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Matthew D. Goodwin

University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA

Rolf Kailuweit wrote a Ph.D. thesis in 1996 on Diglossic Attitudes in Catalonia (1759-1859) and a postdoctoral qualification for professorship (Habilitation) on the Syntax and Semantics of French and Italian Verbs of Emotion in 2003. Since 2004 he has been tenured Professor for Romance Language and Media Studies in the Department of Romance Languages at the Universität Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany). From April 2008 to March 2009 he is internal fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) with a project concerning River Plate Spanish: the Creation of a Linguistic and Cultural Space.

Articles of Matthew D. Goodwin

The Brazilian Exile of Vilém Flusser and Stefan Zweig

In this article, I outline the history of Jewish exile to Brazil during the 1930s and 1940s, and I compare Vilém Flusser’s philosophy of immigration and Stefan Zweig’s last work of fiction, Schachnovelle. Flusser and Zweig shared a similar dialectical form of thinking, and yet Zweig’s novella expressed the failure of finding a synthesis due to exile while Flusser found the synthesis in the experience of immigration itself. Flusser’s philosophy of immigration is not clearly applicable to those who are not in his same situation, since he places awareness, disengagement, and transcendence at a key position. His emphasis may not be applicable to all refugees, transnational immigrants, and border crossers; however, Zweig was one of those in a similar situation as Flusser. Like many of Zweig’s novellas, the framework of Schachnovelle is constructed around a number of opposites and their possible reconciliations and yet these various attempts to bring together the opposites all fail. Flusser’s philosophy is a positive one that has incredibly strong features, yet its limitations show up in an analysis of Zweig’s work and point to the need for further work in the philosophy of immigration.

Brazilian Exile (PDF 123.47 KB)

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