Browsing by Author "Norberg, Jakob"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
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    Adorno's Advice: Minima Moralia and the Critique of Liberalism
    (2011) Norberg, Jakob
    Adorno’s Minima Moralia was part of a publishing boom in the genre of advice literature in postwar West Germany. The combination of economic resurgence and attempted cultural restoration resulted in a widespread wish to master forming models of social intercourse; this craving for guidance accounts for the volume’s commercial success. But while Adorno participates in the culture of counseling, he couples practical suggestions with repeated announcements of the demise of the self-determining subject, the projected recipient of advice. He addresses problems that appear in the individual’s frame of attention but consistently disputes that this is a meaningful scene of action in the age of total administration. Minima Moralia both inhabits and violates the conventions of advice literature in order to dramatize the experience of the discrepancy between societal logic and the individual’s resources.
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    Authorship and Ownership
    (GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW, 2016-05) Norberg, Jakob
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    Disappearing Socialism: Volker Braun's Unvollendete Geschichte
    (2010) Norberg, Jakob
    One aspect of the Cold War’s legacy has slipped from collective memory: the distinctly socialist arguments against the regimes of the East, for instance the GDR.Volker Braun’s 1977 novella Unvollendete Geschichte provides an instructive example of the current invisibility of such socialist arguments. In the West, Unvollendete Geschichte has been read as a straightforward condemnation of an authoritarian state that penalizes individuals on illegitimate grounds. Yet Braun is a committed socialist and criticizes the state not for its violation of the individual’s integrity, but for the suppression of conflict internal to the collective. A historically sensitive reading reveals that Braun seeks to expose the (East German) state as a distorted manifestation of social collaboration, in line with a radical socialist tradition.
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    Disruptive Organizers: Wild children in German realism (1850-1900)
    (2020-05) Reif, Margaret
    This dissertation explores the intersection of childhood and wildness within the literary movement of German realism. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw the introduction of mandatory education and the consolidation of the middle-class family, both of which established childhood as a distinct phase. The literary movement of German realism emerged at the same time, with a focus on representing ordinary life and experiences with a particular concentration on bourgeois values and norms.. But many children in the works of this movement prove more fantastical than realistic, more extraordinary than ordinary, and more deviant than safely bourgeois. This study therefore examines how representations of wild children interact with the aesthetics of the average within German realism. Ultimately, this dissertation has two main points: First, depictions of wild children should not be read solely as a means of celebrating the average, middle class reality of the nineteenth-century through a strategy of the literary containment of wild children. Rather, the wild child initiates a redemptive transformation of reality and is a means for introducing that which would otherwise escape representation in realist prose fiction. Second, the frequent appearance of wild children within the literary movement of German realism serves as a rhetorical strategy to depict a changing nineteenth-century reality with regard to education, family, gender, nation and art, as well as a means to question the success of these structures. In order to make these arguments, this dissertation engages with four types of wild children: literary descendants of Goethe’s Mignon, fairytale children, differently abled children associated with the figure of Kaspar Hauser, and criminal children. It also considers the intersection of gender and wildness and the ways in which the language of wildness, culture and civilization have been used in Western literary traditions, particularly in a late-nineteenth-century German context.
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    Liberating Laughter: Dramatic satire and the German public sphere, 1790-1848
    (2020-05) Hertel, Jeffrey
    One of the most far-reaching consequences of the French Revolution was the spread of political debate. Across Europe, people of all sorts — not just princes, but peasants and peddlers as well— started talking politics. When, in the face of this, the princes of the German states censored traditional modes of public discourse including newspapers other print media, the burden of sociocritical discourse fell to an unlikely place: ridiculing entertainment in the form of satire and, more specifically, satiric theater. Not a place of reasoned discourse seeking the expression of consensus, satire attacks and ridicules its object, making it a fitting forum for the dawn of partisan politics. This dissertation traces the historical and cultural conditions peculiar to German dramatic satire between 1790 and 1848 as it compensated for a lack of political debate elsewhere. Looking at how satire in the public space of the theater became one of the premier channels of political debate in an age of revolutionary change and heavy-handed censorship, the work chronologically surveys the most important satiric dramas of the era, including works by August von Kotzebue, Ludwig Tieck, Joseph von Eichendorff, Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer, Johann Nestroy, Georg Büchner, and Karl Gutzkow. Through careful explication of the sociopolitical crises in which dramatic satirists intervened, we see how they tried to help the German people laugh their way to liberation.
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    No Coffee
    (2007) Norberg, Jakob
    A short history of coffee, and of civil society. What is it about coffee – and coffeehouses – that makes it so agreeable to the bourgeoisie? asks Jakob Norberg in a brief social history of the dark, rich brew. For Jürgen Habermas, the coffeehouse is a place where bourgeois individuals can enter into relationships with one another without the restrictions of family, civil society, or the state. It is the site of a sort of universal community, integrated neither by power nor economic interests, but by conviviality and common sense. For Carl Schmitt, coffee is a symbol of Gemütlichkeit, or the specious bourgeois desire to enjoy undisturbed security. And for Alexander Kluge, drinking coffee provides the opportunity for people to talk to each other beyond the constraints of purpose-governed exchanges, to enter into "human relationships". But who should be invited to participate in such relationships? With whom can we chat over a cup of coffee?
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    The Black Book: Karl Kraus's Etiquette
    (2007) Norberg, Jakob
    The conduct book stakes out the boundaries of correct behavior, making instructions for self-management available to anyone who strives for easy social integration. Given its close relation to the mores of the educated classes, it is a rather unlikely genre to employ for the misanthrope looking to repudiate society. Yet in a series of articles in 1905/06 in his journal Die Fackel, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus alluded to this genre, sharpening its rules to the point of absurdity as a means to completely close down rather than facilitate societal exchange. In Kraus’s etiquette, bad manners come to include all manners. The study of this little-known project enables us to understand Kraus’s obsessive preoccupation with clichéd speech as a critical response to the pathologies of communal life around 1900.
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    The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism
    (2022-04-30) Norberg, Jakob
    Vividly reconstructing the political ideas of the Brothers Grimm, Jakob Norberg transforms our image of history's most famous folklorists.
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    Wild Politics: Political imagination in German Romanticism
    (2020-05) Gill, John:
    The political discourse of German Romanticism is often interpreted reductively: as either entirely revolutionary, reactionary, or indeed apolitical in nature. Breaking with this critical tradition, this dissertation offers a new conceptual framework for political Romanticism called "wild politics". I argue that Romantic wild politics generates a sense of possibility that calls into question pragmatic forms of implementing sociopolitical change; it envisions imaginative alternatives to the status quo that exceed the purview of conventional political thinking. Three major fields of the Romantic political imaginary organize this reading: affect, nature, and religion.