Ever since I was a young girl, I’ve had an immense interest in learning about the past, more specifically, the past of my very own ancestors. This interest was what pushed me to start learning German when I was eleven years old. With every year and every German class we learned about sentence structure, verb conjugation, and most importantly, I was introduced to German authors. But, in all of my years of learning German and reading different works, I was never introduced to any German authors that were female. This, in part with my passion for learning new things about Germany, is what fueled me to write this research paper on Christa Wolf. In this paper, I hope to provide a background on Christa Wolf’s life, take a deeper look at some of her most important and influential works, and take a look at some of the controversy revolving around Wolf.
Born Christa Ihlenfeld on March 18th 1929 in a town by the name of Landsberg an der Warthe (what is today the town of Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland), Christa’s father owned a grocery store with some help from Christa’s mother, which provided Christa and her younger brother with a comfortable and carefree childhood. 1“Gorzow-wielkopolski is located approximately twenty-five miles from Germany’s eastern border. Landsberg, with its modest red brick houses that line the river, and the surrounding countryside, with its dark pine forests and sandy hills, are the perfect setting for a novel. These characteristics, allowed many of Wolf’s
Poissant’s “What the Wolf Wants” allows the reader to truly appreciate the world around us. The events in the story and the language shows how we as a species, specifically us in developed countries, value the wrong things. Poissant uses the wolf to show us that we don’t have a right to appreciate things once they are threatened, demonstrating the horrible mindset of fortunate human beings and advising that it must change. With a change in mindset, dinner at The Olive Garden will seem like the best meal ever and any Christmas present will be better than none, and we will feel thankful for what we
In the short story,“St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, Karen Russell develops the characters in different ways. Jeanette, Claudette, Mirabella are raised by wolves and sent to a home to become less like wolves and more like humans. Throughout their time at St. Lucy's, the girls will go through stages to adapt to their own culture. Some may excel, while others will fail. The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock helps guide the story and let the reader know what the girls know should be doing at that time in the story. It will also let the reader know if the girls are on track or not. Through each stage, a new epigraph tells us what is expected of the girls. For some, they may not meet the expectation, while some will.
BibliographyHerminghouse, Patricia A., and Magda Meuller, eds. German Feminist Writings. Vol. 95. New York: The German Library, 2001.
Ursula Hegi’s “Floating in my Mother’s Palm”, tells a story of a young girl growing up in a small German town in the 1950s. Hanna, who is the lead character, has a painter mother and a dentist father, both of whom try to shield her from the harsh realities of their small town. The novel tells a story of a young girl’s experience right from birth and the many things that shaped her childhood. This essay will pay special focus on the second story of the novel, “Trudi Montag’s Romantic Episode”. This part tells a story about Trudi Montag, who is the town’s librarian and Hanna’s friend, though she is older. Trudi tells Hanna of stories of her childhood and any gossip that goes around town. The story sets precedence for major themes like love, broken love and superstition evident in the community. The author also uses the story to expound on issues of tradition and diversity that is evident in every community.
Whether one would like to admit it or not, change is a difficult and not to mention uncomfortable experience which we all must endure at one point in our lives. A concept that everyone must understand is that change does not occur immediately, for it happens overtime. It is necessary for time to pass in order for a change to occur, be it days, weeks, months, or even years. The main character, who is also the narrator of “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, realizing that “things felt less foreign in the dark” (Russell 225), knows that she will be subject to change very soon. The author makes it evident to readers that the narrator is in a brand new environment as the story begins. This strange short story about girls raised by
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. This saying fits perfectly with a certain character that goes by the name of Howard W. Campbell, Jr. The narrator and protagonist Howard Campbell is an American playwright living in Germany with a German wife as World War II breaks out. Campbell is persuaded to remain in Germany, cultivate the Nazis, and become an American Agent. Throughout the novel “Mother Night” you get to see different sides of Howard. As the novel gets deeper so do you with this character, getting to learn more and more about Howard and his personality. This essay will show you who and what type character Howard W. Campbell, Jr was. Howard at heart a somewhat a simple man, who loved his wife Helga and his work as a writer. he hides his true self deep inside and puts on a façade for everyone. Howard is so effective at hiding himself, that people only know him as the Nazi he pretends to be.
Before addressing the main body of this work, it is necessary to set out an overview of the plot of this book. In order to do it, two parts must be distinguished according to the typography of the chapters: On the one hand, the narration in italics corresponds to the past tense when Gemma tells her granddaughters the tale of “Briar Rose” with some modifications as I will explain in the later sections. The chapters dedicated to this storytelling are intermingled with those which narrate the present time in which Becca, Gemma's granddaughter, begins an investigation and a trip to Poland to discover the past of her recently deceased grandmother. The novel begins in the United States where Gemma visits her grandmother in the nursing home during
Female power is suppressed by men in vampire literature. I will analyze the idea of women treated as inferior by men through psychoanalysis mainly based on Freudian concepts. The topics of psychoanalysis that I will be using to look at the texts are the ‘monstrous feminine’, the castration complex, and masculine instinct. The two texts that will be analyzed are the short stories ‘Carmilla’ and ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’.
With the railroads all occupied or closed down by foreign forces, Lore and her siblings (her younger sister, Liesel; her twin brothers, Jürgen and Günter; and her baby brother, Peter) travel on foot through the forests of Bavaria. The brightness of each shot in “Lore” and the beauty of the landscape seem to make the journey timeless and
Mark Twain’s essay, “The Awful German Language”, is a jocular expression of the average english speaker’s foray into the work of the German language. Twain uses humor and hyperbole to express his difficulties and frustrations that one experiences when trying to learn to speak German. Mark Twain is seen as something of a god in American literary history and his mastery of the english language is apparent, even in this work describing his experiences with another language. Twain states “A person who has not studied german can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is.” (Pg. 1).
This book, truly stimulating and electrifying, takes place in the mysterious and little town of Wolf Hollow. The centre of attention and the main attraction in this book is indeed the main character Cameron Weaver. A few other subjects of attention include Cameron's Mother and her Lover boy! Aka C.B., or cowboy boots to Cameron, but really Ken! Although these three persona's are the principal figures in the book, there must always be a bad guy, and that guy is Cameron's, supposed to be forgotten, yet always in mind, father. Cameron and his clingy Mother are always on the run from the horrific situation. Although, one thing is for sure, Cameron is not to call or be in contact with his father. Cameron and his mother are once again are forced
He quotes or cites text from 45 works by 36 authors as evidence for his claims. It can be observed that this textual evidence has neither been directly extracted from, nor been Haase’s interpretations of, fairy tales. He gives the example of various “contemporary literary version[s] of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’” (362), in lieu of using his own interpretations of the original story. By making sure that he does not impose his own interpretations of fairy tales on the readers, he saves his essay from falling into duplicitous hypocrisy, and maintains the crux of his argument, which is to allow “both adults and children to assert their own proprietary rights to meaning” (363). Nevertheless, the various citations do not always blend seamlessly together, and this leads to certain disharmonious vagaries in the essay, which when read with some attention, reveal themselves to be a somewhat convoluted web of contradictions and conflicts with regard to the views expressed by the author. This can be discerned when Haase takes a critical view on the nationalistic claims of fairy tales, suggesting that they lead to the development of stereotypical images of the identity of the people who belong to the nation claiming ownership, defining explicitly the stereotypical German image: “such social characteristics as
Elie Wiesel’s Night is a self-written memoir about the author’s traumatic experience as a young Jew struggling to survive during WWII. Eliezer, the protagonist was a young religious boy living with his family–Mother, Father, and three sisters–in Sighet, Romania, at the time of the Nazi invasion. Immediately after being forced from their homes and boarded into cattle cars, they arrive to a concentration camp there, Eliezer is separated from the women of his family, and is left only with his father. Together, Eliezer and his father face trouble in five camps, including Auschwitz and Buna. Throughout their downhill experiences, Eliezer and his father use false hope to keep them motivated. False hope hurts and helps Eliezer and his father through
Upon first reading “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” it might seem like an imaginative fantasy and nothing else. The story focuses on the daughters of a pack of werewolves, and it takes place in a world where the werewolves and their daughters are nothing out of the ordinary. But upon closer examination, this is a story rooted in reality. This inventive tale parallels several real world phenomena. Karen Russell uses allegory in “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” to objectify western society’s views of people outside of that society and of outsiders in general, and compare them to the views that people have of wild animals.
In his Literary Theory: The Basics, H. Bertens classifies stereotypes of women in literature into a number of categories; dangerous seductress, self-sacrificing angel, dissatisfied shrew, and defenseless lamb, completely incapable of self-sufficiency, or self-control, and dependent on male intervention. Bertens concludes that the primary objective of these women – or “constructions” – is to serve a “not-so-hidden purpose: the continued cultural and social domination of males”. One such novel that came under feminist scrutiny for these particular reasons was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, although this perlustration didn’t occur until 70 years after Stoker originally penned his masterpiece. However, during the mid-1960s, the rise of the feminist