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Ossi Wessi
Editor: Donald Backman and Aida Sakalauskaite
Date Of Publication: Sep 2008
Isbn13: 9781847186751
Isbn: 1-84718-675-0
Ossi Wessi includes the proceedings of the fourteenth annual Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference at the University of California, Berkeley (2006), which explored issues surrounding the Berlin Wall, both pre- and post-reunification, in language, literature, and visual media. The collected articles discuss the situation of the Berlin Wall, describing its portrayal as both a dividing and uniting boundary, and often discussing the continued existence of the Wall in the minds of Germany’s citizens. The multi-disciplinary range of approaches contained in this volume reveals how diverse the portrayals of the history of the Wall have been, as well as how controversial the division of Germany remains today. Topics covered in this collection include Wende Literature and film, linguistic changes and attitudes since 1989, the complicated history of the Neo-Nazis, and the visual arts. Although Ossi Wessi is by no means a comprehensive reference work, each of its essays serve as a though provoking springboard for further research.

Aida Sakalauskaite is currently completing her dissertation entitled Why Eat Like a Pig? A Contrastive Study of English, German and Lithuanian Zoo Metaphors at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a BA in German linguistics from Vilnius University, Lithuania and an MA in Germanic Linguistics from UC Berkeley. Her research interests include Anglicisms in the German language, musical semiotics, and zoo metaphors in German, English, Lithuanian, and Russian. She has presented several conference papers at international as well as local conferences.

Donald Backman is currently writing his dissertation entitled, End of the Land Sadness: The Kerouacian Myth of Enlightenment in Wendeliteratur. He holds a BS in Secondary German Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; an MA in Comparative Literature from San Francisco State University; and an MA in German Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. His publications include, “Author Dead. Full Report at Eleven:  The Questioning of the Author Function in City of Glass and The Lizard's Tail” in Portals: A Journal in Comparative Literature, 2004.

"With its broad range of topics, the well-researched and well-written 14 essays in the anthology give an excellent overview of and introduction to texts, films, and linguistic discourses on the Wall since reunification...Particularly useful and through provoking for scholars at all levels is the list of images and tables in chapters 8, 9, 10, and 12, that gives the book a hands-on quality and stimulates further research and updates as we commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 2009...This book could form the foundation for many research projects 20 years after the fall of the Wall."

Barbara Mabee, Oakland University, German Studies Review, 33/1 (2010)

Price Uk Gbp: 34.99
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Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)

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