Carl Niekerk
Man and Orangutan in Eighteenth-Century Thinking: Retracing the Early History of Dutch and German Anthopology.
Following Cassirer’s Philosophy of the Enlightenment, this article argues that eighteenth-century natural history, in its movement toward temporalization, demonstrated an active interest in the principles of transformation and evolution, challenging older static models. A particularly clear example of this tendency is the debate about the relationship between humans and anthropoid apes. Even though much of the data is still unreliable and very few actual depictions of anthropoid apes exist, throughout the eighteenth century the issue of the relationship between humans and apes is debated with great vigor, and many prominent intellectuals participated. The beginnings of modern anthropology, and in particular the works of Camper and Blumenbach, are closely connected to this debate; only after the idea of an evolutionary relationship between humans and apes is abandoned does anthropology as a theory of human diversity begin to develop as an autonomous discipline. (CN)
Ruth J. Owen
The Body as Art in Early-Twentieth-Century German Poetry
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, clusters of poems, by both major and minor poets, evoke bodies as art objects, such as statues, paintings, and floral ornaments. In part this originates in a desire to synthesize the ancient and the modern, or to posit a quasi-sexual model of art-reception and art-creation. The symbol-laden bodies constitute a play with aesthetic tradition: strict separation of the made image from the mortal, birthing body allows poets to explore how bodies are conceptualized. They set silent corporeal gesture against lyric language: whilst sonnet form counters the disintegration of broken art-bodies, the voiceless, non-intellectual model of communication also challenges the poem. In the shift from a visual to a linguistic medium, gaps open up, so that images are not just reproduced but critically interpreted in body poems; the critical gaps around bodies’ speechlessness show up the power of spectatorship and the satisfied gaze. (RJO)
Kathleen Condray
Language and Power, Homoeroticism and Illness: A Reading of Jan Peter Bremer’s Der Fürst spricht
Jan Peter Bremer has enjoyed great commercial success with the publication of four novels, yet like other Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis winners, he remains largely ignored by literary scholars. This article explores Bremer’s fêted work Der Fürst spricht (1996). While reviewers in the popular press focus on the novel’s themes of loneliness and isolation, political intrigue, and the Herr-Knecht relationship, neither the importance of language to the story nor the theme of homosexual longing explored through its deceptively streamlined prose have until now been investigated. The essay examines how the eponymous Prince manipulates language to control others and uses linguistic power to construct the world as he desires it to exist, all in an attempt to win his underling as a lover. However, the illness motif of the story links the sexual impulses of the Prince with death, implying that his homosexual yearning is doomed from the outset. (KC)