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Item Open Access James's central intelligence and the deconstruction of character(1983) Ziegler, HeideThe central intelligence in James's novels represents the signifying intention of the text, transcending the merely psychological intention which might be ascribed to any fictional character. If the Jamesian novel is a vast and intricate system of correspondences, then it is the central intelligence that allows us to isolate from among these correspondences a sense of the possibilities of the future, as well as the need for a constant conversion of thought from static to dynamic. The preconceived plot of the Jamesian novel constrains the actual possibilities of the central intelligence as a character and reduces his function to that of commentary and exegesis; yet at the same time it provides the ideal conditions for an exercise of his intelligence in his attempt to transcend the constrictions of this very plot and for a refinement of his taste as an attrition of its overriding demands. The deconstruction of character in James's novels reveals a human possibility and turns it into a task: the development of the imagination as an instrument for understanding life.Item Open Access John Hawkes' "Travesty" and the idea of travesty(1982) Ziegler, HeideJohn Hawkes' novel "Travesty" is a travesty in a broader as well as in the strict sense of the term, what might be termed an "existential" as well as a "literary" travesty: for it travesties, on the one hand, Albert Camus "La Chute" and, on the other hand, Camus' philosophical speculations on the existential implications of suicide as well as his somewhat mysterious death in an automobile accident. Hawkes' "Travesty" finally takes the shape of an apotheosis of death itself: not as a fictionalized instance of the Freudian death-wish, but as the narrator's preoccupation with death as the form for life. The narrator's lifelong concern with pornographic photography as well as his concept of "ideal" suicide in a planned automobile accident force debris to appear as design and thus elevate him to the status of ultimate artist.Item Open Access Item Open Access John Barth's "Sot-weed factor" revisited: the meaning of form(1980) Ziegler, Heide"The sot-weed factor" by John Barth is an expanded parody of the historic Ebenezer Cooke's poem of the same tide as well as of the latter's role as colonial Maryland's first poet laureate. But in the course of the novel the dual nature of parody, as defined between the opposite poles of imitation and play, or necessity and freedom, becomes emblematic of the postmodern imagination as such. Just as the novel's content derives its meaning from the ambivalent central symbol of twinhood, which unfolds in the question of identity and role, so the novel's form mirrors an increasing tension between fiction and reality. Parody, for Barth, becomes a means of solving this tension by dissolving recollected and recorded experience into separate segments which the present author may then treat as material for the creative imagination. In "The sot-weed factor" stories become games played by the author. However, as a creator of fictional characters, while resambling the Creator of real mankind, the author neverthless remains one of His playthings. Thus the freedom which he achieves in entering the realm of the creative imagination can only be enjoyed at the price of evading reality.Item Open Access On translating "The Sunday Drive"(1991) Ziegler, HeideWhat difficulties confront the translator of a text by William H. Gass? Apart, that is, from the difficulties known to any translator of any literary text, differences of environment, culture, and mental habits, as well as linguistic problems regarding tense, aspect, or mode? The following text will point out a few of those difficulties by facing eight paragraphs from Gass's piece "The Sunday Drive" with a German translation, each section to be followed by a commentary on the text and an evaluation of the special complications which that text presented to the translator. The following analysis, however, is not meant to be merely an exercise in translation. It has been said often enough that poetic texts cannot be adequately translated. But I intend to show that finding a translation that scores high by the usual criteria is often not of prime importance. Instead, the translator needs to understand the underlying aesthetic principle of the text and reenact it within his or her own cultural setting and linguistic context.Item Open Access Postmodernism as autobiographical commentary: "The blood oranges" and "Virginie"(1983) Ziegler, HeideThe postmodernist writer needs to be autobiographical; but autobiography, for him, has changed its meaning. Especially the "marginal" problems of the text acquire autobiographical importance, editorial questions, publication procedures, and the intellectual and emotional feedback offered by literary reviews shape the authors life and became part of his further fictional endeavors. It is in this "autobiographical" sense, that John Hawkes can be considered a postmodern writer. Ever since he started to write fiction after World War II, he has been concerned with the relationship between his narrators and himself in the role of author in the text.Item Open Access The tale of the author or, Scheherazade's betrayal(1990) Ziegler, HeideJohn Barth, the postmodernist american writer, who is now in the second cycle of his middle age, professes to have had only one true love during all of his life. Her name is Scheherazade. This love affair began when the writer,"as an illiterate undergraduate, worked off part of my tuition filing books in the Classics Library at Johns Hopkins, which included the stacks of the Oriental Seminary". In 1972 Barth published "Chimera", which consists of three novellas.Item Open Access "Überblicke" : der postmoderne amerikanische Roman(1988) Ziegler, HeideWährend die Erzähler der sogenannten Moderne, vor allem mittels der Erzähltechnik des sogenannten Bewußtseinsstroms, psychische Zeit darstellen wollten, die Abfolge von Eindrücken und Assoziationen, so wie sie im Bewußtsein erscheinen, geht es der Postmoderne um das genaue Gegenteil: sie will die Macht der Zeit über das erzählte Bewußtsein brechen. Die verschiedenen im folgenden aufzuzeigenden Formen der Verräumlichung des postmodernen Romans müssen vor diesem Hintergrund als eine Art Revolte gegen die Väter der eigenen Kunst gesehen werden.Item Open Access Irony, postmodernism, and the "modern"(1991) Ziegler, HeideIn conclusion, it seems to me that those postmodernist writers who could be called ironic have played a crucial role in defining the era. For while most other postmodernist writers persistently claim to be essentially late modernist, the ironic writers are able - because of their self-reflexivity - to place their own works within a larger historical context. If modernist avant-gardism attempted to create the simultaneity of the unsimultaneous, the parodic slant of the ironic postmodemist writer affirms the historicity of even that attitude. In other words: the ironic postmodemist writer defines a new epoch within the philosophical context of modernity. And yet, just as any parody remains dependent on the literaty model it reflects, postrnodemism is not a new political assessment of modem aesthetics. It can lay no claim to having ushered in an aesthetic revolution and it remains to be seen, if-given the more or less unconventional attitude in most Western thinking today - such a new aesthetic revolution is already under way.Item Open Access Browning's The bishop orders his tomb at Saint Praxed's church, 76-79, 98-100(1974) Ziegler, HeideIn Robert Browning's poem "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church" the dying bishop's main rival in his struggle for the power which he sought to attain as a befitting mode of life had been his predecessor, Gandolf. For this reason he tried to play down the latter's significance when Gandolf died. Although Gandolf had already chosen the best position in the church for his sarcophagus, he had to leave its execution to his successor who, driven by a desire to revenge himself, selected as material a "paltry onion-stone" and for the epitaph, in keeping with the poor quality of the stone, he drew on the late Latin of Ulpian.