2015 Issue №2

Daniel Kehlmann’s oeuvre is often interpreted as ‘ironic’ and thus put on a par with works following Friedrich Schlegel’s tradition of Romanticism. It would be more accurate to speak of ‘humour’ in the context of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of pessimism characteristic of the 19th century poetic realism. The central element is not nurturing ennui resulting from awareness of the con-trast between the ideal and reality, but rather cheerful disposition (consola-tion) in the face of reality.
Kehlmann’s world-famous novel Measuring the World should be con-sidered not as a veracious historical document, but rather as a free play with the biographies of Alexander von Humboldt and Karl Friedrich Gauss. Kehlmann focuses on the ‘magic realism’ characteristic of the 20th century South American authors (for instance, Gabriel García Márquez).

After 1900, literary manifestations of subjectivity underwent serious changes, which contributed to the increasing diversity and synthesis of means to create a literary reality. Daniel Kehlmann’s novel I and Kaminski (2003) is analysed from this perspective. Its text is compared with poetic works of German authors, which makes it possible to identify similarities and understand the general trends in modern culture

This article is an attempt at a conceptual interpretation of the scientific paradigm in modern prose and the possibility of using it in discussions in German classes with PhD students. Fragments from Hans Konsalik’s Jour-ney to Tierra del Fuego and Daniel Kehlman’s Measuring the World are used to this end. The biographies of scientists — as shown through literary characters — can serve as a basis for role models for young researchers.

This article focuses upon the features of constructing and re-constructing a literary text in the case of Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Fame (2009). Using various narrative strategies, Daniel Kehlmann manages to create a multilayered fictional space based on meta-narration and self-reflection of the characters and the narrator. The duality, amalgamation of reality and fiction, reciprocity, and the inclusion of the reader into the process of textual modeling through cross-references and intertextual connections constitute the basis of Daniel Kehlmann’s poetics.

This article explores the relativity of game rules followed by two out-standing scientists – Alexander von Humboldt and Gauss – in their research. The exhaustiveness of the scientists’ multidirectional game strategies is ex-plained by a change in their roles: they turn from subjects of the game into its objects ruled by the Nature, Time, and Chance. The central metaphor of gam-bling defines the composition of the novel and its genre, which can be defined as a postmodernist novel about the incomprehensibility of the nature of gen-ius.

This article considers the textual dominant in the context of The Far-thest Place — one of the most famous novel of the modern German author Daniel Kehlmann. The organization of the novel’s text is described and parallels to other literature works are drawn. The article focuses on the influence of the 20th century modernist experiments on Kehlmann’s works