Engaging and sobering. Traces the development of Yizkor from the original memorializing of Jewish communities destroyed by the Crusaders to the touching service we have today, and reflects on how we remember both personal losses and the martyrs of history.

Both Judaism and Christianity have authorized clergy, charged with fulfilling a multitude of tasks in their respective communities. They teach, provide pastoral care, and preach. They lead worship, hold services and offer counseling regarding all aspects of life. They perform religious rites at the beginning and end of life as well as in-between. They make decisions regarding religious questions, serve as administrators, and possibly even mediate ‛between heaven and earth’. The concrete forms of realization and the functions of the office are not only defined through theological specification but are also subject to trends and influences. This in turn leads to constant change and adaptation.

Passions of the Sign traces the impact of the French Revolution on Enlightenment thought in Germany as evidenced in the work of three major figures around the turn of the nineteenth century: Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist. Andreas Gailus examines a largely overlooked strand in the philosophical and literary reception of the French Revolution, one which finds in the historical occurrence of revolution the expression of a fundamental mechanism of political, conceptual, and aesthetic practice. With a close reading of a critical essay by Kleist, an in-depth discussion of Kant's philosophical writing, and new readings of the novella form as employed by both Goethe and Kleist, Gailus demonstrates how these writers set forth an energetic model of language and subjectivity whose unstable nature reverberates within the very foundations of society. Unfolding in the medium of energetic signs, human activity is shown to be subject to the counter-symbolic force that lies within and beyond it. History is subject to contingency and is understood not as a progressive narrative but as an expanse of revolutionary possibilities; language is subject to the extra-linguistic context of utterance and is conceived primarily not in semantic but in pragmatic terms; and the individual is subject to impersonal affect and is figured not as the locus of self-determination but as the site of passions that exceed the self and its pleasure principle. At once a historical and a conceptual study, this volume moves between literature and philosophy, and between textual analysis and theoretical speculation, engaging with recent discussions on the status of sovereignty, the significance of performative language in politics and art, and the presence of the impersonal, even inhuman, within the economy of the self.

Bringing together the analyses of the literary world-system, translation studies, and the research of European cultural nationalism, this book contests the view that texts can be attributed global importance irrespective of their origin, language, and position in the international book market. Focusing on Slovenian literature, almost unknown to world literature studies, this book addresses world literature’s canonical function in the nineteenth-century process of establishing European letters as national literatures. Aware of their dependence on imperial powers, (semi)peripheral national movements sought international recognition through, among other things, the newly invented figure of the national poet. Writers central to dependent national communities were canonized to represent their respective cultures to the norm-giving Other – the emerging world literary canon and its aesthetic ideology. Hence, national literatures asserted their linguo-cultural individuality through the process of worlding; that is, by their positioning in the international literary world informed by the supposed universality of the aesthetic.

Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture challenges a model of literary production that persists in literary studies: the so-called Geniekult or the idea of the solitary male author as genius that emerged around 1800 in German lands. A closer look at creative practices during this time indicates that collaborative creative endeavors, specifically joint ventures between women and men, were an important mode of literary production during this era. This volume surveys a variety of such collaborations and proves that male and female spheres of creation were not as distinct as has been previously thought. It demonstrates that the model of the male genius that dominated literary studies for centuries was not inevitable, that viable alternatives to it existed. Finally, it demands that we rethink definitions of an author and a literary work in ways that account for the complex modes of creation from which they arose.

In What Is a World? Pheng Cheah, a leading theorist of cosmopolitanism, offers the first critical consideration of world literature’s cosmopolitan vocation. Addressing the failure of recent theories of world literature to inquire about the meaning of world, Cheah articulates a normative theory of literature’s world-making power by creatively synthesizing four philosophical accounts of the world as a temporal process: idealism, Marxist materialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Literature opens worlds, he provocatively suggests, because it is a force of receptivity. Cheah compellingly argues for postcolonial literature’s exemplarity as world literature through readings of narrative fiction by Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, Ninotchka Rosca, and Timothy Mo that show how these texts open up new possibilities for remaking the world by negotiating with the inhuman force that gives time and deploying alternative temporalities to resist capitalist globalization.

Over the past two decades there has been great interest in cosmopolitanism across the human and social sciences. Where, earlier, it had largely been a term associated with moral and political philosophy, cosmopolitanism has now become a widely-used term in the social sciences. It is now integral to much of cultural, political and social analysis. This is the first comprehensive survey in one volume of the interdisciplinary field of cosmopolitan studies. With over forty chapters written by leading scholars of cosmopolitanism, this book reflects the broad reception of cosmopolitan thought in a wide variety of disciplines and across international borders. Both comprehensive and innovative in the topics covered, the Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies is divided into four sections: major theoretical debates, where the emphasis is on recent developments cultural topics in the social sciences the politics of cosmopolitanism major world varieties of cosmopolitanism. The Handbook answers the need to take modern cosmopolitanism out of its exclusive western context and relate it to the historical experiences of other world cultures. This is a major work in defining the emerging field of cosmopolitanism studies. Throughout, there is a strong emphasis on interdisciplinarity, with essays covering philosophy, literary theory, history, international relations, anthropology, communications studies and sociology. The Handbook’s clear and comprehensive style will appeal to a wide undergraduate audience across the social sciences and humanities.