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Stages of Inversion: Die verkehrte Welt in Nineteenth-Century German Literature
Stages of Inversion: Die verkehrte Welt in Nineteenth-Century German Literature presents a literary ahistory of inverted subjectivity that runs parallel with, and at times contrary to, the historical consolidation of homosexual desire in the pathologized figure of the “invert.” Its argument builds on five different literary ...
Moments of Rupture: Narratological Readings of Contemporary German Literature
“Moments of Rupture: Narratological Readings of Contemporary German Literature” explores the representation of disruptive moments in contemporary German novels using a narratological framework of analysis. Joining the larger conversation on narrative practices in contemporary German literature, the dissertation focuses on key ...
Preformations of the Amazonian: Strong Women in German Literature of the Early Enlightenment
The dissertation explores preformations of the Amazonian in German literature of the Early Enlightenment. Far prior to Heinrich von Kleist’s famous Amazonian drama Penthesilea (1808), Amazons and other strong female protagonists were taking over German stages. While Amazons were first mobilized en masse as a cultural symbol ...
The Postsecular Traces of Transcendence in Contemporary German Literature
This dissertation focuses on texts written by four contemporary, German-speaking authors: W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn and Schwindel. Gefühle, Daniel Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt, Sybille Lewitscharoff’s Blumenberg, and Peter Handke’s Der Große Fall. The project explores how the texts represent forms of religion ...
Kriemhild: demon-hero-woman
(1993)
Kriemhild, the main character of the Nibelungenlied, provides an interesting transformation from a young girl afraid of a potentially tragic marriage into a mature woman commanding an army in her pursuit of revenge. The reconciliation of these two images of Kriemhild has been the focus of scholarly attention. Scholars such ...
Veränderte Umwelt: Neue Leseweisen im Anthropozän
(2014-04-30)
My dissertation, titled "Veränderte Umwelt: Neue Leseweisen im Anthropozän" ("Altered Environments: New Readings in the Anthropocene"), explores the role imagination plays in coming to terms with the Anthropocene, the new geophysical era that we are now living in. In this new era, as a number of scholars in both natural ...
Masken des Lebens, Gesichter des Todes: zum Verhältnis von Tod und Darstellung im erzählerischen Werk Arthur Schnitzlers
(1998)
This dissertation explores modes of representations of death in selected narrative works of Arthur Schnitzler. The introductory chapter sets the theoretical framework for all following textual analyses, drawing on Schnitzler's more theoretical writings in Aphorismen und Betrachtungen and his one-act-plays Zum grossen Wurstel ...
Pure Violence on the Stage of Exception: Representations of Revolutions in Georg Büchner, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Heiner Müller, and Elfriede Jelinek
(2013-07-25)
This dissertation examines pertinent issues of today's terrorism debate in frequently overlooked earlier representations of revolutionary and state violence. At the center of this debate is the state of exception through which the sovereign legitimizes the juridical order by suspending preexisting civil laws. As recent ...
Déjà vu, the sublime, and the uncanny: the route to self-overcoming of Hans Castorp's "Schnee" vision in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg
(2005)
Critics have dealt extensively with Thomas Mann's Zauberberg in terms of literary technique, thematic elements, structural composition, literary influences, psychological and philosophical aspects, historical significance, and place within German literature. Despite the apparently exhaustive analyses of Mann's novel, a ...
Remodeling the Frauenzimmer: Women-Authored Spaces in German Literature from 1770-1820
"Remodeling the Frauenzimmer: Women-Authored Spaces in German Literature from 1770-1820" searches for a narrated space that could allow women authors to communicate with one another free from controlling forces exerted by male authors and editors and how women could negotiate their entrance into the public realm with their ...