Was It Rape Sexual Violence And The Construction Of Gender In Legal Medical And Literary Discourse 1770 1810

As Brecht's Galileo observed, a country which needs heroes is unfortunate indeed - words which suggest that a society's need for heroes is always a function of its shortcomings. By examining the role that heroes and heroism have played in German literature and culture over the past two centuries, the essays in this volume illuminate and contour both a flawed German society in need of heroes and the flawed but essential heroes brought forth by that society. Beginning in he era of the anti-Napoleontic Wars of Liberation, advancing to the challenging situation Germany faced at the end of World War II, and concluding with the current reemergence of a unified Germany after almost half a century of division, this volume broadens our understanding of the inadequacies and breakdowns of German society. In addition to analyses of heroism in German culture during the last two centuries, this volume contains the first major essays in English on cultural representations of disability in German culture and on AIDS in German literature, as well as two essays on the scholarly accomplishments of Jost Hermand, to whom all of the essays in the volume are dedicated.

Rape Plots documents the cultural significance of biblical scholarship and the Bible to the prevalence of rape in contemporary society. Focused on Genesis 34 and informed by feminist scholarship, this study examines ideas on rape reflected in nineteenth-century German commentaries as well as interpretations from 1970 to 1997. Cross-disciplinary references to forensic medicine and feminist theories place the views of biblical readers into cultural contexts. Similar to other discourses, biblical scholarship has minimized rape. An exegesis restores this imbalance and reads Genesis 34 as Dinah's story.

In nineteenth-century German prose, violence against women, especially affianced young innocents, is brutal, common, and cathartic. This seemingly paradoxical combination of factors results from the role of literature as a place where problems of sexual and social difference can be investigated safely. Taking social-anthropological and psychoanalytic perspectives into account, this book shows how female figures in the works of that era became transformed into «beloved sacrifices, » whose liminal position between the role of daughter and that of wife and mother made them prime targets for expiatory violence. It also demonstrates the prevalence of this topos, even in the major works of such canonical authors as Hoffmann, Storm, Keller, Raabe, and Fontane.

This volume lists and annotates more than two thousand articles, books, dissertations, and papers that, with few exceptions, appeared in 1994. It includes an index of authors and editors, a subject index, and entries cross-referenced according to subject matter. The 1994 Bibliography looks dramatically different from the Bibliography Erika Lindemann founded more than ten years ago. Many more titles now relate to fields not represented in early editions. Although composition and rhetoric has always borrowed methods of investigation from other disciplines, areas such as critical theory, science studies, feminist theory, technology studies, and postmodern theory were much less a part of the discipline a decade ago. These fields are well represented this year. This volume, like the 1993 Bibliography, also differs from early editions in that it contains a section on electronic discussion groups or listservs, including information on how readers may join the various groups. Yet the mission and goals of the Bibliography remain the same: to ensure that it is sufficiently comprehensive that it can continue to function as a major bibliographical resource available to scholars and teachers in rhetoric, composition, communication, and literary education. As usual, the CCCC Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric draws on a large group of experts in the field. Annotations--which accompany every entry in this volume--describe a publication's contents and are intended to help users determine the entry's usefulness. Annotations are brief and are meant to be descriptive, not evaluative: they explain what an entry is about but leave readers free to judge for themselves the work's merits. The CCCC Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric remains a critical bibliographical resource, one that reflects and respects the variety of scholarship in composition studies and that exerts a constructive, productive influence on the composition and rhetoric community.