David Hermann

False Apocalypses and Neverending Stories A report on the incomprehensible challenge of the short story vignette — “Paradox ist: wir wissen, dass wir sterben müssen, aber wir glauben es nicht, weil wir es nicht denken können.” - Hans Blumenberg - This report proposes that our minds are inherently uncomfortable with the literary form of the short story because we are [...]

In this paper I will discuss Lawrence Venuti’s notions of “fluent discourse” and “resistancy” in relation to a close reading of two translations of Paul Celan’s poem Du liegst, one of which is reasonably recent (Ian Fairley’s, of 2007), while the other (Michael Hamburger’s, of 1988) lies nearly halfway between Celan’s death in 1970 and the [...]

INVISIBLE CITIES Literary responses of exile and counter-exile in the poetries of Bertolt Brecht and Franz Werfel This report analyses the markedly different literary responses to banishment in the poetries of exiled writers Bertolt Brecht and Franz Werfel, particularly in relation to the representation (and lack thereof) of the modern urban environment, which abounded in the artistic [...]