Category: Faculty Bookshelf

Translation of Georg Brandes’s Friedrich Nietzsche. 《 尼采传》格奥尔格.勃兰兑斯 著, 安延明 译. 译林出版社.  Yilin Press, China. 2021

The seminal study by Georg Brandes that first introduced Friedrich Nietzsche to the world. The volume includes the complete text of the 1889 “Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism”(based largely on his lecture course of 1888), in addition to the complete Nietzsche—Brandes correspondence and two essays by Brandes written after Nietzsche’s death in 1900. This volume is perhaps the ideal introduction to the life and work of Friedrich Nietzsche, as it allows the reader to appreciate his great impact and originality at the time that he was writing.

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Peebles, Kelly Digby, and Gabriella Scarlatta. Representing the Life and Legacy of Renée de France . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2021.

This book considers the life and legacy of Renée de France (1510–75), the youngest daughter of King Louis XII and Anne de Bretagne, exploring her cultural, spiritual, and political influence and her evolving roles and actions as  fille de France , Duchess of Ferrara, and Dowager Duchess at Montargis. Drawing on a variety of often overlooked sources – poetry, theater, fine arts, landscape architecture, letters, and ambassadorial reports – contributions highlight Renée’s wide-ranging influence in sixteenth-century Europe, from the Italian Wars to the French Wars of Religion. These essays consider her cultural patronage and politico-religious advocacy, demonstrating that she expanded upon intellectual and moral values shared with her sister, Claude de France; her cousins, Marguerite de Navarre and Jeanne d’Albret; and her godmother and mother, Anne de France and Anne de Bretagne, thereby solidifying her place in a long line of powerful French royal women.

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Barnes, Leslie and Joseph Mai (eds.). The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul. Rutgers University Press, 2021

Born in 1964, Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh grew up in the midst of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal reign of terror, which claimed the lives of many of his relatives. After escaping to France, where he attended film school, he returned to his homeland in the late 1980s and began work on the documentaries and fiction films that have made him Cambodia’s most celebrated living director.

The fourteen essays in  The Cinema of Rithy Panh  explore the filmmaker’s unique aesthetic sensibility, examining the dynamic and sensuous images through which he suggests that “everything has a soul.” They consider how Panh represents Cambodia’s traumatic past, combining forms of individual and collective remembrance, and the implications of this past for Cambodia’s transition into a global present. Covering documentary and feature films, including his literary adaptations of Marguerite Duras and Kenzaburō Ōe, they examine how Panh’s attention to local context leads to a deep understanding of such major themes in global cinema as justice, imperialism, diaspora, gender, and labor.

Offering fresh takes on masterworks like  The Missing Picture  and  S-21  while also shining a light on the director’s lesser-known films,  The Cinema of Rithy Panh  will give readers a new appreciation for the boundless creativity and ethical sensitivity of one of Southeast Asia’s cinematic visionaries.

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The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. Eds. Mark Berry & Nicholas Vazsonyi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

The Companion is an essential, interdisciplinary tool for those both familiar and unfamiliar with Wagner’s Ring. It opens with a concise introduction to both the composer and the Ring, introducing Wagner as a cultural figure, and giving a comprehensive overview of the work. Subsequent chapters, written by leading Wagner experts, focus on musical topics such as ‘leitmotif’, and structure, and provide a comprehensive set of character portraits, including leading players like Wotan, Brünnhilde, and Siegfried. Further chapters look to the mythological background of the work and the idea of the Bayreuth Festival, as well as critical reception of the Ring, its relationship to Nazism, and its impact on literature and popular culture, in turn offering new approaches to interpretation including gender, race and environmentalism. The volume ends with a history of notable stage productions from the world premiere in 1876 to the most recent stagings in Bayreuth and elsewhere.

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Fictions of Legibility: The Human Face and Body in Modern German Novels from Sophie von La Roche to Alfred Döblin. Transcript (2020)

Reviewed in  German Studies Review
Reviewed in The German Quarterly

Gabriela Stoicea examines how the incidence and role of physical descriptions in German novels changed between 1771 and 1929 in response to developments in the study of the human face and body. As well as engaging the tools and methods of literary analysis, the study uses a cultural studies approach to offer a constellation of ideas and polemics surrounding the readability of the human body. By including discussions from the medical sciences, epistemology, semiotics, and aesthetics, the book draws out the multifaceted permutations of corporeal legibility, as well as its relevance for the development of the novel and for facilitating interdisciplinary dialogue.

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Eva Piirimäe, Liina Lukas, and Johannes Schmidt (eds.). Herder on Empathy and Sympathy. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, Volume: 311 (2020).

The English-German collection  Herder on Empathy and Sympathy:  Einfühlung und Sympathie im Denken Herders considers the meaning and role of the concepts of empathy and sympathy in Herder’s thought. Herder invokes sympathy in a number of disciplinary domains ranging from metaphysics, biology, anthropology, epistemology, psychology, morality, politics, history, aesthetics to homiletics. While Herder is shown as belonging to a long line of thinkers who view sympathy as a metaphysical principle contributing to the interconnectedness of all parts of nature, he also offers new insights about intra-/inter-species sympathetic communication and distinctively human varieties of sympathy for which he reserves the term “sich einfühlen”. Acknowledging the limits of the natural capacity for “sich einfühlen”, Herder nonetheless calls for its reflective cultivation in various domains.

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Rainer, Godel and Johannes Schmidt (eds.): Herder Yearbook 15 (2020)

This year’s volume collects inquiries into Herder’s activities as a reviewer, his view on Homer in comparison to Wolf’s and Humboldt’s, furthermore Herder’s deliberations on a “Neue Mythologie” as well as a contribution on the Älteste Urkunde. Besides two studies elucidating the reception of Herder during the nineteenth century, the yearbook also offers editions of original Herder manuscripts: a letter to Bertuch, a poem, and an outline for a sermon. A report on Herder research in Brazil and four reviews conclude this volume.

Society for American Sign Language Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring/Summer, 2020.

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The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia. Ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Paperback 2019.

Richard Wagner is one of the most controversial figures in Western cultural history. He revolutionized not only opera but the very concept of art, and his works and ideas have had an immeasurable impact on both the cultural and political landscapes of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From ‘absolute music’ to ‘Zurich’ and from ‘Theodor Adorno’ to ‘Hermann Zumpe’, the vividly-written entries of The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia have been contributed by recognized authorities and cover a comprehensive range of topics. More than eighty scholars from around the world, representing disciplines from history and philosophy to film studies and medicine, provide fascinating insights into Wagner’s life, career and influence. Multiple appendices include listings of Wagner’s works, historic productions, recordings and addresses where he lived, to round out a volume that will be an essential and reliable resource for enthusiasts and academics alike.

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Society for American Sign Language Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring/Summer, 2019.

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