FROM NINEVEH TO BABYLON: THE IMAGE OF MANHATTAN IN MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE (NEW YORK).
Item
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Title
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FROM NINEVEH TO BABYLON: THE IMAGE OF MANHATTAN IN MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE (NEW YORK).
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Identifier
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AAI8713803
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identifier
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8713803
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Creator
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STOEFFLER, CLAUDIA.
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Contributor
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Burton Pike
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Date
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1987
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Germanic
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Abstract
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The image of the city in literature reflects the historical change in the configuration of the physical city. The enclosed circular emblem representative of the Medieval and Renaissance city has given way to an image suggestive of the uncertain and the infinite in the twentieth century. The city of New York exemplifies this kaleidoscopic nature of the modern city, and German literature is replete with images of Manhattan as a graphic expression of our age. The three texts analyzed, Kafka's novel fragment Amerika (Der Verschollene), Brecht's poem "Der verschollene Ruhm der Riesenstadt New York" and Bachmann's radio play Der gute Gott von Manhattan reflect mutable and often mutually contradictory images of the city, and to a large extent, represent but a point on the continuum of German anti-urbanism.;In analyzing the three texts, my aim was not to determine the degree of verisimilitude between the writer's vision of New York and the topographical city, but rather to explore the cities of the mind that emerge. Kafka's New York is a city of perpetual change that reflects the elusive nature of the city itself. Brecht's poem, with its intention of referentiality, reveals itself to be more complex and paradoxical than the author may have intended, and the tension between the metaphorical and the representational is most pronounced in his text. Bachmann, as had Brecht, relies on stereotypical images to gain detachment from the object, the city, whereas Kafka captures the sense of New York through abstraction, or in Mumford's term, "etherealization". The three authors reflect the emphasis on the temporal over the spatial characteristic of the twentieth century, and perceive New York as an agent divorcing man from society. The longstanding view of the city as community has yielded to the city as solitude.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Germanic Languages & Literatures
