During the decades following the pioneering work of authors such as Walter Benjamin or Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s and 1930s, it has become increasingly common to refer to memory as a source not only of personal identity or of the identity of small groups but also of large collectivities. In recent years an ever growing number of studies in a variety of disciplines employ the concept of collective memory. Using the example of an episode from Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre tombe, this paper investigates the meaning of this concept in the methodological perspective of philosophy and the role of imagination in collectively remembered, communicable experience. It aims to elucidate the way in which collective memory might be demarcated from constructs of the imagination, above all in the public sphere.

The article discusses the German-Jewish author and philosopher Margarete Susman (1872-1966) and her interpretation of cultural Zionism around the First World War. Susman has largely disappeared from our cultural canvas in spite of the fact that she is one of the rare thinkers in German philosophical tradition for whom the challenge of idealism lies in its potential conversion into reality, and the force of beauty in its undeniable ethical appeal. In 1916 Margarete Susman wrote an extensive article in the Frankfurter Zeitung on the Zionist philosophy of Ahad Ha'am and Martin Bubber. Although the cultural journalist and former poet from the wider circle around Stefan George had already reflected on the question of Jewish identity in Germany in previous years, her strong interest in Zionism cannot just be explained by a sudden awareness of her Jewish descent. The 1916 article reveals a remarkable interpretation of cultural Zionism as a spiritual movement that is the real foundation of all political thought and any state. It has its roots in her belief in the meaning of spirit and art as truly regenerating forces, a belief she did not lose in spite of fact that she never turned a blind eye to the brutal reality of her time.

Analyzing how mid- to late-nineteenth-century Bildungsromane as well as scientific and philosophical texts conceive of society and the process of socialization, this essay supplements existing studies of Victorian liberalism and the British concept of "character" as Bildung. It traces the interest in the body and physiological processes - the nexus of biology and society that Bildungsromane have always been concerned with, while also emphasizing the nineteenth-century tension between voluntarism and determinism that was partly resolved in favour of scientific materialism and biological determinism at the fin-de-siècle. Concentrating on how three related areas of nineteenth-century biological research and thinking - the science of anthropometry, physiological theories of habit formation, and the ideas of organic memory and degeneration - are represented, subverted, or reimagined in Bildungsromane and Anti-Bildungsromane by, among others, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, the essay suggests that social stratification, a vision of society as fragmented into distinct social classes, is at the core of these mid- to late-nineteenth-century novels of development and their negotiation - and subversion - of cultural and biological models of individual and collective identity. Special emphasis is given throughout to the novels' representative strategy of differential embodiment.

The relations between literature and the political community have figured prominently on the research agenda in the humanities in the last few decades. The tension between political power and its different rhetorical and literary figurations can be productively explored by focusing on the juncture of two prominent nineteenth-century discourses: those relying on notions of Bildung (a term capturing processes of self-development and organic growth) and the state (which often denotes those aspects of power that cannot be couched in a naturalizing rhetoric of the nation or, indeed, Bildung). This forum traces the mobilization of figures of Bildung for the legitimation of political power in the paradigmatic genre of the Bildungsroman as well as in novelistic, biological, utopian, architectural, educational, and journalistic discourses.

Reading a narrative text is or provides an experience. In this article, I attempt to reconcile this common claim about reading with the intentionalist model of narrative David Herman has presented in his "Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance" (2008). I do so by developing two lines of argument. First, taking my cue from Daniel D. Hutto's philosophy of mind, I argue that two organisms can participate in a joint attention scene only if they are capable of sharing an experience. Thus, if we endorse Herman's view that, through narrative texts, authors draw readers' attention to some features of a storyworld, we must also account for how authors and readers can share an experience. I deal with this problem by tracing a (primarily heuristic) distinction between basic, embodied experience and linguistic, conceptual experience. At the level of basic experiential responding, I draw on psycholinguistic research to argue that both the production and the reception of narrative texts are grounded in embodied simulations. At the linguistically mediated level, I apply Dennett's conception of consciousness as a "Joycean machine" to the experiences provided by narratives, adding that these experiences can be shared by authors and readers because they are narratively constructed. Second, I address the question of interpretation, which I distinguish from both the understanding of linguistic meaning and the reconstruction of the storyworld: interpretation is concerned with the "aboutness" of a work, and touches on what Stein Haughom Olsen (1987) has called the "human interest" questions. It is because of its openness to human experience that interpretation cannot be fully subsumed under the intentionalist model of our engagement with stories. At this level, readers are not required to comply with the author's instructions: they are free to relate the experience they have undergone while reading a story to their own past experiences, and draw their conclusions as to what the story is "about." This is why the experientiality of stories - i.e. the experiential "feel" they create - can be said to bridge the gap between Herman's intentionalist model and interpretation. Thus the reader would be able to become a coparticipant and cosufferer of the experience through which the novelist is passing.

The abyss, the German Abgrund, is a recurring concept and motif which Paul Celan addresses in both his poetics and poetry. The abyss-like quality of Celan's poetry did not emerge unheralded, but the Abgrund topos has been little researched. This paper argues that in Celan Abgrund functions as both a thematic image and textual practice. The Abgrund topos is motivated by rich allusions to Celan's literary sources. Celan's abysses have a paradoxical twofold function. On the one hand the abyss is an ultimate end-point in which significance and value are doomed to collapse; on the other hand, building on that non-foundation is the source of Celan's poetic craft.

The title of Henriette Frölich's Virginia oder die Kolonie von Kentucky (1820) voices the nineteenthcentury imagination of America as the locus of a new civilization in the wake of post-Revolutionary disillusionment. The novel's subtitle, Mehr Wahrheit als Dichtung, echoes the title of the autobiography of Goethe, author of the German Bildungsroman par excellence, Wilhelm Meister. Frölich's title establishes a correlation between new concepts of community and the individual's "Bildung" as the basis for novel forms of communal living in the early nineteenth century. This paper explores the ambivalent legacy of Frölich's text. On the one hand, Virginia has been described as a socialist utopia modeled on thinkers such as François-Noël Babeuf, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, and Étienne-Gabriel Morelly. On the other hand, however, this new community does not extend equality to women, Native Americans, Blacks, and non-French European immigrants such as Germans. Ethnic, racial, and gender inequalities persist in the North American colony. Frölich's utopia is, therefore, also a dystopia, which is shaped by the same social injustice that provided the impetus for its creation.

"Pray what authors should she read, who in Classics would succeed?" the director of a new women's university is asked in W. S. Gilbert's comic opera libretto, Princess Ida. In the new schools and colleges that were extending formal education to women and to the poor, the core curriculum was still selected "classic" Latin and Greek writers as it had been in the traditional boys schools of the rich. The director's three selected "classic" authors, Ovid, Aristophanes, and Juvenal (in that order) would have surprised Gilbert's audience, since they mark a progression from risqué sexual allusiveness to crude and overt sexual satire. Then she adds: "if you're well advised, you will get them Bowdlerised." Dr. Bowdler's removal of elements he considered tasteless made his name synonymous with sexual censorship. But sexual reference, overt or oblique, is not the most important element altered in the public presentation of classical poetry in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. Educators were no less anxious about inflammatory or revolutionary political ideas and wanted "classic" texts that could be used to enhance a patriotic agenda. The only ancient epic that suited their needs was Virgil's Aeneid. This paper discusses why and how Gilbert's libretti were (and still are) misread as supportive of the very ideas he was criticizing; why Virgil's Aeneid was, by a process of judicious excerpting, represented throughout Europe as a paean of praise to Rome and Augustus, and why it has been as difficult for us to escape this nineteenth-century view of the Aeneid as it has been to escape from Freud's understanding of Oedipus or Nietzsche's reading of Greek Tragedy.