bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Alte und neue Dilemmata: Frauen in der ehemaligen DDR
Authors: Dölling Irene
Published: October 2010

The euphoria of 1989, when large numbers of GDR women publicly demanded change, was followed first by the rush toward unification and then by the sobering recognition of the problems stemming from life in a unified Germany. When in March 1990 46% of voting women supported the conservatives, it became clear that they were not interested in a feminist approach to issues affecting women. This article locates the roots of those attitudes in the "patriarchal-paternalistic" structures of GDR state socialism. Although these policies granted women economic independence, they at the same time furthered their dependence on the "father" state, encouraging women to abdicate responsibility for improving their own lives. (SF)
Auflehnung gegen die Ordnung von Sprache und Vernunft: Die weibliche Wirklichkeitsgestaltung bei Waltraud Anna Mitgutsch
Authors: Kecht Maria-Regina
Published: October 2010

Since the appearance of her first novel Die Züchtigung (1985), Waltraud Anna Mitgutsch has established herself as an important and insightful writer. Intended as an introduction to her work, comprising four novels so far, the essay discusses Mitgutsch's central themes of female "Entfremdung," "Ichlosigkeit," and "Sprachverlust," and analyzes her use of poetic language and narrative perspective. The essay complements the interview with Mitgutsch, in which she comments on her work and its reception, expresses her views on being a writer in Austria, addresses the questions of female vision and feminist aesthetics, and explains her artistic intentions and goals. (M.-R.K.)
Birth as Metaphor in Kleist's Das Erdbeben in Chili: A Comparison of Critical Methodologies
Authors: Gelus Marjorie
Published: October 2010

This essay compares a semiotic and a feminist interpretation of Heinrich von Kleist's Das Erdbeben in Chili with particular emphasis on one theme in the story: birth. The story shows a tendency toward abstraction that marks much of Kleist's work and bespeaks a disturbed relationship to the material world. The same tendency is evident in the semiotic treatment of the story, and both can be seen as a function of the traditional patriarchal privileging of the abstract that has been increasingly denaturalized and challenged by certain currents in feminist and gender studies. (M.G.)
Who's Looking? Who's Laughing?: Of Multicultural Mothers and Men in Percy Adlon's Bagdad Cafe
Authors: Streese Konstanze , Shea Kerry
Published: October 2010

At the time of its release Bagdad Cafe was praised as a subversive comedy with utopian characteristics, lightheartedly contesting sexism and racism, sketching out sisterhood and multicultural bonding. Our reading identifies the ideological gloss that allows the film to disregard social and cultural disparities, as well as to blur the audience's awareness of neo-colonial and pseudo-feminist strategies of representation and narration. Our inquiry into the film examines the comic use of stereotypes as a device for generating pleasure and acceptance, which veils both a particularly oppressive definition of femininity centered in traditional notions of the maternal, and an unmistakable allegory for the process of colonial expansion and neo-colonial domination. (K.S./K.S.)
Harsdörffers Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele als geschlechtsspezifische Verhaltensfibel: Ein Vergleich mit heutigen Kommunikationsstrukturen
Authors: Griesshaber-Weninger Christl
Published: October 2010

This article analyzes the construction and legitimization of a gender-specific hierarchy of communication in Georg Philipp Harsdörffer's Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele (1641-1649) that shows striking similarities to patterns observable today. Both the historical dimension and the durability of this construction are highlighted by correlating Harsdörffer's responses to the Baroque "querelle des femmes" with recent findings in the field of sociolinguistics. The comparison of specific examples taken from Baroque and contemporary discourse identifies some communication patterns "discovered" by linguists as diverse as Fishman, Tannen, and Trömel-Plötz as belonging to a centuries-old social organization of sexual difference. (CG-W)
Auseinandersetzung mit dem Abendlanddenken: Gisela von Wysockis Abendlandleben
Authors: Waschescio Petra
Published: October 2010

The article examines Gisela von Wysocki's innovative first drama Abendlandleben (1987), in which she does away almost entirely with the dialogue structure of classical theatre and avoids familiar modes of individual self-exploration and -analysis. Instead, the self-determined bourgeois subject becomes a conglomerate of diverse social rules and ways of thinking that assign a separate status to women. They, like the "savages" in masculinist Enlightenment discourse, have become surfaces for the projection of unassimilatable desires. By illuminating Wysocki's modus operandi , the article aims to establish a basis for further scholarly discussion of her work. (JC)
Memory and Criticism: Ruth Klüger's weiter leben
Authors: Lorenz Dagmar C.G.
Published: October 2010

Klüger's autobiography is a literary account of an Auschwitz survivor, an immigrant to the United States and a professor of German literature, weiter leben is also a metadiscourse on earlier accounts and studies of the Holocaust and the exile experience. Klüger's familiarity with international Holocaust literature and Fascism theory lends this very personal work, with its close-up descriptions of concentration camp life and insights into the experience of a Jewish woman scholar in contemporary Germany, a multi-dimensional, critical perspective and an unusual scope and depth. Klüger confronts the present with her own recollections and her generation's collective memory. (DCGL)
Domesticating the Reader: Women and Die Gartenlaube
Authors: Belgum Kirsten
Published: October 2010

I argue here that popular reading material in the nineteenth century, besides providing a source of entertainment, also helped create a sense of national identity in its readers, unifying a disparate nation into a cohesive reading audience. In discussing the most popular illustrated magazine of the time, Die Gartenlaube , this paper outlines the text's specific strategies for distinguishing between male and female readers. Although the magazine explicitly addressed the entire family, women readers were presented with a restricted, exclusively domestic identity. This analysis of the narrative domestication of women contributes to an understanding of the role of gender both in the conception of the nation and in the creation and consumption of popular culture. (KB)
Equality Decreed: Dramatizing Gender in East Germany
Authors: Sieg Katrin
Published: October 2010

This essay situates four plays by and about GDR women, written between 1951 and 1963, in relation to the nascent state's gender legislation. The plays register the initially aggressive implementation of gender equality at work and at home that ended with the national and economic crisis created by the cold war. Under pressure, the state expected women to reshoulder domestic responsibilities and concomitant gender roles. Women's drama propagated acceptance of the "double burden," forfeiting feminist politics for family ideology and thereby shaping the contradictory construction of a female, socialist subject. (KS)
"We are adjacent to human society": German Women Writers, the Homosocial Experience, and a Challenge to the Public/Domestic Dichotomy
Authors: Joeres Ruth-Ellen B.
Published: October 2010

With the help of several Anglo-American theoretical texts from philosophy and political theory, the thesis is put forth that the expression of friendship/love that is conveyed by homosocial correspondences between middle-class German women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries allowed for the creation of another sort of social sphere. This sphere in turn made room for the expression of desire and the construction of identities that the rigid ideology of public and private spheres did not acknowledge. Examples from a letter by Rahel Varnhagen and the epistolary novel Die Günderode by Bettine von Arnim are used to illustrate the thesis. (R-EBJ)
Motherhood and the "New Woman": Vicki Baum's stud. chem. Helene Willfüer and Irmgard Keun's Gilgi-eine von uns
Authors: von Ankum Katharina
Published: October 2010

The article situates Vicki Baum's stud. chem. Helene Willfüer (1926) and Irmgard Keun's Gilgi—eine von uns (1931) in the gendered political and cultural discourses of the inter-war years. The protagonists of both texts embody a new idealized female type: the rationalized, desexualized, yet compassionate worker of the modern age. By advocating this reconfiguration of the "New Woman" into the "New Mother," both texts participate in the adaption of an essentialist femininity to a cult of rationalization that supported patriarchal and capitalist structures, preparing the ground for the backlash against women in 1933. (KvA)
"Germany, Pale Mother": On the Mother Figures in New German Women's Film
Authors: Möhrmann Renate
Published: October 2010

This investigation is part of a comprehensive book project on the representation of motherhood in literature, painting, fairy tales, film and television, theater, and advertising. Edited by Renate Möhrmann, it will be published in the spring of 1996 by Metzler Verlag under the title Verklärt—Verkitscht—Vergessen: Die Mutter als ästhetische Figur . Since this project will be the first examination in German of the aesthetic representation of motherhood throughout various disciplines—and from the perspective of the mother rather than that of the daughter—the focus is less on the critical interpretations of individual works than on the treatment of motherhood within specific genres. (RM)
Feminist Criticism and Bakhtin's Dialogic Principle: Making the Transition from Theory to Textual Analysis
Authors: Eigler Friederike
Published: October 2010

Following a brief introduction to the Russian linguist and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, this article reviews recent publications that combine Bakhtin's theories and feminist criticism. The article moves from a discussion of theory and "feminist dialogics" to its application in the analysis of specific literary works and then concludes with a Bakhtinian reading of two stories by Lou Andreas-Salomé. My assessment of the often uncritical appropriation of Bakhtinian notions—in particular the frequent references to "dialogue"—seeks to recover Bakhtin's "dialogic principle" as a category of critical analysis. Drawing on Bakhtin's socio-linguistic approach to literature, I maintain, can be most productive in making the often difficult transition from feminist theory to the analysis of individual texts. (FE)
Dokument und Fiktion: Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumers Der weibliche Name des Widerstands
Authors: Lange Sigrid
Published: October 2010

This essay introduces Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer's Der weibliche Name des Widerstands to American audiences. Thematically this collection of portraits of women who died in the Holocaust is discussed as a contribution to the literature of women's antifascist resistance; at the same time the article examines the poetics of the work as distinct from documentary prose. With reference to Kerschbaumer's linguistic studies as well as her feminist and political intentions, the article develops a specific semiotic of the female. (SL)
Masochism and Femininity in Lou Andreas-Salomé's Eine Ausschweifung
Authors: Haines Brigid
Published: October 2010

Beginning with a close reading of Lou Andreas-Salomé's Eine Ausschweifung (1898) within the contexts of her other work and of turn-of-the-century understandings of masochism, this article then explores the text's contradictory depiction of feminine masochism in the light of Deleuze's theory of the pre-oedipal origins of the phenomenon. Its originality lying in its locating of patriarchal power structures within women's subjectivities, the text's puzzling affirmation of masochism in women (despite the simultaneous cataloguing and condemnation of its pathological symptoms) is interpreted as offering resistance to oedipal repression. (BH)
Private Anxieties/Public Projections: "New Objectivity," Male Subjectivity, and Weimar Cinema
Authors: McCormick Richard W.
Published: October 2010

The so-called "New Objectivity" in the arts and culture of the Weimar Republic was characterized by an erosion of the boundary between the "high culture" associated with the bourgeois public sphere and new forms of mass culture directed at other classes in the emerging modern consumer society. Related to this erosion of boundaries were anxieties about the destabilization of traditional models of (national, ethnic, class, gender, sexual) identity. Change seemed especially threatening in its effect on traditional ("natural") gender roles, as can readily be demonstrated in G.W. Pabst's film Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926). Similar anxieties about gender are also crucial to subsequent developments in German culture and society. (RWM)
From "Halbtier" to "Übermensch": Helene Böhlau's Iconoclastic Reversal of Cultural Images
Authors: Grant Alyth F.
Published: October 2010

Böhlau's Halbtier! questions the images of femininity current in the arts and philosophy of the nineteenth century that idealized such notions as self-sacrifice and identifies their role in the continued oppression of women. It shows how women are seduced by such images, internalizing their messages, so that they help perpetuate their own subjection. Böhlau seeks to create a counter-image in her heroine, both drawing on and subverting the philosophy of Nietzsche; she critically examinines the sociological implications of the many variations of the animal motif to be found there, yet adopts his vision of the Übermensch as the model for her heroine. (AFG)
Now You See It, Now You Don't: Afro-German Particulars and the Making of a Nation in Eva Demski's Afra: Roman in fünf Bildern
Authors: Adelson Leslie A.
Published: October 2010

Promising both a national history (of the Federal Republic) and a particular one (of the "mixed race" protagonist), Afra filters both through a textual economy of black-and-white symbolism that alternately foregrounds and backgrounds the "visibility" of different levels of historical experience. By examining competing functions of racialized discourse in the novel, this essay probes the relationship between Afra's story and the national one in which it is made to assume representational status. Not a literary rendition of an Afro-German sociological reality, Demski's text nonetheless invokes a kind of social discourse that does have some bearing on the Afro-German project of self-definition in the 1990s as well as our disciplinary obligation to respond to it. (LAA)
Woman as Sexual Criminal: Weimar Constructions of the Criminal Femme Fatale
Authors: Hales Barbara
Published: October 2010

The construction of the sexual-criminal woman, evident in early twentieth-century medical and social discourses, is part of the cultural currency of Weimar Germany. The femme fatale as criminal monster occurs in mainstream journalism of the period as well as in Weimar scientific studies. In psychological and social treatises concerning the criminal woman, woman's innate vanity and excess of sexuality motivate criminal action. Weimar street films like Karl Grune's The Street and Joe May's Asphalt further demonstrate interest in the female criminal, as woman stands in for the evils of the city. Representations of the criminal woman reveal Weimar society's discomfort with modernity in general, including the fear of women's liberation, the new importance of the city, and the fledgling German republic. (BH)
Searching for the (M)Other: The Rhetoric of Longing in Post-Holocaust Poems by Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer
Authors: Bower Kathrin
Published: October 2010

The post-Holocaust poems of Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer demonstrate shifts toward experimentation in form and message, particularly in relation to religious belief and the expressive potential of poetic language. The experience of the Holocaust forced both authors to confront the interconnections between their Jewishness, their relationship to the German language, and their displacements as homeless exiles. They turned to poetry as a means of mediating the past in the present, and their post-Holocaust writings represent acts of both remembrance and reproduction. As victims and witnesses to suffering, devastation, and loss, Sachs and Ausländer appealed to images of the maternal in an effort to recreate the intimacy and security of the irretrievably lost past, adapting the multivalence of the Mother for their own purposes in the pursuit of a new language of faith. (KB)
The Red Flower and the Rod
Authors: Müller Herta
Published: October 2010

Rumanian-born Herta Müller was one of the two invited guest speakers at the 1996 Women in German annual conference in St. Augustine, Florida. She has been awarded a number of prestigious prizes for her writing, including the "aspekte" Literaturpreis in 1984, the Förderpreis des Bremer Literaturpreises in 1985, the Marie Luise Fleisser Prize and the Ricarda Huch Prize in 1989, and the Kleist Prize in 1994. At the editors' request, she contributed this previously unpublished autobiographical essay, titled "Die rote Blume und der Stock" in German, to the Yearbook. The translator of this story, Sieglinde Lug, has recently completed the translation of a collection of Müller's stories, Niederungen . The translation is forthcoming with the University of Nebraska Press. A bibliography of the author's book-length works is appended to this essay.
Some Theses Regarding Women's Writing
Authors: Moníková Libuše
Published: October 2010

Born in Czechoslovakia, Libuše Moníková was one of two invited guest speakers at the 1996 Women in German annual conference in St. Augustine, Florida. Her works have been recognized with numerous prizes, including the Alfred Döblin Prize in 1987, the Franz Kafka Prize in 1989, the Adalbert von Chamisso Prize in 1991, and the Berliner Literaturpreis and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal in 1992. This essay was previously published in Die Zeit . A bibliography of the author's book-length works is appended to this essay.
Sophie Mereau's Authorial Masquerades and the Subversion of Romantic Poesie
Authors: Purdy Daniel
Published: October 2010

Hermeneutic understanding purports to penetrate a spiritual depth imbedded within texts. Historically when a subject's engagement with a text has not attained hermeneutic insight that encounter has been characterized as a mere performance, an unsuccessful attempt to empathize with a content or character not wholly one's own. In the following paper, I wish to investigate how masquerade disrupts an aesthetics that predicates meaning on its own ability to invoke a reality behind the surface of representation. The early fiction and late translations of Sophie Mereau demonstrate that literary masquerade served as a strategy for women writers to counter the gendered ontology implicit in early Romantic aesthetics. (DP)
Ottilia Fenchlerin's Songbook: A Contribution to the History of Sixteenth-Century German Women's Literature
Authors: Classen Albrecht
Published: October 2010

Women authors do not figure prominently in the annals of the history of early German literature. If their voices can be heard, they are primarily those of mystics and other religiously oriented writers. This article examines a songbook that the Strasbourg burgher Ottilia Fenchlerin commissioned a scribe to produce in 1592. It contains primarily women's songs that were composed, according to the narrative voices, by women and that explicitly address women's issues and concerns. Although they seem to continue the medieval tradition of Frauenlieder composed by male poets, both the detailed literary analysis of exemplary pieces and comparisons with some representative Middle High German women's songs and Provençal trobairitz poetry undoubtedly created by women writers indicate that the lyrics in Fenchlerin's songbook address women's issues and concerns in a surprisingly radical fashion without precedent in the history of German literature. (AC)
The Sexual Woman and Her Struggle for Subjectivity: Cruel Women in Sade, Sacher-Masoch, and Treut
Authors: Wilke Sabine
Published: October 2010

Nietzsche mentions the cruel, sadistic woman who requires the whip to maltreat the male masochist. The masochistic projection of the cruel woman is embodied in Sade's female figures and in Sacher-Masoch's Wanda, among others. The cruel woman reappears in Monika Treut's work as the one who actively lives out her sexuality and consciously renounces the institutions of marriage and family. This paper traces the question of how far this re-emergence of the figure of the cruel woman in Treut's films can be attributed to a cultural-critical impulse, or whether she should be seen as constructed in the patriarchal image of woman. (SW)
Katherine Mansfield Revisited: Constructions of the Self in Christa Moog's Aus tausend grünen Spiegeln
Authors: Mundt Hannelore
Published: October 2010

This essay places Christa Moog's Aus tausend grünen Spiegeln (1988) in the tradition of women's autobiographical writings that resort to multiple displacements of subjectivity. Moog, who bases her novel on her expatriation from the GDR in 1984 and her subsequent travels throughout Europe and New Zealand in the 1980s, retreats behind a first-person narrator who, in turn, disappears behind the life and writings of Katherine Mansfield. A closer look at the narrative strategies, which interlace the lives of Moog's narrator and Mansfield, can reveal that Moog presents freedom from restrictive structures quite ambivalently. In the case of both women, the desire for self-realization and independence results in lives overshadowed by a sense of displacement and the loss of orientation and identity. (HM)
Woman, Violence, Nation: Representations of Female Insurgency in Fiction and Public Discourse in the 1970s and 1980s
Authors: Becker Bettina T.
Published: October 2010

Germany in the 1970s was subject to a wave of terrorist activities in which women such as Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin played a significant role. The mass media and public discourse in general struggled with women's participation in these cases of extreme physical violence. In this article, I explore the articulations of the discourses of gender, nation, and violence in the German news magazine Der Spiegel , Ulrike Meinhof's television play Bambule , and Traude Bührmann's Flüge über Moabiter Mauern (Flights over Moabit's Walls), in order to illuminate representations of female insurgency. My argument centers around their different uses of deviance and the changing character of social criticism in the 1970s and 1980s.
Grand Hotel : The Sexual Politics of a Popular Culture Classic
Authors: King Lynda J.
Published: October 2010

This article analyzes four stage and screen adaptations of Vicki Baum's 1929 international best-seller Menschen im Hotel . Through the New Woman character of Flämmchen and her relationship with men, Baum injected issues of sex, prostitution, and women's role in Weimar society into her original. The study traces how adapters from 1930 to 1959 reconfigured these sensitive issues as they attempted to make the text palatable to their audiences; it then examines the implications of each producer's changes for the sexual politics of the period by focusing on contemporary audience response. (LJK)
No Man, No Cry? The Film Girls in Uniform and Its Discourses of Political Regime
Authors: Zimnik Nina
Published: October 2010

Leontine Sagan's film Girls in Uniform (Germany, 1931) offers a critique of Prussianism and, by extension, of patriarchy and fascism. By dint of a shift in psychoanalytic paradigms, this essay displaces the 1947 interpretation of Siegfried Kracauer, who thought the film opts for authoritarianism. Instead, the author argues that the master signifier, the closure offered by a new regime, is lacking: Girls in Uniform presents a cinematic space that tends toward democracy. The investigation of the status and function of the representation of men, i.e., patriarchal figures, in the film and its critical discourses is pivotal to this conclusion.
The Collapse of Language and the Trace of History in Ingeborg Bachmann's "Simultan"
Authors: Craig Siobhan S.
Published: October 2010

In Ingeborg Bachmann's story "Simultan" ("Word for Word"), history—-specifically the history of fascism in Austria and Italy-and language have collapsed as structures and subsided into symbolic rubble, ruled by metonymy and slippage, exceeding any stable meanings. Fascist violence is always present through its very absence, in lacunae and silences. Bachmann's protagonist, both privileged and cursed by her awareness of this language of echo and displacement, chooses to become blind and deaf to the trace of fascism; ultimately, she is "cured" of its discomfiting effects by submitting to the "murder" of her unique subjectivity. (SSC)
" Fräulein Doktor ": Literary Images of the First Female University Students in Fin-de-Siècle Germany
Authors: Mazón Patricia M.
Published: October 2010

The admission of women to higher education in Germany caused considerable debate from 1865 to 1910 and beyond. By examining fictional representations of women students before their admission to university study became official policy, this essay shows the Studentin as a contested cultural symbol. She epitomizes both women's emancipatory strivings and male anxieties about social change and modernity. Imagining women as intellectual equivalents to men generated responses ranging from male authors' satires or dark visions of modernity to female authors' sentimental or radical plotlines.
Teacher and/or Mother: Personal and Political Transformations in Hilde Maria Kraus's Nine Months
Authors: Kautz Elizabeth
Published: October 2010

Published in 1931, Hilde Maria Kraus's Nine Months ( Neun Monate ) defies both social and literary norms in that the novel's protagonist, Olga, chooses to continue her teaching career after the birth of her child. Kraus's novel, however, draws on a concept of "spiritual motherhood," whose conservative, essentialist elements appear to relativize the novel's emancipatory potential. In this article, I examine the protagonist's complex process of personal transformation: she experiences how the personal intersects with the political, as she begins to critique social and political inequalities based on class and gender. I show that while Olga eventually embraces the teaching profession as a means for social reform, she differs from the more traditional proponents of spiritual motherhood in that she challenges bourgeois concepts of marriage, morality, and class privilege. I argue that her version of spiritual motherhood is infused with socialism and a more radical type of feminism, thus making her decision to combine both career and motherhood truly exceptional. (EK)
Amalia Schoppe's Die Colonisten and the "menace of mimicry"
Authors: Wilson Judith
Published: October 2010

Amalia Schoppe (1791-1858) was well known as an editor, publicist, and popular author in her own time, but she was soon forgotten. She is accorded a place in German literary history as the mentor of Friedrich Hebbel, but rarely as a writer, and until now there has been little response to calls for a reassessment of her work. Here I examine just one of Schoppe's books, the two-volume novel Die Colonisten (The Colonists, 1836). The text draws on traditional topoi of the time in what appears to be a conventional script reaffirming the values of middle-class European society. Drawing on the popular legend of Inkle and Yarico and the concept of mimicry elaborated in Bhabha's The Location of Culture , I attempt to show how the text, in a sophisticated double-voiced discourse, links colonization and middle-class gender relations. Such a reading challenges previous interpretations of the text and the unqualified dismissal of Schoppe's work as trivial and insignificant. (JW)
Nineteenth-Century German Literary Women's Reception of Madame de Staël
Authors: Martin Judith E.
Published: October 2010

This essay examines Madame de Staël's impact on German women writers from Romanticism to the Vormärz , including Caroline Paulus, F.H. Unger, Johanna Schopenhauer, Ida Hahn-Hahn, and Luise Mühlbach. I argue that these German women refer in their novels to Staël's exemplary life and to her influential stories of politically engaged and artistic heroines in order to authorize their own discourses on art and politics. These authors' intertextual responses to Staël's powerful statements on women's social and artistic potential reflect their ambivalent positions regarding women's cultural role, and show that Staël's example inspired their development of a female authorial identity. (JEM)
The New Scheherazade
Authors: Faschinger Lilian
Published: October 2010

The New Scheherazade ( Die neue Scheherazade , Paul List Verlag, 1986) is Lilian Faschinger's first novel. As in the original Thousand and One Nights , Faschinger's narrator tells stories to escape death, if not literal death at the hands of a wrathful King Schahriar, then figurative death in the stifling existence of an Austrian wife. The novel, which Faschinger has called "my contribution to postmodernism," features her characteristic humor and treats many of the themes found in her later works: the latent fascism in Austrian society, the uses and misuses of psychoanalysis, and the role of the Catholic Church in the oppression of women, among others. The narrator, whose kinship with and distance from her literary ancestor are symbolized by her different-colored eyes (the legacy of an Austrian father and an Iranian mother), recounts adventures in which she and other fictional characters interact with "real," historical figures (such as the artist Christo, author Gertrude Stein, and actor Clint Eastwood) as well as with characters from movies or literary works, rock musicians, the narrator's own family and friends, and even cartoon characters. A self-interrupting narrative continually calls the narrator's authority into question. Scenes from everyday life suddenly merge with fairy tale motifs (Snow White, Bluebeard) or switch from narrative to drama. As the narrator comments (15), "...there is no significant difference between thought and deed, between imagination and reality." The excerpts included here are from the first few pages of the novel, where the narrator explains her situation and gives us her family history, and two later sections, one describing the first love of the narrator's Aunt Steffi (as she herself would have told it, had she ever done so), and the other imagining the artist Christo confined in an asylum for abnormal criminals. The narrator's musings on love take her to the confessional; the excerpt ends with a line that also occurs in Magdalena the Sinner ( Magdalena Sünderin , 1995): "What do you mean by repent?"
Eighteenth-Century Libertinism in a Time of Change: Representations of Catherine the Great
Authors: Dawson Ruth
Published: October 2010

During and soon after Catherine II's long reign in Russia, accounts of her in her native Germany often included gendered representations of her sexual behavior. Assessments in prayers, biographies, caricatures, and histories shifted from chaste and virtuous to adulterous and libertine. Meanwhile, interpretations of sexuality also changed. Extramarital sexuality among aristocrats and royals that long elicited no shock became a target of middleclass criticism, boosted by anti-royalist sentiments of the French Revolution and new middle-class notions of faithful womanhood. Two novels about Catherine written soon after her death, Miranda (1798) by Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht and Der Günstling (1808) by Caroline Auguste Fischer, navigate these shoals. (RD)
"Weil ich der raschen Lippe Herr nicht bin": Oral Transgression as Enlightenment Disavowal in Kleist's Penthesilea
Authors: Benbow Heather Merle
Published: October 2010

Kleist's Penthesilea so shocked contemporary readers that the writer insisted: "She really did eat him, Achilles, out of love." Indeed, the oral aspect of Penthesilea's destruction of Achilles is sometimes overlooked, an omission this article seeks to address. I argue that by radically conflating oral appetites, the figure of Penthesilea disawows Englightenment culture in three respects: the ideal of feminine modesty; aesthetic values that posited woman as an object of appreciation rather than an agent of aesthetic taste; and the Enlightenment's social contract, which subordinated bodily appetites to the interests of the community.
Re-Producing the Class and Gender Divide: Fritz Lang's Metropolis
Authors: Stoicea Gabriela
Published: October 2010

The following article outlines the economy of gender relations in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). I approach the topic of gender relations from a previously neglected perspective that examines connections between gender, sexuality, and work as conceptualized by Marx and the early Socialists who preceded him. Close analyses of several key sequences will demonstrate that Metropolis translates cinematically the inversion of causality between work and sexuality that Marx introduced after the Saint-Simonians, from whom he otherwise distanced himself. By keeping women either completely outside the cinematic space or relegating them to certain strategic roles within the narrative, Harbou and Lang move towards their own understanding of the relationship between work, gender, and sexuality, suggesting that cinema not only reflects, but actively participates in the creation and maintenance of the status quo.
The Making of Transnational Textual Communities: German Women Translators, 1800-1850
Authors: Piper Andrew
Published: October 2010

By portraying the work of female translators from the first half of the nineteenth century, this essay explores how women created new textual communities that capitalized on the increasing diffusion of print networks. In doing so, women used translation to negotiate new relationships to print and publishing that facilitated their emergence as a professional writing class. Translations by women also promoted the creation of new, increasingly international cultural geographies in which translation functioned not as a force for homogenization, but as a means of identifying cultural differences. (AP)
Heterosexism, Misogyny, and Mother-Hatred in Rilke Scholarship: The Case of Sophie Rilke-Entz (1851-1931)
Authors: Ritmeester Tineke
Published: October 2010

This article examines from a feminist perspective the prevailing misogynistic view of Sophie Rilke-Entz. It discusses the themes of mother hatred and heterosexism and analyzes motherhood, marriage, divorce, and domestic violence against the socio-historical background. The author speculates about the role of Rilke's father, who has been virtually ignored by scholars. Finally, she presents evidence that, whereas Rilke in many ways had an unexceptional family background, his mother was an independent and emancipated woman.
"Rückhaltlose Subjektivität": Subjektwerdung, Gesellschafts- und Geschlechtsbewußtsein bei Christa Wolf
Authors: Wilke Sabine
Published: October 2010

The essay seeks to orient Wolf's contribution to the problem of subjectivity and gender within the philosophical and theoretical tradition. Two models of subjectivity, both emerging out of German Idealist thought, are discussed as theoretical framework for this text: Schelling's idea of an absolute subject versus Hegel's concept of synthetically constructed individuals. The essay intends to show that Wolf avoids the pitfalls of traditional thinking about subjectivity by having Kassandra undergo a learning process that leads her from an essentialist model of the female subject to an acceptance of a dialogic form of individuality incorporating the presence of other voices. Instead of shedding other (patriarchal) inscriptions to reveal an authentic self, she finally accepts the challenge of working towards a socially relevant form of subjectivity constituted by intersubjective processes.
Demographic parameters of Akodon montensis (Mammalia: Rodentia) in an Atlantic Forest remnant of Southeastern Brazil
Authors: Jordão Juliana Costa , Ramos Flavio Nunes , da Silva Vinícius Xavier
Published: October 2010

Small mammals seem to be affected by edge effects, hence understanding the local dynamics of these populations is important to assess the risks to which they are exposed. The objective of this study was to compare population size, sex ratio and home range size of the rodent Akodon montensis (Cricetidae) between the edge and interior of an Atlantic Forest fragment in the dry (June-August) and rainy (December-February) seasons. The population was sampled using capture-mark-recapture methods and a spool-and-line device was used to map the movements. The population size was significantly higher in the rainy season relative to the dry season, and this pattern can be related to the higher food availability in this period, as observed in other studies. However, there was no difference in the number of individuals captured in the edge and interior. The home range size showed no significant differences between edge and interior and between males and females, although, in a general way, the females showed a greater home range size related to the males. The absence of differences between edge and interior could result from the small size of the remnants and extrapolation of edge conditions to the interior.
An Evaluation of Containership Registrations in Taiwan: Application of the Grey Relation Analysis Model
Authors: Lin Cheng-Wei , Chung Cheng-Chi , Yang Shih-Hao
Published: October 2010

To strengthen competitiveness, many shipowners have shifted their vessels’ registrations to open registers as flag of convenience (FOC) vessels. The tendency of flagging out in Taiwan is more serious. This paper adopts the analytic hierarchy process and grey relation analysis model to evaluate the relative attractiveness of different types of registers to containership corporations in Taiwan. The preferences of registry locations are also compared and analyzed. The study finds that the FOC locations of Panama and Liberia are the most preferred locations of vessel registrations for containership corporations in Taiwan, followed by the quasi-FOC locations of Singapore and Hong Kong. Other traditional maritime countries and Taiwan are the final options. Based on the findings of this study, some suggestions are proposed to the government as a reference in revising relevant shipping policies.
Surprising Fitness Consequences of GC-Biased Gene Conversion. II. Heterosis
Authors: Glémin Sylvain
Published: October 2010

Heterosis is a widespread phenomenon corresponding to the increase in fitness following crosses between individuals from different populations or lines relative to their parents. Its genetic basis has been a topic of controversy since the early 20th century. The masking of recessive deleterious mutations in hybrids likely explains a substantial part of heterosis. The dynamics and consequences of these mutations have thus been studied in depth. Recently, it was suggested that GC-biased gene conversion (gBGC) might strongly affect the fate of deleterious mutations and may have significant fitness consequences. gBGC is a recombination-associated process mimicking selection in favor of G and C alleles, which can interfere with selection, for instance by increasing the frequency of GC deleterious mutations. I investigated how gBGC could affect the amount and genetic structure of heterosis through an analysis of the interaction between gBGC and selection in subdivided populations. To do so, I analyzed the infinite island model both by numerical computations and by analytical approximations. I showed that gBGC might have little impact on the total amount of heterosis but could greatly affect its genetic basis.
A Case of Atrial Fibrillation Induced by Inhaled Fluticasone Propionate
Authors: Oteri Alessandro , Bussolini Anna , Sacchi Milena , Clementi Emilio , Zuccotti Gian Vincenzo , Radice Sonia
Published: October 2010

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common rhythm disorder observed in clinical practice. Several case reports and case-control studies have associated this condition with the use of systemic corticosteroids. However, to our knowledge, no case of AF induced by inhaled corticosteroids has been reported in the literature. We describe here the case of a 15-year-old boy who reported a paroxysmal AF with fast ventricular response after the administration of fluticasone propionate, which resolved after discontinuation of the drug. Use of the Naranjo adverse-drug-reaction probability scale indicated a possible relationship between the patient's development of AF and fluticasone propionate therapy. More studies are needed to confirm the association between this arrhythmia and the use of high doses of inhaled corticosteroids. Data from this report already suggest that clinicians should be aware of the possibility of adverse cardiovascular reactions when corticosteroids are prescribed also as inhaled preparations.
Neurocognitive and Endothelial Dysfunction in Children With Obstructive Sleep Apnea
Authors: Gozal David , Kheirandish-Gozal Leila , Bhattacharjee Rakesh , Spruyt Karen
Published: October 2010

OBJECTIVE:

Pediatric obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) is associated with neurocognitive and endothelial dysfunction. However, it is unclear whether these 2 frequent morbidities of OSAS in children represent similar or different underlying pathophysiological processes, because they have never been concurrently assessed in children.

METHODS:

Consecutive children (ages 5–8 years) with polysomnographically based OSAS underwent cognitive battery evaluation (Differential Ability Scales and the NeuroPsychological Assessment Battery) and cuff-occlusion hyperemic tests for assessment of endothelial function. The presence of neurocognitive deficits (NC+) was defined on the basis of the presence of ≥2 abnormal cognitive test results. Endothelial dysfunction (ED+) was defined as a time to maximal postocclusive hyperemic response of ≥45 seconds (Tmax).

RESULTS:

Twenty-one control children and 87 children with OSAS completed both cognitive and endothelial tests. Of these children, 48 were NC+ and 50 had a Tmax of ≥45 seconds, and at least 80% of these children were in both groups. Conversely, among children in whom there was no presence of neurocognitive deficits (NC−), only 25.6% were ED+, whereas among those without endothelial dysfunction (ED−) only 21.6% were NC+. Furthermore, approximately one-third of the children with OSAS was NC− and ED−. Thus, findings on hyperemic vascular responses were highly predictive of neurocognitive status.

CONCLUSIONS:

Endothelial dysfunction and neurocognitive deficits are more likely to coexist than otherwise predicted from the frequency of each of these morbidities alone in pediatric OSAS. Thus, both of these morbid consequences may share similar pathogenetic mechanisms. Furthermore, a simple test such as the postocclusive hyperemic vascular response may help detect at-risk patients for neuropsychological deficits.
Relationship Between Bed Sharing and Breastfeeding: Longitudinal, Population-Based Analysis
Authors: Blair Peter S. , Heron Jon , Fleming Peter J.
Published: October 2010

OBJECTIVES:

This is an investigation into the longitudinal patterns of bed sharing, the characteristics associated with those patterns, and the relationship with breastfeeding.

METHODS:

The study used prospective, population-based data from the United Kingdom to investigate nocturnal bed sharing at 5 time points from birth to 4 years of age. Of 14 062 live births, 7447 (53%) had data available for all time points.

RESULTS:

Latent class analysis identified 4 mutually exclusive groups, broadly described as nonsharers (66%), early bed sharers (only in infancy) (13%), late bed sharers (after the first year) (15%), and constant bed sharers (throughout the 4 years) (6%). The boy/girl ratio and the proportion of families of nonwhite ethnicity were slightly higher in all 3 bed-sharing groups, compared with the non–bed-sharing group. Higher maternal educational achievement and higher social class were positively associated with early bed sharing, negatively associated with late bed sharing, and not associated with constant bed sharing. The 3 bed-sharing patterns were related significantly to breastfeeding at 12 months (P < .001), whether the families shared beds late (odds ratio: 1.72 [95% confidence interval: 1.36–2.18]), early (odds ratio: 2.36 [95% confidence interval: 1.87–2.97]), or for the whole period (odds ratio: 5.29 [95% confidence interval: 4.05–6.91]). The prevalence of breastfeeding was significantly higher among the groups that shared beds constantly or early for each of the first 15 months after birth.

CONCLUSIONS:

Advice on whether bed sharing should be discouraged needs to take into account the important relationship with breastfeeding.
Acoustic neurinomas: diagnosis and treatment
Authors: Ramina Ricardo , Manigua João Jarney , Meneses Murilo Sousa , Pedrozo Ari Antonio , Barrionuevo Carlos Eduardo , Arruda Walter Oleschko , Pineroli José Carlos
Published: October 2010

We present our experience with 83 patients with acoustic neurinomas (January 1988 to November 1996); 81 patients underwent surgery and 2 patients with intracanalicular neurinomas received conservative therapy due to their advanced age (1 case) and patient's option (1 case). The surgical approach was retrosigmoid/ trasmeatal and the goal was total removal in one procedure with preservation of facial and cochlear nerves. Radical removal of lesion was attempted in 79 cases and it was possible in 77 patients. Subtotal tumor resection was planned in 2 cases. Facial nerve function (grades 1 to III, House and Brackman) was preseved in 90% and hearing in 58% of those with preoperative hearing. Three patients died due to postoperative complications. Early diagnosis of acoustic neurinomas is the most important factor in the prognosis and is one of the most important conquest of neurophysiology and modern neuroimaging. The management of these patients still present many controversial points. This article presents the diagnostic procedures used for acoustic neurinomas, the advantages and disadvantages of the different surgical approaches and the alternative management of these lesions.
Anatomia cirúrgica do acesso nasal transesfenoidal para tumores da hipófise
Authors: Meneses Murilo S. , Rocha Juliana G. , Gonçalves Carolina G. , Petry Anna Carolina M. , Ramina Ricardo , Maniglia João J. , Pedrozo Ari A.
Published: October 2010

Foram analisadas diferentes medidas relacionadas ao acesso nasal transesfenoidal em 18 hemicabeças de cadáveres com o objetivo de estudar os limites e vantagens dessa via. Foram obtidos os seguintes valores médios (mm) para as principais medidas: diâmetro maior da narina 15,18; altura da cavidade nasal 44,11; distância narina - sela turca 71,71. Esses valores demonstram ser o acesso nasal uma via ampla e direta à sela turca. O presente estudo demonstrou também ser possível nesse acesso preservar o septo cartilágino e outras estruturas que são usualmente lesadas no acesso sublabial.