Foreign Language Study : German

In "Performance and Femininity," Arons examines a series of texts by eighteenth-century German women in order to illuminate how women writers of the time used theater and performance both to investigate female subjectivity and to intervene in the dominant cultural discourse of femininity. Arons's study focuses on works featuring heroines who, for the most part— like their authors— lead lives with public dimensions, primarily by working as actresses.  The texts she chooses all call attention to the difficulties that the eighteenth-century conception of the self as sincere and antitheatrical presented for women.  By highlighting the fact that the social audience that determines a woman's reputation is almost always a fickle and untrustworthy "reader" of female subjectivity, these works expose the untenable position into which the discourse of sincerity placed women, paradoxically requiring them to perform the very "naiveté "that was, by definition, not supposed to be performable. Arons's original argument takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from the fields of literary criticism, cultural studies, theatre history, and performance studies, and reveals how these women writers exposed ideal femininity as an impossible act, even as they attempted to reproduce that act in their writing and in their lives. more...

Price: $69.95

more...

Price: $179.20

The study is a language-historical investigation of the use of the conjunctive mood in speech rendition. The textual data source consists of 105 transcripts from questioning in Early Modern witch trials dating from 1580 to 1650. Numerous tables document t more...

Price: $159.30

The study examines relative clauses in spoken German from an extensive empirical corpus of informal and formal interactions. It provides a comprehensive grammatical analysis of one of the central structural features of German, using consistent oral language data. The analysis of the corpus is marked by its combined use of quantitative and qualitative data, and takes account of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic relationships. more...

Price: $176.00

In his late novels, Goethe formulates a profound critique of language and thus challenges his own capacity to represent. Goethe’s fundamental scepticism about language derives from an irresolvable ambiguity of words coupled with limitations on their expressiveness; in the case of Elective Affinities and Journeyman Years this leads to the conception of an open work of art. Using detailed textual analysis, Christian Mittermüller reconstructs a hitherto scarcely recognised connection between scepticism about language and poetic theory, and in so doing opens up a new avenue for approaching Goethe’s late works. more...

Price: $93.00