigma. In Form as Revolt Sebastian Zeidler recovers Einstein's multifaceted career, offering the first comprehensive intellectual...
Earth
A Tenant's Manual
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
"It’s impossible to grasp the whole planet or integrate all the descriptions of it. But because we live here, we have to try. This is not just an artistic compulsion or an existential yearning, still less an academic exercise. It’s a survival issue. This is the only planet we have. We’re stuck...
by Hans Blumenberg
Language: English
Release Date: April 27, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: April 27, 2011
What role do metaphors play in philosophical language? Are they impediments to clear thinking and clear expression, rhetorical flourishes that may well help to make philosophy more accessible to a lay audience, but that ought ideally to be eradicated in the interests of terminological exactness? Or...
Counterpreservation
Architectural Decay in Berlin since 1989
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2016
In Berlin, decrepit structures do not always denote urban blight. Decayed buildings are incorporated into everyday life as residences, exhibition spaces, shops, offices, and as leisure space. As nodes of public dialogue, they serve as platforms for dissenting views about the future and past of Berlin....
Berlin Coquette
Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne...
Benjamin's Library
Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
In Benjamin's Library, Jane O. Newman offers, for the first time in any language, a reading of Walter Benjamin's notoriously opaque work, Origin of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends to its place in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin's day. Taking into account the literary and...
Inconceivable Effects
Ethics through Twentieth-Century German Literature, Thought, and Film
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
In Inconceivable Effects, Martin Blumenthal-Barby reads theoretical, literary and cinematic works that appear noteworthy for the ethical questions they raise. Via critical analysis of writers and filmmakers whose projects have changed our ways of viewing the modern world—including Hannah Arendt,...
On the Ruins of Babel
Architectural Metaphor in German Thought
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
The eighteenth century struggled to define architecture as either an art or a science—the image of the architect as a grand figure who synthesizes all other disciplines within a single master plan emerged from this discourse. Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe described the architect as their...
The Topography of Modernity
Karl Philipp Moritz and the Space of Autonomy
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Karl Philipp Moritz (d. 1793) was one of the most innovative writers of the late Enlightenment in Germany. A novelist, travel writer, editor, and teacher he is probably best known today for his autobiographical novel Anton Reiser (1785–90) and for his treatises on aesthetics, foremost among them...
The Chain of Things
Divinatory Magic and the Practice of Reading in German Literature and Thought, 1850–1940
Language: English
Release Date: April 15, 2018
In The Chain of Things, Eric Downing shows how the connection between divinatory magic and reading shaped the experience of reading and aesthetics among nineteenth-century realists and modernist thinkers. He explores how writers, artists, and critics such as Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, and...
Novel Translations
The European Novel and the German Book, 1680–1730
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Many early novels were cosmopolitan books, read from London to Leipzig and beyond, available in nearly simultaneous translations into French, English, German, and other European languages. In Novel Translations, Bethany Wiggins charts just one of the paths by which newness—in its avatars as fashion,...
Repentance for the Holocaust
Lessons from Jewish Thought for Confronting the German Past
Language: English
Release Date: July 15, 2017
In Repentance for the Holocaust, C. K. Martin Chung develops the biblical idea of "turning" (tshuvah) into a conceptual framework to analyze a particular area of contemporary German history, commonly referred to as Vergangenheitsbewältigung or "coming to terms with the past." Chung examines a selection...