Inconceivable Effects Ethics through Twentieth-Century German Literature, Thought, and Film / Martin Blumenthal-Barby.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Blumenthal-Barby, Martin, author.

, Cornell University Library, Author.

Contributor:

funder.

Series:

Signale (Ithaca, N.Y.)

Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethics in motion pictures.

Ethics in literature.

Ethics--Germany--History--20th century.

Ethics.

German literature--20th century--History and criticism.

German literature.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (222 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cornell University Press 2013

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Library, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Biography/History:

Martin Blumenthal-Barby is Assistant Professor of German and Film Studies at Rice University.

Summary:

In Inconceivable Effects, Martin Blumenthal-Barby reads theoretical, literary and cinematic works that appear noteworthy for the ethical questions they raise. Via critical analysis of writers and filmmakers whose projects have changed our ways of viewing the modern world-including Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, the directors of Germany in Autumn, and Heiner Mueller-these essays furnish a cultural base for contemporary discussions of totalitarian domination, lying and politics, the relation between law and body, the relation between law and justice, the question of violence, and our ways of conceptualizing "the human." A consideration of ethics is central to the book, but ethics in a general, philosophical sense is not the primary subject here; instead, Blumenthal-Barby suggests that whatever understanding of the ethical one has is always contingent upon a particular mode of presentation (Darstellung), on particular aesthetic qualities and features of media. Whatever there is to be said about ethics, it is always bound to certain forms of saying, certain ways of telling, certain modes of narration. That modes of presentation differ across genres and media goes without saying; that such differences are intimately linked with the question of the ethical emerges with heightened urgency in this book.

Contents:

"The odium of doubtfulness" : or, the vicissitudes of Arendt's metaphorical thinking

Why does Hannah Arendt lie? : or, the vicissitudes of imagination

"A peculiar apparatus" : Kafka's thanatopoetics

A strike of rhetoric : Benjamin's paradox of justice

Pernicious bastardizations : Benjamin's ethics of pure violence

The return of the human : Germany in autumn

A politics of enmity : Müller's Germania death in Berlin.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This eBook is made available Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780801467387

0801467381

9780801467394

080146739X

OCLC:

857080722