Eleoma Joshua – författare

Cutting-edge application of the insights of Disability Studies to the German cultural field.Established, commissioned, and edited by the Department of German at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh German Yearbook encourages and disseminates lively and open discussion of themes pertinent to German Studies. No other yearbook covers the entire field while addressing a focused theme in each issue.Volume 4 focuses on disability in German literature, film, and theater. Disability Studies is part of the broader discussion of difference and "otherness," of the politics of identity, human rights, ethics, and discrimination. It retrieves disabled figures from literature, film, and theater and discusses them vis-à-vis "normalcy." Recently, Disability Studies has explored the binary of "able" and "disabled," strategies of exclusion, and the marginalization and suffering of the disabled body under social and medical structures of control. It is now entering a phase of positive reflection addressing the ontological politics of disability. Accordingly, this volume examines cultural representations of disability that raise questions about "the humane gaze" and posits disability as historically central to discussions of humanity, modernity, and social and moral behavior in German-language literature, film, and theater. Points of focus include blindness, physical deformity, injury, illness, and euthanasia.Contributors: Martin Brady, Pauline Eyre, Corinna Häger, Karin Harrasser, Urte Helduser, Eleoma Joshua, Susanne C. Knittel, Anna Kornbrodt, Siegfried Saerberg, Rosa Schneider.Eleoma Joshua is Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Edinburgh,UK. Michael Schillmeier lectures in the Department of Sociology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich.

This study examines the life and works of the poet Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg (1750-1819). It begins with an analysis of Stolberg’s essays on poetic expression in relation to Romantic thinking, and the impact of his poetic style on Novalis’s early poetry. Stolberg’s aesthetic education in Italy is examined as well as his challenge to the idea that classical sculpture was always the pinnacle of beauty and that the culture of antiquity was the highest form of humanity. The detection of melancholy in Greek sculpture, which arises from the transfer of anxieties about redemption from the artist to the artefact, affected his response and detracted from the beauty of the sculpture. This view amounted to an attack on Goethe and Schiller, as it identified the issue of salvation and death as a weakness in the classical paradigm. The picture of Italy that Stolberg offered was overshadowed by a crisis of confidence in the aesthetic insights both of Winckelmann and of Lessing and was also the basis for his reception of Raphael and Michelangelo. Stolberg arrived at a response to Renaissance art and artists that marginally predates the early German Romantic worship of artists in the 1790s. The book concludes with a discussion of Stolberg’s support of Romantic politics and Romantic conversions.