Kenneth S. Calhoon - Böcker

The title of this collection echoes Siegfried Kracauer's statement that the lavish movie palaces of 1920s Germany served to stimulate peripheral vision and thus prevent the audience from being absorbed by the spectacle itself. In consideration of questions concerning spatial transformations in and around Weimar cinema, the eight essays in this volume, though some more explicitly than others, have Kracauer as their interlocutor. The first major critic of classic German cinema, Kracauer is patron of the optics that seeks insight on the periphery, inviting the analysis of those other spaces that are implicated, if not present, in the films themselves. The films treated in this volume include such Expressionist mainstays as Lang's ""Metropolis"" and Murnau's ""Nosferatu"" as well as generally less familar works such as Ruttman's ""Berlin, Symphony of a City"", Jessner's ""Backstairs"", Berger's ""Day and Night"" and the mountain films of Fanck and Riefenstahl. Among the ""hidden stages"" analyzed are amusement parks, carnivals, department stores, train compartments, city streets, the womb, the theatre, the chamber, basement apartments - and ultimately Neubabelsberg, the gargantuan studio-complex near Berlin where so many of these peripheral spaces came to be simulated. With references that range from set architecture to Christmas celebrations, from the poetry of Rilke to chamber music, from the introduction of sound to Macy's parades, and from an ""urban unconscious"" to a ""cinematic sublime"", ""Peripheral Visions"" is a collection that should be of interest to students and scholars of film and German cultural studies.

Affecting Grace examines the importance of Shakespeare’s poetry and plays within German literature and thought after 1750 – including its relationship to German classicism, which favoured unreflected ease over theatricality. Kenneth S. Calhoon examines this tension against an extensive backdrop that includes a number of canonical German authors – Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing, von Kleist, and Nietzsche – as well as the advent of Meissen porcelain, the painting of Bernardo Bellotto and Francesco Guardi, and aspects of German styles of architecture.Extending from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (c. 1597) to Kleist’s The Broken Jug (1806), this study turns on the paradox that the German literary world had begun to embrace Shakespeare just as it was firming up the broad but pronounced anti-Baroque sensibility found pivotally in Lessing’s critical and dramatic works. Through these investigations, Calhoon illuminates the deep cultural changes that fundamentally affected Germany’s literary and artistic traditions.