Die Behandlung englischen Kulturgutes im Wiener fin de siècle:am Beispiel von Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Bahr und Peter Altenberg

This study explores the fascination which English culture represented in turn-of-the-century Vienna. The writers that are going to be discussed are the renowned Anglophile Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the more ambivalent Hermann Bahr and the idealizing, but Janus-faced Peter Altenberg. With the more widely known poet, prose writer and playwright, Hofmannsthal, individual aspects of his engagement with English culture have already been well researched; the same, however, cannot be said in the case of Hermann Bahr, whose extensive literary oeuvre has now largely been forgotten, and who has, instead, come to be valued as a prominent figure in the culture life of modernist Vienna, and Peter Altenberg, whose literary fame rests mainly on his prose poems and who, a legend in his life-time, has in recent years also increasingly attracted research interest as a phenomenon and ‘embodiment’ of the culture of his time: while their engagement with French literature, for example, has long received its due share of attention, their debt to English culture has, until now, been neglected. This thesis, therefore, sets out to explore Hofmannsthal’s, Bahr’s and Altenberg’s perception and portrayal of English civilization – ranging from English character and stereotypes, to what they saw as the principles of British society; it goes on to investigate the impulses they derive from Pre-Raphaelite art (Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Whistler) and the art and crafts-movement centred around William Morris, as well as their inspiration by the art criticism of John Ruskin and Walter Horatio Pater. In English literature one of the focal points will be their reading and evaluation of aestheticism as it was reflected in the life and writings of the Dubliner Oscar Wilde, who was perceived, by these Austrian authors, as a predominant figure of London’s cultural life. Similarly, they regarded his compatriot George Bernard Shaw as a key player in turn-of-the-century English (and European) culture. Hermann Bhar largely identified with him. Hofmannsthal, on the other hand, while having some reservations, acknowledged his importance and achievements, whereas Peter Altenberg saw in Shaw a model to reassure him, as his writings were becoming more openly didactic and even more miniaturistic than they had already been. He turned to Shaw, too, to explain and justify his new goal of making his texts more intelligent to a wider circle of readers.

An integral equation method for a mixed initial boundary value problem for unsteady Stokes system in a doubly-connected domain

We present a novel numerical method for a mixed initial boundary value problem for the unsteady Stokes system in a planar doubly-connected domain. Using a Laguerre transformation the unsteady problem is reduced to a system of boundary value problems for the Stokes resolvent equations. Employing a modied potential approach we obtain a system of boundary integral equations with various singularities and we use a trigonometric quadrature method for their numerical solution. Numerical examples are presented showing that accurate approximations can be obtained with low computational cost.

Peter Schmucker 'Grenzübertretungen':intertextuality in the work of WG Sebald

Review of 660 page study on WG Sebald

An alternating method for the stationary Stokes system

An alternating procedure for solving a Cauchy problem for the stationary Stokes system is presented. A convergence proof of this procedure and numerical results are included.

Stokes waves revisited:exact solutions in the asymptotic limit

The Stokes perturbative solution of the nonlinear (boundary value dependent) surface gravity wave problem is known to provide results of reasonable accuracy to engineers in estimating the phase speed and amplitudes of such nonlinear waves. The weakling in this structure though is the presence of aperiodic “secular variation” in the solution that does not agree with the known periodic propagation of surface waves. This has historically necessitated increasingly higher-ordered (perturbative) approximations in the representation of the velocity profile. The present article ameliorates this long-standing theoretical insufficiency by invoking a compact exact n-ordered solution in the asymptotic infinite depth limit, primarily based on a representation structured around the third-ordered perturbative solution, that leads to a seamless extension to higher-order (e.g., fifth-order) forms existing in the literature. The result from this study is expected to improve phenomenological engineering estimates, now that any desired higher-ordered expansion may be compacted within the same representation, but without any aperiodicity in the spectral pattern of the wave guides.