Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Publication Introduction: Women and ageing in Irish writing, drama and film(Nordic Irish Studies Network, 2018) O'Neill, Margaret; Schrage-Frueh, Michaela[No abstract available]Publication Reimagining the Fourth Age: The ageing mother in the poetry of Mary Dorcey and Paul Durcan(Nordic Irish Studies Network, 2018) Schrage-Frueh, MichaelaIn my analysis of selected poems by Mary Dorcey and Paul Durcan, literary representations of the ageing mother are explored in conjunction with research in cultural and social gerontology relating to the demographic group of ‘deep’ old age. Presented with pervasive stereotypes such as old age as a second childhood or the cultural ‘decline narrative’, these poets seek to find a language and perspective that does not diminish the ageing mother’s dignity, agency, and personhood while still attending to the physical and sociocultural realities of old age. In light of the iconic, timeless image of the mother in Irish culture, such explorations gain special pertinence. They also reveal how the mother’s ageing process impacts the mother-child relationship and informs the adult child’s own ageing. By thus moving the ageing mother to the centre of their poems, these poets not only reimagine what has been termed the ‘social imaginary of the fourth age’ but remind us of our shared vulnerability and the need for intergenerational connection and care.Publication Remembering at the margins: trauma, memory practices and the recovery of marginalised voices at the Berlin-Hohenschonhausen memorial(Taylor & Francis, 2017-12-11) Byrnes, Deirdre; College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies, National University of Ireland GalwayThe Berlin-Hohenschonhausen memorial is located on the site of the main remand prison for people detained by the Stasi, the GDR secret police. In this exploration of memory practices at the site, the concept of marginalisation will be used both in a geographical and in a metaphorical sense. I will first consider the significance of the prison's relatively peripheral location in the north-eastern district of Lichtenberg. Anchoring the analysis within theories of museology, in particular the museum as experiential site and as site of trauma, I will explore the manner in which the once-marginalised voices of former prisoners now find expression as they conduct guided tours, thus continuing to recall their experiences of imprisonment and isolation at the very site where the trauma occurred. Visitors to the memorial can also view a permanent exhibition documenting the history of political persecution at the prison; eyewitness testimony is inscribed very powerfully into this narrative also. I will explore how past trauma is narrated and performed both during those guided tours and throughout the permanent exhibition. This analysis contends that the Berlin-Hohenschonhausen memorial is an essential space of agency, allowing for the articulation of previously marginalised voices and for their inscription into the post-unification memorial landscape.Publication Trembling Drums. The Permeable Membranes of Rilke’s “Weltinnenraum”(German Studies Association of Ireland, 2014) Pusse, Tina-Karen; |~|At first sight, looking at Rilke’s Duineser Elegien and Sonette an Orpheus when thinking of utopian, dystopian or heterotopian spaces represented in literature seems an unlikely choice. It is Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge which immediately lend themselves to an analysis within this paradigm, with its highly subjective description of a metropolis, with a narrator who is constantly, simultaneously in the past and in the present, with a constant disintegration of space and the I, which could be read as an ultimate study in Foucauldian heterotropes. And, I am sure, an interesting article could be written with this focus, perhaps culminating in a series of direct pointed questions: Is Malte himself actually alive as the ‘I’ that narrates the text? Or, is this rather the perspective of a revenant, who can pass easily through walls and time while making up plausible excuses why, in the entire text, nobody directly addresses him, so that he himself could just as well be invisible to the other characters in the text? But this will not be my undertaking in this article.Publication “I am coming!” Returning to the Womb in Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin and Michael Haneke’s Film La Pianiste(German Studies Association of Ireland, 2010) Pusse, Tina-Karen; |~|Elfriede Jelinek‟s Die Klavierspielerin (1983), 1 a novel about a piano teacher (Erika Kohut) at the Vienna conservatory in her late thirties who still lives with her mother in a small flat, deconstructs and anatomises myths of maternity very radically and successfully, perhaps better than any other German-language literary text. Erika‟s short moments of escape from her possessive mother are made up of little secrets, such as going to peep shows and porn cinemas or hurting herself in the bathroom as well as playing sadistic mind games with her students. But Erika‟s sadism in relation to her students and her sexual masochism are in fact addressed to her mother, who is simultaneously her penetrator, her object of hate and desire, and her accomplice. In this article, I will explore this complex sexual drive between mother and daughter.Publication Kontinuum der Ausnahmezustände. Hans-Henny Jahnn 1930-1950(De Gruyter, 2016-12-31) Pusse, Tina-Karen; Detlef Haberland; |~|1267881|~|Hans Henny Jahnn (1894‒1959) gilt heute als einer der „großen produktiven Außenseiter des [20.] Jahrhunderts“ und zugleich als „Verneiner der Zivilisation“1 Die meisten Standardwerke der deutschen Literaturgeschichte folgen im Grunde bis heute der nationalsozialistischen Presse, der er als ‚Kommunist und Pornograph‘ gilt, bewerten dies aber je nach politischer Ausrichtung als positiv oder negativ. Auch Bergs Sozialgeschichte merkt an, dass in fast allen seiner Texte das Inzesttabu gebrochen werde,2 sagt aber wenig über die ästhetische Dimension oder die Entwicklung seines Werks. Eine „Stunde Null“ lässt sich in Jahnns Schreiben nicht konstatieren; sein zwischen den Jahren 1937 und 1951 verfasster Roman Fluss ohne Ufer3 amalgamiert Elemente des expressionistischen Dramas mit zahlreichen intertextuellen Verweisen (z.B. auf Büchner, Rousseau und Kleist) und präsentiert sie in der Form eines modernen Romans (inklusive der genretypischen fragmentarischen Elemente), ohne dass sich Stilbrüche oder -verschiebungen am Datum des Kriegsendes oder Jahnns vorübergehender Rückkehr nach Deutschland festmachen ließen. Auch thematisch präsentiert sich das Jahnnsche Werk als Kontinuum – und zwar nicht als eines, das Terror und Entmenschlichung des Faschismus ignoriert, sondern eher als eines, dass diese nicht als Ausnahmezustand behandelt, sondern als ständige Möglichkeit der Entgleisung, die sich aus unterschiedlichen Motiven ins Alltagsleben seiner Protagonisten schieben.Publication Heidegger, or the neglect of boundaries(Copernicus Publications, 2015-05-05) Strohmayer, Ulf; |~|Benedikt Korf’s recent invitation to re-think the deployment of Heidegger’s philosophy within geography in the pages of this journal (Korf, 2014) is both opportune and essential: opportune, because the many and continuing controversies surrounding Heidegger’s political stance have been reignited following the on-going publication of his Schwarze Hefte (Heidegger, 2014a, b, and c); essential, because any invocation of “Heidegger” today arguably involves something additional to a reflection of the man, his politics, Weltanschauung and philosophy. What is also called for is a discussion of the conditions facilitating meaningful discourse about the nexus between “politics” and “knowledge”. Heidegger’s own construction of that nexus increasingly requires little by way of explanation: his involvement with National Socialism before, during and after his acceptance and subsequent relinquishing of the rectorship of Freiburg University in 1933, his refusal directly to comment on the Holocaust in the aftermath of World War II and the lack of support offered to his previous mentor and predecessor Edmund Husserl throughout the 1930s all speak volumes about just how the public person Heidegger saw fit to engage with politics. What is new, today, is that we can substantiate the charge of anti-Semitism given repeated pronunciations of undeniably anti-Semitic character in the Schwarze Hefte.Publication Das Mühlviertel und Connemara - Richard Wall zum Thema zweier mutierender Landschaftsräume(Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2007) Bourke, EoinPublication The Frankfurt Judengasse in Eyewitness Accounts from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century(Camden House, 1999) Bourke, Eoin