Johannes Kaminski

• Slovak Academy of Sciences

Werther is different Werthers but not everywhere at the same time. This study investigates how the novel’s interpretations, translations and literary adaptations have left their marks on the original text, but this time without judging them against the canonical ideas of academic criticism. It turns out that Werther’s narrative malleability facilit...

This paper discusses how Arthur C. Clarke’s four-volume Odyssey series (1968–1997) and Charles Stross’s Accelerando (2005) relate to humanity’s narcissistic injuries. Here, powerful AIs threaten the self-perception of humanity, which intuitively assumes that it holds a central position in the universe. Clarke’s and Stross’s texts are representative...

Toxic Temple pursues an interdisciplinary approach toanthropocenic issues in criticism and the arts. By integrating aesthetic andeducational perspectives, the book offers new approaches for understanding thecultural and environmental ramifications of the Age of Extinction.@font-face{font-family:"Cambria Math";panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;mso-font-c...

In Cixin Liu’s trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past (2008–2010) and Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (2015), the surface of planet Earth becomes uninhabitable amid global states of emergency, and central governments devise radical plans to ensure the survival of the human species. In contrast to the Old Testament, where human emancipation from nature is...

As the era of globalization and comfort ends, preparedness novels embrace humanity's dystopian future and leap at the chance for societal rejuvenation on more localized terms. The three textual case studies explored here put forward a value system derived from the lives of the pioneers and settlers. The frontier, a classic trope of American mytholo...

Mao Zedong's views on literature were enigmatic: although he coerced writers into “learning the language of the masses,” he made no secret of his own enthusiasm for Dream of the Red Chamber, a novel written during the Qing dynasty. In 1954 this paradox appeared to be resolved when Li Xifan and Lan Ling presented an interpretation that saw the tragi...

Rich in exclamations and ellipses, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther inhabits a linguistic space in German that does not immediately lend itself to literal translation. Its first translations into Japanese and Chinese coincided with periods of linguistic innovation, as writers and translators contributed to the development of vernacular writing...

Since the end of the Goethezeit and the advent of large-scale destruction of the biosphere, the way we observe nature has changed. While it holds true that the emphatic gaze at nature has become something of an anachronism, the synchronization of esthetics and science has not lost relevance. In Briefe aus der Schweiz: Zweite Abteilung , Goethe achi...

Charlie Chaplin, Luis Buñuel, Lars von Trier, Takeshi Kitano: Das Thema Blindheit zieht sich durch die ganze Filmgeschichte. Den blinden Protagonisten kommen dabei ganz unterschiedliche Funktionen zu. Zum einen werden durch sie die spezifischen Wahrnehmungsmöglichkeiten des Kinos sowie technische Neuerungen (wie z.B. vom Stumm- zum Tonfilm) reflekt...

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung features a number of passages that did not make it into the finalized version of the Lehrjahre. In one of them, the narrator rants against the protagonist’s over-consumption of coffee. The rise of German coffee consumption, commencing in the 1760s, was indeed an object of fierce debate. One of the spe...

Keeping the methodological challenges of comparative literature in mind, the present analysis of Cao Xueqin's Hong Lou Meng and Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre explores the structural parallels of the texts. The interplay between the realist outline of the main stories and the metanarratives is evaluated in the light of the theory of myth. Inst...

Unlike Anton Reiser, Karl Philipp Moritz's other novel, Andreas Hartknopf: Eine Allegorie has never been examined in the light of the author's Erfahrungsseelen-kunde. After discovering the narrator as the protagonist, a new light is cast on the epistemological value of Hartknopf's wisdom. The novel depicts the unheard of encounter of two individual...

Zusammenfassung Während Karl Philipp Moritz’ Erfahrungsseelenkunde schon lange als Prämisse für seine Arbeit an Anton Reiser gilt, wurde Andreas Hartknopf: Eine Allegorie noch nie dahingehend untersucht. Es gilt, im Erzähler den Protagonisten des Texts zu entdecken, um den individualpsychologischen Stellenwert der Weisheiten Hartknopfs auszuwerten....