Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift

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Die Suche erzielte 3 Treffer.

Stefan Bub

Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, Jahrgang 69 (2019), Ausgabe 2, Seite 189 - 207

According to the importance of myth and childhood in the work of Cesare Pavese the contrast between cultivated land and wilderness constitutes a significant topic in the collection ‚Feria d’agosto‘ (1946). Many of his characters/first-person narrators are fascinated by the experience of rural life where they encounter a non-human space of untamed nature beyond culture. In ‚Feria d’agosto‘ we find two stories which are of particular importance in this context. ‚Storia segreta‘ focuses on the memory of inaccessible nature, subterranean spaces and moist earth permeated by roots and enclosing live and death. In a heightened manner, ‚Nudismo‘ describes the attempt of a mimetic fusion with nature in a hidden place (under a hazy sky) that leads to images of death, decomposition, and bare existence (symbolized by mud and naked roots) which transcend Pavese’s idea of myth. As certain thematically related passages in the novel ‚Il diavolo sulle colline‘ (1949) reveal, nakedness means existential vulnerability. Finally, the narrating ‘I’ has to realize the impossibility of the attempt to leave the sphere of human existence.

Stefan Bub

Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, Jahrgang 67 (2017), Ausgabe 2, Seite 167 - 184

In the context of his ‚Arcades Project‘ Walter Benjamin notices the disappearance of the stars in Charles Baudelaire’s ‚Fleurs du Mal‘. Baudelaire’s sonnet ‚Obsession‘, for example, speaks of the search for void, darkness and nudity in view of the familiar starlight. This attraction of the unknown characterizes also the nihilistic mysticism of Georges Bataille’s poetry in which one encounters the idea of a fall in infinite dark space. At the same time the stars gain a new meaning according to what Bataille calls his “anthropomorphisme déchiré” (‚Le Coupable‘ ). A number of Bataille’s poems link the universe and its stars with distinctive notions of his thinking like ‘sacrifice’, ‘wound’, ‘eroticism’, ‘disgust’, ‘death’ and ‘decay’ and try to express the experience of decomposition.

Stefan Bub

Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, Jahrgang 63 (2013), Ausgabe 3, Seite 347 - 362

J.-K. Huysmans’ last book, Les Foules de Lourdes (1906), is connected with his conversion to Catholicism in the 1890s. Huysmans, who visited Lourdes in 1903 and 1904, criticizes, among other things, the atrocities of its religious architecture and art. For this reason, Kurt Tucholsky refers to Huysmans in the chapter Lourdes of his travelogue Ein Pyrenäenbuch (1927) which describes the place as an anachronism and a mass phenomenon. Tucholsky appreciates Huysmans’ fierce observations but does not share his belief in the miracle and the holiness of the place. Beyond these evident contrasts, however, the close comparison of the two texts reveals more complex analogies and differences concerning the encounter with crowds of pilgrims, human suffering and religious symbols.

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