Yoel Hoffmann Bibliography

This paper analyses Freud's concept of Das Unheimliche used to describe a strange proximity between the known and the unknown, whether as something acquainted represents itself with an extraneous shape or as something extraneous discovers an element of intimacy in itself. Freud inaugurated this concept in the text " Das Unheimliche " in 1919 referring to cases in which the subject in relation to objects or events has feelings that range from usual closeness to the point of utter automated perception, when an object or event appears strange. The automatism of repetition is only one of manifestations of Das Unheimliche.

This is a thesis in two parts, a novel and a critical project. Both are about Maria-Theresavon Paradis, a blind and possibly 'hysterical'pianist and composer, and Doctor Franz Anton Mesmer, the founder of Mesmerism, who temporarily managed to cure her with this controversial treatment. In the novel, The Cost of Light, Paradis's confessions to Mesmer allow me to show that her possible hysterical blindness arises from a complex cluster of motives, for example, a refusal to see, and too great a desire to witness, forbidden sights. In this way, the novel demonstrates the malleable nature of eighteenth-century hysteria, which, for Paradis, transforms itself constantly in relation to her psychosocial conditions and familial constraints. Her sudden blindness, her miraculous recovery of sight at Doctor Mesmer's hands and then its subsequent loss could thereforeallbe considered hysterical symptoms. The related critical project, 'Rapportand Subversion: Mesmer's Treatme...

As diaries, letters and the intensive intertextuality of his prose fiction show, the German Romantic writer and composer, E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), was an obsessive bibliophile and polymath. The aim of this article is to explore how far three of his literary fairy tales, The Golden Pot: A Modern Fairy Tale (1814), The Strange Child (1816) and The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), use the generic conventions of the fairy tale, and how far they are influenced by his voracious reading, his encyclopaedic knowledge of literature, and his engagement with contemporary debates. We conclude with brief observations about his literary legacy in the genres of fairy tales and fantasy fiction.

Une contribution au catalogue sur Dieter Roth concernant son livre Mundunculum.

A fascinating conundrum-Les contes d'Hoffmann: with its troubled genesis & editorial confusion, Offenbach's final opera seems unique, yet it developed out ideas from the composer's lesser-known late period Jacques Offenbach's output is so large (close to 100 stage works) that we tend to be familiar with only a small number of his operas. So, a work like his grand opera Les contes d'Hoffmann seems to appear out of nothing, and to bear little resemblance to other key works such as Orphée aux enfers or La belle Hélène. It does not help that matters are confused by the editorial difficulties, performing material being difficult to obtain, manuscripts being dispersed and the fact that a number of Offenbach's works exist in significantly different versions.

don't know," came the stentorian reply. "I suppose they were plowing and copulating. Oh yes, you like that, don't you!" And then the ultimate, well-timed pedagogical outrage: "We all have our myths. .. it's just that mine are closer to objective reality." Mosse the scholar is most remembered for his interpretations of nationalism and fascism. His training in early modern religious history had, indirectly, been excellent preparation for understanding mass movements, with their manipulation of myths, rituals, and symbols. As an outsider, he appreciated the seductive power of appeals to the group, and he had a gift for empathizing with those whose values were anathema to him. "Many Jews," he once remarked, only half facetiously, "would have made good Nazis, had they been accepted." A voracious consumer of schlock literature and social theory ("Always read the bad books of an era," he would advise), he was among the first to understand the deep völkisch roots of National Socialism. His The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (1964) remains the locus classicus on the subject. And unlike many mature historians, Mosse continued to cultivate new interests and approaches. His long sojourns in Israel, where he held an appointment at Hebrew University, and his gradual open acceptance of his homosexuality were reflected in his later work, in which he linked modern nationalism to respectability and notions of masculinity. Confronting History is an affecting book, the well-told story of a life well worth telling. Taking stock at age eighty, Mosse writes that he has had a good life, filled with wonderful friends and favored by fortune. Yet the reader of these pages is struck by his apparent total lack of nostalgia and sentiment. He seems to have survived the anxieties of being ripped from his homeland by cultivating a refined sense of the ludicrous, the tragic-comic, and the bizarre; by not taking himself too seriously; and by being at home everywhere and nowhere. He lived comfortably and well connected in Jerusalem, but was never a practicing Jew, and he refused to learn Hebrew. He loved Munich, and even considered retiring there, but he was no longer really a German and delighted in being a Schwarzfahrer on the U-Bahn. His return visit to his childhood estate at Schenkendorf seems to have left him strangely unmoved. The new owner was turning it into (of all things!) a Dracula theme park. To the end he remained the "free-floating intellectual" whose true home was Bildung-to him the richest legacy of German Judaism.