Peter Arnds

Trinity College Dublin, Comparative Literature, Faculty Member

Trinity College Dublin, Italian, Faculty Member

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Peter Arnds is a Fellow and the Director of the Comparative Literature programme at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Elected into the Academia Europaea in 2018, he has published books on Günter Grass, Dickens, Lycanthropy, Holocaust Literature and is the author of Searching for Alice (2019). His literary translation of Patrick Bolthauser's 'Rapids' was longlisted for the 2016 IMPAC Prize.

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Stephen Muecke

University of Notre Dame (Australia)

Serpil Oppermann

Kapadokya Üniversitesi

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Julia Hell

University of Michigan

Kati (Katalin) Prajda

University of Vienna

Niccolò Scaffai

University of Siena / Università di Siena

חנוך בן-פזי Hanoch Ben-Pazi

Bar-Ilan University

Domenico Scarpa

Centro internazionale di studi Primo Levi

Ármann Jakobsson

University of Iceland

Stephen Mitchell

Harvard University

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Papers by Peter Arnds

Carnivalizing the Ban

The fool (Dolpel), the rogue (Schelm) and the wolf form a synthesis in this passage in Hans Jacob... more The fool (Dolpel), the rogue (Schelm) and the wolf form a synthesis in this passage in Hans Jacob Christoph von Grimmelshausen’s The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668), a key text which will demonstrate the significance of the wolf metaphor as a reflection of the early modern age’s anxieties about idleness, mental illness and crime. I argue that this association of the wolf with these flaws and vices in the German picaresque has its roots both in a range of earlier literary forms and the biopolitical custom of expulsion of the criminal in the Middle Ages as the human wolf.

Lycanthropy in German Literature

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to crimina... more

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Wolves at the Door

From Elephant God to Man Dog: Hybridity, Mimicry, and the Homo Sacer in Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”

Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory

THE HOMO SACER IN SALMAN RUSHDIE'S MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN "Sometimes legends make reality, and becom... more THE HOMO SACER IN SALMAN RUSHDIE'S MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN "Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than facts"; "Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past the more concrete and plausible it seems…tiny details assume grotesque proportions. The illusion dissolves, or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality" (Salman Rushdie,

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Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass's The Tin Drum : Abbreviations

... JM Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955). HM Lynne Lawner, Harlequin on the Moon: Commedia del... more

Homo Lupus as Hunchback: representation, subversion and trauma in fiction about the Third Reich

espanolEste articulo muestra como el hombre lobo de Agamben aflora en la figura del jorobado en t... more espanolEste articulo muestra como el hombre lobo de Agamben aflora en la figura del jorobado en tres novelas sobre el Tercer Reich: “El tambor de hojalata” de Gunter Grass, “Si esto es un hombre” de Primo Levi y “El ogro” de Michel Tournier. Hibrido de lo humano y lo animal, de lo santo y lo monstruoso, el jorobado de estas tres novelas tiene un significado especial para la representacion del fascismo y para la subversion de conceptos tales como lo infrahumano y lo sobrehumano. La hibridacion de imagenes en conjuncion con el cuerpo abierto de los protagonistas sirve como manifestacion de la monstruosidad en el contexto del fascismo, pero tambien contiene momentos subversivos en un sentido bajtiniano, si, como hacemos en este articulo, observamos la carnavalizacion del saludo hitleriano de Oskar Matzerath, por ejemplo. Las novelas miticas realistas sobre el Holocausto en particular y sobre el genocidio en general, juegan con el monstruo como una categoria politica que puede ser anali...

From Wolf Man to Bug Man

Jean Grenier, a boy in seventeenth-century France, claimed to have turned into a wolf by means of... more Jean Grenier, a boy in seventeenth-century France, claimed to have turned into a wolf by means of an ointment and a wolf skin and to have eaten a collection of young girls. He was pronounced insane by the judges and his crimes were not punished other than by perpetual imprisonment within the walls of a monastery. The court emphasized ‘the utter neglect of his education and moral development’, that his ‘mind was completely barren’ and referred to the whole matter of lycanthropy as an aberration of the brain.1 Baring-Gould echoes Foucault in arguing that from the seventeenth century onwards, mental malady was segregated and treated rather than punished. The metaphor of humans possessed by wolves or other wild animals points to material that is repressed in the subconscious of the psyche. As became evident in the case of Tieck’s Christian, who was caught between his bourgeois existence and a deeper unfulfilled impulse, his wild side that eventually made him run off into the mountains i...

On the Awful German Fairy Tale: Breaking Taboos in Representations of Nazi Euthanasia and the Holocaust in Giinter Grass's Die Blechtrommel, Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi & der Friseur, and Anselm

Transmedia Storytelling and Cultural Heritage Tourism

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From Eros to Thanatos: Hiking and Spelunking in Ludwig Tieck's Der Runenberg

A s M ichel F oucault tells us , “the disciplinary space is always basically cellular” as “solitu... more A s M ichel F oucault tells us , “the disciplinary space is always basically cellular” as “solitude [is] necessary to both body and soul, according to a certain asceticism.” Martin Heidegger was well aware of this as he took refuge in his mountain hut in Todtnauberg, whose solitude far away from the city was deeply connected to the harmony of his work world and essential to his roots in the Alemannic-Swabian soil. Heidegger saw the link between the German Volk and its home soil as deeply rooted in the autochthony, the Bodenstandigkeit , of ancient Greece. To his mind, these chthonic roots of Greek antiquity constituted the very being of its people in the city of Athens. He understood Athens, the polis , as etymologically derived from pelein , being. He also regarded his own roots and those of Germany as connected specifically with the Black Forest. In this regard he differed substantially from Greek perceptions of places outside the city (especially the mountains) as a locus daemoni...

Wilhelm Raabe's «Der Hungerpastor» and Charles Dickens's «David Copperfield»: Intertextuality of Two Bildungsromane

Der Hungerpastor (1864-65) is Wilhelm Raabe's most popular novel. This monograph shows how Ra... more Der Hungerpastor (1864-65) is Wilhelm Raabe's most popular novel. This monograph shows how Raabe borrowed much of the plot and characters from Charles Dickens's best-selling David Copperfield (1849-50). By providing the reasons why Raabe borrowed from Dickens, this study goes far beyond the existing research on the parallels between these two Bildungsromane. A comparison of the heroes, their Jewish antagonists and a number of female characters demonstrates the extent of Raabe's indebtedness to Dickens. The intertextuality ranges from direct verbal echoes to a mere use of Dickens's ideas upon which Raabe builds a novel distinctly his own.

Random Pandemic Perambulations: A Brief History of Literary Walks in the Age of Corona

Comparative Critical Studies

This article focuses on the concept of randomness as the absence of goal-oriented movement in lit... more This article focuses on the concept of randomness as the absence of goal-oriented movement in literary walks. The literature of walking displays the happenstance of adventure as one of the great antidotes to our inane, highly technologized, digitalized twenty-first-century lifestyle. In the end, however, such randomness may reveal itself as not so random after all, as the purpose of the journey, its inherent telos, discloses itself while travelling or in hindsight. This article provides brief glimpses into the history of literary walks to examine this tension between apparent randomness and the non-random. By drawing on a range of cultural theories and theorizations of travel and especially of walking, I look at literary foot travel in the nineteenth century, the Romantics and American Transcendentalists, some great adventure hikes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the urban and rural flâneur. In doing so the article does not lose sight of the question of how we can i...

Deleuzean Perambulations: Urban and Rural Walking in W.G. Sebald

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies

Translating Holocaust Literature

Blasphemy and sacrilege in the novel of magic realism: Grass, Bulgakov, and Rushdie

Negotiating the Sacred II: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts

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Special Focus Introduction: Literary Walks, Slow Travel, and Eco-Awareness in Contemporary Literature

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

New Media Ecology and Theoretical Foundations for Nonfiction Digital Narrative Creative Practice

Narrative

User Testing Persuasive Interactive Web Documentaries: An Empirical Study

Interactive Storytelling

Rewilding the world in the postcolonial age: On the nexus between cultural production and species politics

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

ABSTRACT This article discusses how the politics of dewilding and rewilding interact with biodive... more ABSTRACT This article discusses how the politics of dewilding and rewilding interact with biodiversity, cultural diversity, and cultural production. Although dewilding – stripping nature of healthy ecosystems and its various species – is still a widespread practice around the globe, it has a particular relationship with the colonial period. Dewilding under colonialism implies the suppression of the resistance of the colonized as well as the extermination of species, especially of those standing in as metaphors for the resistance of those to be colonized. As a case study, this article analyses the metaphorical perception of the wolf from the colonial period in Britain, Ireland, and the US until today to demonstrate how literature has supported both the extermination and the reinstitution of wolves, and how the trajectory from “dewolfing” to “rewolfing” can potentially benefit both nature and culture.

Carnivalizing the Ban