Friedrich Kittler’s farewell words of 15 July 2011, delivered at the original building of the Institute for Cultural History and Theory at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he had taught during the final eighteen years of his academic career, are of course not among his most intellectually important texts. Rather, this address belongs to those documents whose specific status and relevance depends on a temporal relation to their author’s life dates. Kittler’s death on 11 October 2011 made the improvised Sophienstraße address his last public statement and thus gave it the aura of a legacy. What he said to his students and a few colleagues on that occasion is a random snapshot that, due to the posthumously dramatic perspective from which it conjures up his personality for us, has become a monument. As such, as a monument and as a legacy, I want to comment on those few sentences pronounced shortly before the end of his life by one of my dearest and most admired friends from my own German generation of scholars and intellectuals.

This chapter aims to locate Machado’s place in the development of literature—more specifically, realism in Brazil. This exploration of the aesthetic mode of realism in Brazilian literature focuses on Machado and his often contentious place within literary movements. More importantly, Gumbrecht addresses how Machado reconfigured realist aesthetics to the demands of his time, engendering a new brand of realism—in stark contrast to the European realist tradition—founded upon a firm philosophical questioning of placing reality into representation. Gumbrecht interrogates Machado’s relationship with realism, centering on the writer’s singular narrative form of instability and self-reflexivity.

The Routledge Handbook of Muslim-Jewish Relations invites readers to deepen their understanding of the historical, social, cultural, and political themes that impact modern-day perceptions of interfaith dialogue. The volume is designed to illuminate positive encounters between Muslims and Jews, as well as points of conflict, within a historical framework. Among other goals, the volume seeks to correct common misperceptions about the history of Muslim-Jewish relations by complicating familiar political narratives to include dynamics such as the cross-influence of literary and intellectual traditions. Reflecting unique and original collaborations between internationally-renowned contributors, the book is intended to spark further collaborative and constructive conversation and scholarship in the academy and beyond.

Although it is probably apocryphal, the etymology deriving obscene from the Latin ob and scena has proved to be enduring because it gets at something in the phenomenon itself. Thus derived, the “ob-scene” would be something opposed to the main event, or, as Svetlana Boym put it, “something played offstage with respect to the performance.” Whatever else obscenity is, it is something that is visible when properly it shouldn’t be, something that shouldn’t hold our attention but does. If we watch a performance with our minds fastened on whatever the obscene object is, then we’re not watching the performance right. That doesn’t mean that the obscene should be hidden; it means that it shouldn’t be, even as hidden. No one sits in a serious theatrical performance hoping for a wardrobe malfunction. The very imagination that would contemplate this possibility would strike us as obscene. If you know obscenity when you see it, that is at least in part because the obscene does not occur to you as viewable before it comes into view. In this respect, being obscene differs from being  perverse, which means to avail yourself of something prohibited by the law of the father but  perfectly in view as prohibited. In what follows, I will tryto argue for ballet as an obscene object in post-Wagnerian drama, musical or otherwise. Although this claim is part of a larger argument, I will  focus primarily on a failed collaboration between two post-Wagnerians, Richard Strauss and Frank Wedekind.

The present study focuses on the intersection between Islamic jurisprudence, poetics, and manuscript culture in the secret Muslim communities (moriscos) of sixteenth-century Aragon. Using as a theoretical rubric the Islamic legal concept of ^curf (“custom”), I argue that early modern Aragonese Muslims made use of handwritten Islamic legal texts, and the physical books that contained them, to incorporate specific and adaptive local innovations into their religious and cultural practice. At the center of such innovation is the practice of translation and the specific forms that Aljamiado legal texts took within the space of the manuscript folio. All of these features and practices, I argue, revolve around a broader concern with closeness at the physical, social, linguistic, and ultimately metaphysical levels.

Jewish speech was heard in Russian revolutionary contexts as characterized by emphatic tones, rhetorical questions, an argumentative stance, and sarcasm, all performative elements of Jewish English (JE) as well. I examine depictions of Jewish Russian (JR) in the world of the non-Jewish Socialist Revolutionary (SR) leader Victor Chernov. This article first introduces Chernov, then analyzes his depictions of JR, and finally looks at transcripts of speeches by SR leaders for evidence of Jewish speech style. I use speech length, bold-face, exclamation points, and question marks as proxies for the heightened emotion and argumentative stance associated with JR. My analysis indicates no significant difference between the speech of Jewish and non-Jewish SR leaders as a whole, but shows that Chernov’s own speech contains a significantly higher than average use of these elements. This result complicates the notion of ethnolect and suggests that individuals’ evaluations of other people’s language should be examined in light of their biographies.