Dieser Band versammelt Beiträge zum weiten Gebiet der narrativen Ethik mit einem Schwerpunkt auf erzählender Literatur und Prozessen der Selbsterzählung. Am Anfang stehen Beiträge zum Stand der Forschung zur narrativen Ethik aus theologischer Perspektive und zur Frage nach dem theologischen Zugriff auf literarische Texte sowie der Situierung narrativer Ethik im interkulturellen Kontext. Ein zweiter Teil legt den Fokus auf Aushandlungen von Identität in autobiographischen Texten. Exemplarisch werden Quellen aus der Antike, der Zeit um 1800 und dem 20. Jahrhundert ausgewertet. Abschließend widmen sich Beiträge der Bedeutung von Selbsterzählung im Zusammenhang von seelischem Leiden und Suchtkrankheit. [The Narrated Self. Narrative Ethics from the Perspectives of Theology and Literary Studies] The contributions to this collection belong to the vast field of narrative ethics, with a focus on narrative literature and the processes of self-narration. The first section looks at the current scholarly field of narrative ethics in theology and at theological approaches to literary texts. The focus of the second section of the collection is on the negotiations of identity in autobiographical texts. There is a particular emphasis on exemplary sources from antiquity and from the time of the 19th and 20th centuries. The last two chapters of the collection inquire into the meaning of self-narration in the realm of mental suffering and addictive illness.

Ulrike Draesner is a prize-winning writer of novels, short stories, critical essays and poetry, and one of the foremost authors in Germany today. While a number of volumes have been published in German on her work, the current Companion offers the first volume on Draesner in English, capitalising on the interest in her work in Germany and further afield. Introducing Draesner’s major novels and short stories, poetry collections and essays, as well as giving an overview of existing research focusing on migration, memory, science, gender and bodily experience, chapters by international scholars in this volume also break new ground by focussing on visual culture, poetology, nature, the posthuman and Draesner’s reception of English literature and medieval culture. A comprehensive bibliography, commissioned interview and original writing by Draesner make the volume a valuable research tool for scholars and students. This will become essential reading for all those interested in Draesner, women’s writing, literature and history, and contemporary German prose and poetry.

Included in the 2018 summer reading list by New York Times Books A modern-day glimpse into the surprising reality of life in Iran. Iran: A destination that is seldom seen by westerners yet often misunderstood. A country that simultaneously “enchants and enrages” those who visit it. A place where leading a double life has become the norm. In Couchsurfing in Iran, award-winning author Stephan Orth spends sixty-two days on the road in this mysterious Islamic republic to provide a revealing, behind-the-scenes look at life in one of the world’s most closed societies. Through the unsurpassed hospitality of twenty-two hosts, he skips the guidebooks and tourist attractions and travels from Persian carpet to bed to cot, covering more than 8,400 kilometers to recount “this world’s hidden doings.” Experiencing daily what he calls the “two Irans” that coexist side by side—the “theocracy, where people mourn their martyrs” in mausoleums, and the “hide-and-seek-ocracy, where people hold secret parties and seek worldly thrills instead of spiritual bliss”—he learns that Iranians have become experts in navigating around their country’s strict laws. Though couchsurfing is officially prohibited in Iran—the state fears spies would be able to travel undetected through the country—more than a hundred thousand Iranians are registered with online couchsurfing portals. And thanks to these hospitable, English-speaking strangers, Orth gets up close and personal with locals, peering behind closed doors and blank windows to uncover the inner workings of a country where public show and private reality are strikingly opposed.

Based on a true story, this haunting tale centers on two brutal murders--the first of a local forester and the second of a Jewish moneylender near a beech tree--and the impact these events have on the life of Friedrich Mergel, a herdsman with a turbulent family history. A prototype of the murder mystery and a thoughtful examination of village society, this intriguing novella contains hints of the Gothic and the uncanny, including ominous thunderstorms, mysterious disappearances, eerie doppelgangers and grizzly discoveries, as well as a famously ambiguous climax.

This edited volume sets the groundwork for a dialogue between transformative learning and continental theories of Bildung in adulthood. Both theoretical frameworks bring meaning to the complex learning process of individuals as they develop a more critical worldview. In this volume, a variety of authors from different countries and theoretical backgrounds offer new understandings about Bildung and transformative learning through discussion of theoretical analyses, educational practices, and empirical research. As a result, readers gain greater insight into these theories and related implications for teaching for change. From the various chapters an exciting relationship between both theories begins to emerge and provides impetus for greater discussion and further research about two important theories of change in the field of adult education. /div

Examines how uses of fictional storytelling reflect the secularization process that coincided with the rise of the modern novel. The modern novel appeared during the period of secularization and intellectual change that took place between 1660 and 1740. This book examines John Bunyan's Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress, Johann Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and J. G. Schnabel's Insel Felsenburg as prose works that reflect the stages in this transition. The protagonists in these works try to learn to use language in a pure, uncorrupted way. Their attitudes towards language are founded on their understanding of the Bible, and when they tell their life stories, they follow the structure of the Bible, because they accept it as the paradigmatic story. Thus the Bible becomes a tool to justify the value of telling any story. The authors try to give their own texts some of Scripture's authority by imitating the biblical model, but this leads to problems with closure and other tensions. If Bunyan's explicitly religious works affirm the value of individual narratives as part of a single, universal story, Grimmelshausen's and Defoe's protagonists effectively replace the sacred text with their own powerful, authoritative stories. J. G. Schnabel illustrates the extent of the secularization process in Insel Felsenburg when he defends the entertainment value of escapist fiction and uses the Bible as the fictional foundation of his utopian civilization: arguments about the moral value of narrative give way to the depiction of storytelling as an end in itself. But Bunyan, Grimmelshausen, Defoe, and Schnabel all use positive examples of the transfiguring effect of reading and telling stories, whether sacred or secular, to justify the value of their own works. Janet Bertsch teaches at Wolfson and Trinity College, Cambridge.

Despite all the assertions towards the end of the twentieth century that the literary subject had expired along with the author, the wave of autobiographies published in German after the Wende was a clear indication that, on the contrary, life stories were very much alive. In this study, Owen Evans examines the work of eight authors - Ludwig Harig, Uwe Saeger, Ruth Klüger, Günter de Bruyn, Günter Kunert, Christoph Hein, Grete Weil and Monika Maron - who all published personal texts after 1989 dealing either with life in Nazi Germany or the GDR, and in some cases both. By means of close textual analysis, Evans explores the impact these regimes had on the individuals concerned and the contrasting ways in which the authors handle the autobiographical project. They adopt varying textual strategies to render the self on the page, with some employing overt fiction, and yet in each case, the project was clearly motivated by the need to treat psychological wounds inflicted on the self by totalitarianism. In their mapping of the contours of oppression, the texts at the heart of this study combine to offer a powerful defence of literary autobiography, in Germany at least, as a valuable means of tackling the legacy of totalitarianism.

Johann Jakob von Grimmelshausen (1622-76) wished to be taken seriously as a writer, which by and large, in his own day, he was not. He was in fact the author of the first great German novel, Der abentheuerliche Simplicissimus (1688), out of which arose a kind of cycle of `Simplician' novels. Later generations have made up for this neglect, and established him as an accomplished satirist and profound allegorist, who confronted the temporal and eternal issues of the seventeenth century. This study sets out to show, principally through detailed textual analysis, that Grimmelshausen's `Simplician style' allows of the co-existence of general religous and moral concerns with a spontaneous response to the individual vitality, curiousness, and above all, humour of life, which is the motive force of true storytelling. In addition, while the constituent novels of the `Simplician Cycle' should be and are considered as separate entities, the author's claim that they should also be seen as a coherent whole cannot be brushed aside, and this becomes a progressively more important theme.

This book documents Radio Revolten, the international radio-art festival in Halle, Germany, which took place in October 2016 and featured an independent station, installations, live performances, conferences, workshops and public interventions.