Review of Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zeibert.

Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zeibert. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 286 pp. ISBN 0791459470

Review of Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zeibert.

Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zeibert. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 286 pp. ISBN 0791459470

Review of Stanley Corngold, Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature.

Stanley Corngold, Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. 244 pp. ISBN 080472940

Representation and its discontents: the critical legacy of German romanticism

Azade Seyhan provides a concise, elegantly argued introduction to the critical theory of German Romanticism and demonstrates how its approach to the metaphorical and linguistic nature of knowledge is very much alive in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. Her analysis of key thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis explores their views on rhetoric, systematicity, hermeneutics, and cultural interpretation. Seyhan examines German Romanticism as a critical intervention in the debates on representation, which developed in response to the philosophical revolution of German Idealism.Facing a chaotic political and intellectual landscape, the eighteenth-century theorists sought new models of understanding and new objectives for criticism and philosophy. Representation and Its Discontents identifies the legacy of this formative moment in modern criticism and suggests its relevance to contemporary discussions of post-structuralism, orientalism, theories of textuality, and the nature of philosophical discourse

Perpetual Exile: Legacies of a Disrupted Century

The transnational configuration of contemporary German literature cannot be detached from its historical continuum, since such a separation would render the archive of histories of exile in and out of Germany inconsistent and incomplete. Bringing literary histories of exile in a dialogue, in this instance, Exilliteratur, represented by prominent German authors, who, during the Second World War, immigrated to Southern California (Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Franz Werfel, among others), as well as Anna Seghers and Stefan Zweig, who went into exile in Mexico and Brazil, respectively, and the emerging literature of contemporary transnational or so-called hyphenated German (“Bindestrich-Deutsche”) writers would enable an inclusive paradigm that communicates across communities of research. To that end, I briefly review one novel each by Anna Seghers and Lion Feuchtwanger and essays by the Iranian-German poet SAID, which exemplify the two distinctive genres of exile literature: the long-established Exilliteratur and what I elsewhere described as transnational literature of writers mostly from the non-Western world, who in the latter part of the twentieth century began immigrating to the West. While I acknowledge the different circumstances and historical imperatives that have dictated the features of the two genres, I foreground the ethical implications and the cautionary tales the respective works of Exilliteratur authors and transnational writers share