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Gesammelte Schriften in 20 Bänden

Theodor W. Adorno

Collected Writings in 20 Volumes

As the primary figure behind Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, as an essayist and critic of society, a music theorist and composer, a sociologist and high-school teacher, Adorno made a definitive and lasting mark not only on the intellectual history of Germany. His Collected Writings, the first volume of which was published one year after his death in 1970, brings together in 20 volumes the more than 10,000 printed pages Adorno published in his lifetime as well as the completed texts from his estate.  

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Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung I: Fragment gebliebene Schriften

Theodor W. Adorno

Posthumous Writings

The extensive edition of Adorno’s posthumous writings expands the Collected Writings and together with the fragmentary works collects editions of his lectures, papers, and discussions as well as notebooks.  

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Quellen, Ströme, Eisberge

Hans Blumenberg

Sources, Streams, Icebergs

In order to escape the overwhelming burden of reality, humans invent myths and metaphors, metaphysical and cultural systems, which offer a point of orientation even though it is all but impossible to prove their inherent »truth«. Departing from this observation, the philosopher Hans Blumenberg was interested throughout his life in certain metaphors that act as »regulative ideas«, providing a framework for thought, without delimiting it completely. Metaphors, he believed, form the bedrock of the history of ideas.

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Spanish world rights (Fondo de Cultura Economica), Turkey (Ketebe)

Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer

Hans Blumenberg

Shipwreck with Spectator

»This elegant essay exemplifies Blumenberg's ideas about the ability of the historical study of metaphor to illuminate essential aspects of being human. Originally published in the same year as his monumental Work on Myth, Shipwreck with Spectator traces the evolution of the complex of metaphors related to the sea, to shipwreck, and to the role of the spectator in human culture from ancient Greece to modern times.

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English world rights (MIT Press), France (L'Arche), Sweden (Faethon), Korea (Saemulgyul), Hungary (Atlantisz), Slovenia (Krtina), Turkey (Alfa), Greece (Antipodes), Israel (Shalem Press); previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Spanish world rights (A. Machado Libros), Italy (Il Mulino), Netherlands (Historische Uitgeverij), Japan (Tetsugako Shobo)

Schriften zur Literatur 1945-1958

Hans Blumenberg

Writings on Literature 1945-1958

Long awaited and now available from the estate: Hans Blumenberg’s reviews, talks and lectures on international literature: Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Greene, Kafka, Jünger, Faulkner, Robbe-Grillet and many others.

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Mit Dolchen sprechen

Karl Heinz Bohrer

Speaking with Daggers

Particularly in recent times, the term »hate« has made a career in public importance. In the journalistic and socio-historical critique of the reaction to the refugee crisis prevalent in Germany and Europe it moved to the forefront of the discourse alongside terms like »identity« and »racism«.

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Das Erscheinen des Dionysos

Karl Heinz Bohrer

The Appearance of Dionysus

Has Dionysus only become Dionysian in the course of modernity? Dionysus, son of Zeus, god of ecstasy, has been ascribed many characteristics. But only one of them discerns him from all the other gods: his sudden »appearance«, that mysterious eventfulness that is connected to his entrance and which was already thematised in the Greek texts. In his new book, Karl Heinz Bohrer explores the traces of this Dionysian feature and shows how it has been detached from the myth successively and became the token of romantic-modern literature and philosophy after 1800.

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Plötzlichkeit. Zum Augenblick des ästhetischen Scheins

Karl Heinz Bohrer

Suddenness

»Suddenness or epiphany – an expression of discontinuity and rupture – resists aesthetic integration. This argument is the centrepiece of Bohrer's collection of essays […]. The study examines a romantic and modernist literary phenomenon and traces its textual appearance in the works of early German Romantics – Schlegel, Schleiermacher and Kleist – through Nietzsche to such modernists as Proust, Joyce, Musil and Benjamin. Although Bohrer discusses the influence of the French poststructuralists Foucault and Derrida, by concentrating on the ›incommensurability‹ of fictional language, he ultimately develops his arguments from the literary texts themselves. As he concludes this study, Bohrer states that ›suddenness‹ transcends history and yet is tied to it, especially to the processes of acceleration typical of modernization since the industrial revolution.« (book description of the English edition published by Columbia UP)

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English world rights (Columbia UP), Chinese simplex rights (China South Publishing & Media Group); previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Poland (Oficyna Naukowa)

Die dunklen Seiten der Empathie

Fritz Breithaupt

The Dark Sides of Empathy

Empathy is considered the basis of moral action. But if we examine this more carefully, the ability to »empathize with other people« proves itself to be a prerequisite for deliberate humiliation and cruelty. Additionally, even well-meaning compassion has many unintended consequences. It is for these reasons that we must investigate especially the dark, hitherto repressed aspects of empathy in order to achieve a better society.

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English world rights (Cornell University Press), Korea (SOSO), Hungary (Typotex)

Kultur der Ausrede

Fritz Breithaupt

The Culture of Excuses

Why do people tell each other things? Why did they learn to tell stories? What cultural achievements are linked to telling stories? And what is story telling in the first place? Fritz Breithaupt gives us an astounding answer to this question.

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Kulturen der Empathie

Fritz Breithaupt

Cultures of Empathy

Most theories of empathy assume that the primary scene of empathy involves two people: One who has empathy with another. The author's hypothesis, however, is that human empathy derives from a scene of three individuals: One individual who observes a conflict between two others.

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Spanish world rights (Katz)

Diskrete Stetigkeit

Oswald Egger

Discreet Continuity

»A mathematician who is not also to some extent a poet will never be a perfect mathematician.« (Karl Weierstraß, mathematician) Conversely, lyric poet Oswald Egger conducts basic research into the interaction between mathematics and poetry:

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Scharmützel und Scholien

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Skirmishes and Scholia

They remained unpublished for decades: Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Frankfurt lectures on poetry from the winter semester of 1964/65. Using these extensive texts, Enzensberger's writings on literature spanning half a century have been assembled for the first time into one volume.

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Denmark (Gyldendal)

Zukünftigkeit

Amir Eshel

Futurity

When looking at how trauma is represented in literature and the arts, we tend to focus on the weight of the past. In this book, Amir Eshel suggests that this retrospective gaze has trapped us in a search for reason in the madness of the twentieth century’s catastrophes at the expense of literature’s prospective vision. 

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Der cartesische Taucher

Durs Grünbein

The Cartesian Diver

René Descartes’ most ambitious project was his expansive oeuvre Le Monde. His intention: to weave all the divided strands of knowledge into a fabric that is so dense that it allows you to explain everything under the sun.

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English world rights (Upper West Side Philosophers), Sweden (Ersatz)

Jenseits der Literatur

Durs Grünbein

Beyond Literature

In his four Lord Weidenfeld Lectures held in Oxford in 2019, poet Durs Grünbein deals with a topic that has occupied his mind ever since the moment he started to perceive his own position within the history of his nation, his language community and his family as historic: How is it possible that HISTORY, the fetish of the humanities since Hegel and Marx, determines the individual imagination into the private niches, into the ludic drive of poetry? Shouldn’t its poetry look at the world with its own, sovereign eyes instead?

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Lob des Sports

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

In Praise of Athletic Beauty

There is no more widespread or intense fascination in present-day culture than Sports (both as an active physical practice, and as spectator sports) but, quite astonishingly, the reaction of contemporary literature and of the scholarly world to this phenomenon have been anemic (to say the least).

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English world rights (Harvard UP), Spanish world rights (Katz), Chinese simplex rights (Horizon), Italy (Sossella), Netherlands (Arbeiderspers), Korea (Dolbegae), Hungary (Kijárat), Ukraine (Dukh i Litera); previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Russia (New Literary Observer), Brazilian Portuguese Rights (Companhia das Letras)

Nach 1945

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

After 1945

How we have become what we are - A journey through time that sheds light on our present day

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English world rights (Stanford UP), Spanish world rights (Universidad Iberoamericana), Russia (NLO), Brazilian Portuguese rights (UNESP), Poland (Krytyka Polityczna)

Unsere breite Gegenwart

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Our Broad Present

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s new book, Our Broad Present, outlines a present of simultaneities, a present that is trapped between a threatening future that can no longer be planned, and a past that overwhelms us.

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English world rights (Columbia UP), Brazilian Portuguese rights (UNESP), Italy (Bompiani)

Nach der Natur

Ursula K. Heise

After Nature

The extinction of species from the perspective of cultural science.

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