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| Hans Magnus Enzensberger |
| Writing, Media, Democracy |
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| Series: |
Cultural History and Literary Imagination  Vol. 10 |
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| Year of Publication: 2007 |
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| Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2007. 357 pp. |
| ISBN 978-3-03910-902-9 pb. |
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| Sales price |
| SFR 75.00 |
€* 51.10 |
€** 52.60 |
€ 47.80 |
£ 43.00 |
US-$ 74.95 |
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includes VAT - only valid for Germany |
[Currency of invoice] |
| ** |
includes VAT - only valid for Austria |
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| Book synopsis |
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The writings of Hans Magnus Enzensberger are a provocative commentary on the post-1945 period in Germany. Poet and essayist of international standing and frequent contributor to political and cultural debates, his work has accompanied the development of the Federal Republic from the 1950s to German unification and after. This study makes explicit the links between Enzensberger's literary imagination and the cultural and political history of Germany and offers a close reading of both Enzensberger's poetry and his seminal essays on politics and culture, proposing that they be considered as part of a single artistic project.
The book argues that Enzensberger's significance lies in his sustained exploration of the relationship between literary and cultural practices and political democracy in Germany. It offers detailed analyses of Enzensberger's poetry and considers his essays on the 'consciousness industry' and on the 'constituents of a theory of the media' in the context of the political development of the Federal Republic in the half-century following 1945. Post-World War 2 essays on cinema and television, on tourism, consumption and migration, and on digital media and the future of literature are also considered and analysed. Enzensberger's work is situated as part of an ongoing critical debate between him and key intellectual figures such as Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Jürgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault. |
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| Contents |
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| Contents: Hans Magnus Enzensberger - Adorno and the Culture Industry - 'A difficult pleasure': poetry and the politics of the 'economic miracle' - The plebiscite of the consumers: popular culture and the 'consciousness industry' - Enzensberger's theory of the media - Post-utopian culture and the aesthetics of survival - Enzensberger, cultural populism and the Federal Republic in the 1980s - Enzensberger and the anachronistic pleasures of literature - Writing, media and democracy in the new Germany. |
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| Reviews |
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| «This book on one of post-war Germany's most significant writers and political commentators is an ambitious, exhaustive, and largely successful attempt to fathom the titanic depths of its subject and to explain and reconcile the apparent inconsistencies in his ideas and works. [...] This is an intelligent, readable, and highly accessible study: just as Enzensberger would like it.» (Peter Thompson, Modern Language Review) |
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| About the author(s)/editor(s) |
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| The Author: Alasdair King teaches German and Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He has translated Enzensberger's poems for the Times Literary Supplement and published articles on The Sinking of the Titanic and on Enzensberger and German cinema. His recent publications also include articles on landscape and ideology in German cinema and on spatial politics and the 1950s Heimatfilm. He is currently working on spatial theories of the cinema and on Edgar Reitz's Heimat trilogy. |
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