Author: Reiner Stach File Type: pdf This volume of Reiner Stachs acclaimed and definitive biography of Franz Kafka tells the story of the final years of the writers life, from 1916 to 1924--a period during which the world Kafka had known came to an end. Stachs riveting narrative, which reflects the latest findings about Kafkas life and works, draws readers in with nearly cinematic precision, zooming in for extreme close-ups of Kafkas personal life, then pulling back for panoramic shots of a wider world blighted by World War I, disease, and inflation. In these years, Kafka was spared military service at the front, yet his work as a civil servant brought him into chilling proximity with its grim realities. He was witness to unspeakable misery, lost the financial security he had been counting on to lead the life of a writer, and remained captive for years in his hometown of Prague. The outbreak of tuberculosis and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire constituted a double shock for Kafka, and made him agonizingly aware of his increasing rootlessness. He began to pose broader existential questions, and his writing grew terser and more reflective, from the parable-like Country Doctor stories and A Hunger Artist to The Castle. A door seemed to open in the form of a passionate relationship with the Czech journalist Milena Jesenska. But the romance was unfulfilled and Kafka, an incurably ill German Jew with a Czech passport, continued to suffer. However, his predicament only sharpened his perceptiveness, and the final period of his life became the years of insight.

Author: Pascale Chapdelaine File Type: pdf This is the first book to offer an in-depth investigation of the unsettled nature, scope and dynamics of copyright user rights in an increasingly dematerialized environment. Combining a detailed theoretical framework with practical applications, the book provides a comprehensive perspective on copyright user rights, exploring the nature of commercial copies of copyright works, of exceptions to copyright infringement, and how they are shaped to a large extent by traditional concepts of private law (e.g. property, goods, services, sales, and licences). Using property and contract law and theory, it addresses the competing interests of copyright holders and users in the same object, and points out the double standards in how the rights of copyright holders and copyright users are dealt with. It argues that the property component of user rights has been largely neglected and needs to be brought to the fore, to give the protection that users deserve, without neglecting the rights users should have as they increasingly experience copyright works through services. With the onset of an increasingly digital age, it emphasises how traditional concepts of private law need to adapt for adequately dealing with the dematerialization of copies of copyright works and user rights. It proposes a clearer view on the justification and nature of user rights, with possible gradations of powers for users, and suggests how courts and legislatures may address contract terms that weaken user rights. This book provides vital tools for law- and policy-makers worldwide who seek to achieve the proper balance between the competing rights and interests of copyright holders, copyright users, and the public domain. **

Author: Suzanna Jansen File Type: epub Amsterdam-Noord tijdens de crisisjaren Roza Dingemans, moeder van een door schulden en alcoholisme getroffen gezin, probeert koste wat kost haar waardigheid te bewaren. Ze ontleent onvermoede trots aan een gerucht over een voorname afkomst en een misgelopen erfenis. Maar is dat mythe, of werkelijkheid? Op zoek naar de feiten stuit haarkleindochter, de auteur, op een verborgen stuk Nederlandse geschiedenis haar voorouders blijken te zijn blootgesteld aan een uniek heropvoedingsexperiment in de Drentse nederzetting Veenhuizen. In drie enorme kazernes werden daar vanaf 1823 tienduizenden arme stadsgezinnen door tucht en landarbeid gedrild tot nuttige burgers. Maar wat begon als een bevlogen project om de armoede in Nederland in twaalf jaar uit te roeien, veranderde al snel in een fuik voor de paupers. In een betrokken, beeldende stijl volgt Suzanna Jansen vijf generaties van haar familie langs alle goedbedoelde pogingen om de onderklasse te verheffen. Van Veenhuizen, via het beschavingsoffensief van de gegoede dames, naar de moderne arbeiderswijken begin twintigste eeuw waar het volk het beschaafde wonen krijgt aangeleerd. Gaanderweg tekent zich af hoe deze opvoedcampagnes ingrijpen op het leven van Roza Dingemans en haar voorouders. En hoe de erfenis ervan generaties lang doorwerkt.(source Bol.com)

Author: Chris Danta File Type: pdf Shows how Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot develop heretical accounts of the sacrifice of Isaac in order to illuminate the sacrificial situation of the literary writer. **Review With exemplary precision Literature Suspends Death demonstrates how the enigmatic account of the binding of Isaac in Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling spurs a series of radical reflections on the interconnection among narrative, sacrifice, and mortality. Danta identifies a blind-spot in Kierkegaards work that Kafka and Blanchot do not so much illuminate as make into the ethical content of literature. Peter Fenves, Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor of Literature, and Professor of German, Comparative Literary Studies, and Jewish Studies, Northwestern University, USA Abraham haunts the Western religious imagination and its many embodiments in literature. Chris Danta is an acute and eloquent witness to this haunting. His remarkable study, Literature Suspends Death, is a must read book for anyone interested in religion and literature. Kevin Hart, Edwin B Kyle Prof of Christian Studies & Chair, Department of Religious Studies, The University of Virginia, USA Chris Danta brings to bear his remarkably alert and thoughtfully deployed reading skills on the story of Abraham and Isaac as refashioned by Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Blanchot. While riveting attention on the exchange that narrative negotiates, Scheherazade-like, with the lethal knife, he sustains with patient, passionate argument the assertion, set here in epigraph, that literature is indeed the foe of death. Reading this book is an absorbing experience. Peggy Kamuf, Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Director, Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture Doctoral Program, University of Southern California, USA The logic of sacrifice is among one of the most powerfully overdetermined topoi in Western literature, philosophy, and religion, bearing powerfully on issues of cultural significance and value, human loss and suffering, flesh and text, authority and resistance, secrecy and communicability, the possibility and impossibility of justice, the aporetics of decision-making, and much else besides. In this book, Chris Danta goes to the core of one of the Western traditions most revealing stories of sacrifice, the story of Abraham and Isaac, and studies in closely argued and wide-ranging detail its treatment in the literary and other works of Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Blanchot, engaging too with an impressive quantity of philosophical and other sources, from commentaries on the Bible and on the Talmud to the work of Derrida. The result is a subtle, incisive, and original account of literatures complex displacement and reworking of the logic of sacrifice. Leslie Hill, Professor of French, University of Warwick, UK With exemplary precision Literature Suspends Death demonstrates how the enigmatic account of the binding of Isaac in Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling spurs a series of radical reflections on the interconnection among narrative, sacrifice, and mortality. Danta identifies a blind-spot in Kierkegaards work that Kafka and Blanchot do not so much illuminate as make into the ethical content of literature. Peter Fenves, Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor of Literature, and Professor of German, Comparative Literary Studies, and Jewish Studies, Northwestern University, USA Chris Danta brings to bear his remarkably alert and thoughtfully deployed reading skills on the story of Abraham and Isaac as refashioned by Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Blanchot. While riveting attention on the exchange that narrative negotiates, Scheherazade-like, with the lethal knife, he sustains with patient, passionate argument the assertion, set here in epigraph, that literature is indeed the foe of death. Reading this book is an absorbing experience. Peggy Kamuf, Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Director, Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture Doctoral Program, University of Southern California, USA The logic of sacrifice is among one of the most powerfully overdetermined topoi in Western literature, philosophy, and religion, bearing powerfully on issues of cultural significance and value, human loss and suffering, flesh and text, authority and resistance, secrecy and communicability, the possibility and impossibility of justice, the aporetics of decision-making, and much else besides. In this book, Chris Danta goes to the core of one of the Western traditions most revealing stories of sacrifice, the story of Abraham and Isaac, and studies in closely argued and wide-ranging detail its treatment in the literary and other works of Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Blanchot, engaging too with an impressive quantity of philosophical and other sources, from commentaries on the Bible and on the Talmud to the work of Derrida. The result is a subtle, incisive, and original account of literatures complex displacement and reworking of the logic of sacrifice. Leslie Hill, Professor of French, University of Warwick, UK About the Author Chris Danta is Senior Lecturer in English in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Literature Suspends Death Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (2011) and the coeditor of Strong Opinions J. M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction (2011). He has also published essays in New Literary History, Angelaki, Textual Practice, Modernismmodernity, SubStance and Literature & Theology.