Since its publication, the age of the protagonist in Christian Kracht's Faserland has been widely discussed. While this discussion has often been accompanied by a devaluation of the novel, the childlike aspects of the first-person narrator and the role of childhood memories have not yet been systematically examined. This essay analyses the extent to which the idealisation of childhood proves to be regressive and futile. The investigation of the connection between the literary motif of the eternal child and current criticisms of tendencies towards infantilisation can help explain the polemical reactions of the literary public following the novel's publication.
Machiavelli's Mandragola, his most famous comedy, is structured around a complex web of intrigue. A carefully constructed narrative drives the plot, luring the victims into a trap. This narrative framework allows the audience to understand the characters' motivations, as it forms the foundation for key plot decisions. As this article demonstrates, the play makes functional use of implied consent - deceiving the victims while simultaneously entertaining the audience. The analysis focuses on the role of silence in comedy and its function in non-verbal behavior. This perspective highlights how, in drama, narrative often aligns with legal reasoning. In this sense, Machiavelli's Mandragola serves as a paradigmatic example of the strategic use of silence, illustrating how it creates implied-in-fact contracts among the protagonists.
Sonic experiments in lyrics are more than just nonsense. The sound has its own poeti-cal meaning which supports the semantics of the words, opposes them or works inde-pendently of them. This applies to both pre-modern and modern texts, but it seems to be a particular challenge for medieval songs, which have mostly survived without melody (d & ocirc;n), making the sound a kind of rudimentary substitute for the lost music. In this article, Walther's von der Vogelweide `Vokalspiel' (L 75,25), consisting of five monovocally rhymed stanzas, is claimed as a test case for a dense reading attuned to the sense of the text as/and sound. Further questions arise from this case, such as the evidence for a genuinely pre-modern sound poetics and-theory, the limits to the translatability of sound, and the effects of Walther's impulse on further medieval and even (post-)modern poetry.
This essay reconstructs Christian Hermann WeiEe's "System der Aesthetik", published in 1830, as well as his early writings on myth theory, and, with particular reference to WeiEe's examination of the pastness of art (Hegel) and his ,,theory of ugliness", outlines perspectives for a history of aesthetic theory "after Hegel".
The essay explores Shakespeare’s playful revision of Petrarchan conventions in Venus and Adonis and Twelfth Night . It is particularly interested in how these works engage with social contingency in the arena of love. In contrast to critical reflections on the subjectivity of the lyrical lover in Petrarchan poetry, the essay focuses on the beloved and their freedom to reciprocate or reject the lover’s attentions. In Venus and Adonis and Twelfth Night , the beloved is neither unattainable in principle nor necessarily willing to submit to persuasion, yet their freedom is contingent on their own desire. Read side by side, Shakespeare’s epyllion and play indicate that the critical engagement with Petrarchism around 1600 played out across different genres, facilitated by a proliferation of love discourses.
