Der Band enthält 15 Artikel zur Frage nach postmodernen Schreibweisen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur. Anders als viele eher theoretisierende Beiträge auf diesem Gebiet besteht die Mehrzahl der hier versammelten Aufsätze aus konkreten Textanalysen. Es gibt Beiträge zur bundesdeutschen Literatur aus den letzten vier Jahrzehnten, zur Literatur der DDR, der Schweiz und in Österreich, zu feministischer und interkultureller Literatur. Die Leitfrage ist fast allen Beiträgen lautet: Gibt es ein postmodernes Schreiben, das ein kritisches, politisches und ethisches Engagement nicht ausschließt und das an Vorstellungen von subjektiver Authentizität festhält?

By recasting instances of ‘German’ cultural production around the turns of centuries – 1800, 1900, 2000 – the essays in this volume examine the role that color has played in perceiving and representing ethnic difference. In innovative essays, literary scholars, historians, anthropologists and art historians support an overarching thesis: that the ‘origins’ of a modern, ‘ethnic’ imagination, inscribe patterns of seeing, whereas more recent developments involve processes of de-colorization and metaphorization. By preserving the difference in disciplinary approaches, methods and writing styles, the volume presents a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to German Studies, and is therefore of interest to Germanists, as well as to all others engaged in the study and scholarship of German Culture. Contributors: Christine Achinger, Nana Badenberg, Helen Cafferty, Fatima El-Tayeb, Gudrun Hentges, Uli Linke, Andreas Michel, Thomas Miller, Daniel Purdy, Assenka Oksiloff, Wendy Sutherland, Birgit Tautz. Der Band untersucht die Rolle der Farbe in Prozessen der Wahrnehmung und Darstellung ethnischer Unterschiede in der deutschsprachigen Kultur an drei Jahrhundertwenden: 1800, 1900, 2000. Die interdisziplinären Essays von Literaturwissenschaftlern, Historikern, Anthropologen und Kunsthistorikern bieten Lesarten, die sich auf vielfältige Phänomene beziehen und die These unterstützen, daß das Ethnische zunächst überwiegend visuell vorgestellt und versprachlicht wurde, bevor es einer zunehmenden Metaphorisierung und “Entfärbung” unterlag. Die angebotenen Deutungsmuster repräsentieren keine kohärente Wahrheit; vielmehr sind sie als Symptome unterschiedlicher Wissensformationen, d.h. unterschiedlicher Disziplinen, Methoden und “Schreibverfahren“, zu sehen. Mit Beiträgen von Achinger, Badenberg, Cafferty, El-Tayeb, Hentges, Linke, Michel, Miller, Purdy, Oksiloff, Sutherland, Tautz.

Inhalt: Birgit TAUTZ: Introduction: Color and Ethnic Difference or Ways of Seeing Part I: 1800 Gudrun HENTGES: Die Erfindung der 'Rasse' um 1800 - Klima, Säfte und Phlogiston in de Rassentheorie Immanuel Kants Wendy SUTHERLAND: Black Skin, White Skin and the Aesthetics of the Female Body in: Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler's Die Mohrinn Daniel PURDY: The Whiteness of Beauty: Weimar Neo-Classicism and the Sculptural Transcendence of Color Assenka OKSILOFF: The Eye of the Ethnographer: Adalbert von Chamisso's Voyage Around the World Part II: 1900 Thomas R. MILLER: Seeing Eyes, Reading Bodies: Visuality, Race and Color Perception or a Threshold in the History of Human Sciences Andreas MICHEL: "Our European Arrogance": Wilhelm Worringer and Carl Einstein on Non-European Art Nana BADENBERG: Mohrenwäschen, Völkerschauen: Der Konsum des Schwarzen um 1900 Fatima EL-TAYEB: "We are Germans, We are Whites, and We Want to Stay White!" African Germans and Citizenship in the early 20th Century Part III: 2000 Uli LINKE: Shame on the Skin: Post-Holocaust Memory and the German Aesthetics of Whiteness Christine ACHINGER: Colouring the invisible: The figure of the 'black drug dealer' as a projection of socially produced fears Helen CAFFERTY: Orfeo and Sam: Racial, Sexual, and Ethnic Otherness in Dörrie's Keiner liebt mich (1994) and Sanoussi-Bliss' Zurück auf los (1999) Birgit TAUTZ: Epilog: Farblose Räume

A challenging new reading of Grass's literary work and political writings that examines how the author has reacted to sustained public interest in his person from the mid-1960s onwards. Braun draws together an eclectic body of literary writing and suggests that questions of authorship lie at the heart of Grass's work.

In opposition to an essentialist conceptualization, the social construct of the human body in literature can be analyzed and described by means of effective methodologies that are based on Discourse Theory, Theory of Cultural Transmission and Ecology, System Theory, and Media Theory. In this perspective, the body is perceived as a complex arrangement of substantiation, substitution, and omission depending on demands, expectations, and prohibitions of the dominant discourse network. The term Body-Dialectics stands for the attempt to decipher – and for a moment freeze – the web of such discursive arrangements that constitute the fictitious notion of the body in the framework of a specific historic environment, here in the Age of Goethe.

The two-volume work Modernism has been awarded the prestigious 2008 MSA Book Prize! Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres, locations, and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical, aesthetic, and historical questions, 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts, from individual texts to national literatures, from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism, literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical, environmental, urban, and political domains, including issues of race and space, gender and fashion, popular culture and trauma, science and exile, ­all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.