Sudhir Kakar

Günter Blamberger

The concept of genius has been a subject of much speculation and debate since the eighteenth century. However, in a world obsessed with creative genius and the possibilities of the human imagination, the actual workings of the creative process and its psychological underpinnings remain a mystery. In On Creativity, a group of experts seeks to unlock this enigma.

On Creativity

Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts war der Glaube an Inspiration als göttliche Begnadung des Künstlers erschüttert, das Bild vom Kuß der Muse überholt; die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Kreativität stellte sich neu. Welche Darstellungs- und Deutungsmuster in Literatur, Ästhetik und Wissenschaft seither entwicklet wurden, um dem Geheimnis des Schöpfertums auf die Spur zu kommen, wird von Günter Blamberger exemplarisch untersucht. Er liefert damit einen bedeutsamen Beitrag zur interdisziplinären Kreativitätsforschung der Gegenwart, an der sich Germanisten bisher kaum beteiligt haben.

Studien zur Literaturgeschichte der Kreativität zwischen Goethezeit und Moderne

Das Geheimnis des Schöpferischen oder: Ingenium est ineffabile?

Biographie

Heinrich von Kleist

Krisenbewußtsein und Neubegründung im Zeichen der Melancholie

Versuch über den deutschen Gegenwartsroman

M'illumino/d'immenso - I'm lit/with immensity is Geoffrey Brock's translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem Mattina. In the poem's minimalism, Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry's expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction, and literature's capacity, according to Kant, even to evoke, with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas, representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually graspable - in case studies about myths of creativity, images of death and the beyond after the 'death of God', of the soul, of melancholy as the dark ground of genius, of metamorphoses of both evil and good, of ecstasy, of the economy of self-sacrifice, of the art of resistance, and, among others, about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity, what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality.

On the Fascination and Power of Aesthetic Ideas. Translated from German by Joel Golb

Thinking in Literature

This volume explores current images of afterlife/afterdeath and the presence of the dead in the imaginations of the living in Indian and European traditions. Specifically, it focuses on the deepest and most fundamental uncertainty of human existence---the awareness of human mortality, on which depends any assignment of meaning to earthly existence as also to notions of worldly and otherworldly salvation. This central idea is addressed in the literature, arts, audiovisual media and other cultural artefacts of the two traditions. The chapters are based on two main assumptions: First, that one cannot report on the direct experience of death; so it is only possible to speak allegorically of it. Second, in contemporary Western societies, marked by structural atheism, people look at literature, the arts and mass media to study their depiction and reading of traditionally religious questions of disease, death and the Beyond. This is in contrast to Asian civilizations whose preoccupation with death and Beyond is persistent and perhaps central to the civilizations’ highest thought. The chapters cover a wide spectrum of disciplinary approaches, from psychoanalysis to religious, anthropological, literary and film studies, from sociology and philosophy to art history, and address issues of unsettling power: comforting illusions of afterlife; the relations between afterlife and fertility; visions of technological immortalization of mankind; the problem of thinking about death after the “death of God”; socialist utopias of bodily immortality; fear of Hell and punishment; different concepts in relating the living and the dead; near-death experiences; and cultural practices of spiritualism, occultism and suicide.

Imaginations of Death and the Beyond in India and Europe

Anne Fleig

Hannah Lotte Lund

Martin Roussel

Andrea Allerkamp

Barbara Gribnitz

Das Kleist-Jahrbuch 2019 dokumentiert die Verleihung des Kleist-Preises 2018 mit den Reden des Preisträgers Christoph Ransmayr, der Vertrauensperson der Jury László Földényi und des Präsidenten der Heinrich-von-Kleist-Gesellschaft Günter Blamberger. Den Schwerpunkt bilden die von Anne Fleig betreuten Beiträge der internationalen Jahrestagung der Heinrich-von-Kleist-Gesellschaft (in Kooperation mit der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft) ›Kleist und Schiller - Auftritt der Moderne‹ (u.a. von Peter-André Alt, Claudia Benthien, Christian Moser und Dorothea von Mücke) und die von Matthias N. Lorenz und Thomas Nehrlich geleitete Tagung ›Kleists Anekdoten – Zur Größe der Kleinen Formen‹ im Kleist-Museum, Frankfurt (Oder). Rezensionen und Miszellen beschließen den Band.

Günter Blamberger

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