Showing papers in "Modern Language Review in 2019"

The biographical fashioning of the Americas' first Saint: Santa Rosa de Lima (1586-1617)

Abstract: This article studies the disjunctions between the narratives created around the first saint of the Americas, Santa Rosa de Lima (1586–1617). According to the Peruvian popular version, Rosa could speak to mosquitoes, whereas the Vatican version eschews mention of the insects. The fact that the first official biography, Vita mirabilis et mors pretiosa (1664), was written not by a German Dominican called Leonardus Hansen but by an elusive English Dominican, Vincent Torre, suggests that this text was part of the Popish Plot and constitutes a coded attempt to bring England back to the True Faith.

Weimar Classicism and Intellectual Exile: Schiller, Goethe and Die Horen

Abstract: This article asks how Goethe and Schiller’s works in Die Horen, in the shadow of the French Revolution and the ‘émigré question’, prefigured the concerns of later exile writing. It asks how far they established principles of ‘intellectual exile’ that have gained currency in the writings of Edward Said and Vilém Flusser. It compares Schiller’s Ästhetische Briefe with Adorno’s reception of them; it examines concepts of exile in Goethe’s ‘Erste Epistel’ and Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten. Finally, it asks how elegy fits into a poetics of exile. The article suggests a fresh perspective on Weimar Classicism, and widened scope for Exilforschung.

How to Be Alone with Others: Plessner, Adorno, and Barthes on Tact

Abstract: This article looks at three theories of tact that are rarely compared. Although developed during different periods of radical change in the twentieth century, they are based on the same diagnosis: the key problem of modern subjectivity is not the increased distance between individuals, but, on the contrary, its disappearance. This article explores how tact, understood as an ongoing negotiation between the demands of convention and the ‘unruly claims of the individual’ (Adorno), emerges as a figure of distance, and of deviation, a figure that does not only serve to describe the relations between individuals, or the individual within the group, but that also facilitates alternative forms of critical inquiry.