German

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Wolfed: The Sociopolitical Implications of being Animalized in the Middle Ages
(2026-02-05) WEBER, DETLEV M; Oehme, Annegret
In this dissertation, the primary point of interest is the wolf’s voice and its portrayal of agency in German medieval literature and reception thereof. For this reason, examples in which the wolf itself speaks, or acts to address its own sociopolitical status, and comments on issues of being an outsider, or having been made an outsider, are of particular interest.I analyze various medieval texts that portray realistic as well as allegorical wolves. These texts include receptive works by German Romanticists who engage with medieval material and culture specifically connected to the wolf motif. Within this analysis, I show the cultural value of the wolf motif in literature, and, due to the motif’s ambivalent and ambiguous implications in Western thought, I focus on the wolf’s sociopolitical status as an outsider and its liminal nature in relation to society and humanity. In analyzing the literary wolf in medieval German literature, I focus on the ambiguous implications of what it means for a character to be given wolfish characteristics, or to be made a wolf. This process of wolfing interplays with attitudes toward the animal and its cultural value. I claim that wolves have, on the one hand, been given a predominantly negative stigma. Like the real animal that was free to be hunted and killed in medieval times, allegorical wolves are individuals associated with the wolf motif as an intrinsically negative, and socio-politically hostile characteristic in literature. For individuals to have been wolfed means, concretely, that the animal and the human individual are in some form silenced, exiled, prosecuted, and similarly ostracized. The concept of being made a wolf is complex because, the wolf and wolfed individual hold, on the other hand, highly desirable qualities such as strength, bravery, and independence in their wolfed status. I argue that these wolfed individuals frequently use their abilities and skills to both survive and to stand up against the specific sociopolitical grievance that the repressive social structure used to make these individuals into wolves in the first place. Being wolfed, in other words, includes positive connotations like survival strategies in a hostile environment, such as a repressive society. Acknowledging both sides of the wolfish qualities underscores the relevance of wolfish voices and their role in formulating a more just sociopolitical constellation by calling out injustices in the first place. This study shows the importance of acknowledging the ambivalence of the wolf motif to create a more tolerant society. The function of the wolf motif in literature is a signal toward sociopolitical grievances, and how these grievances reflect prejudices and biases. Of course, the wolf is not only innocent and misunderstood, but also a dangerous predator. However, with regard to individual freedom to participate and formulate social structures and regulating its rules for a thriving environment, all voices need to be taken into account, and the wolf’s voice is significantly strong.
Imposing Identities: Representations of 'das Volk' from Herder to BÃ¼chner
(2024-10-16) Jarzomb, Jeffrey; Wiggins, Ellwood
This dissertation examines the applications of the term Volk in selected philosophical writings of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) and three historical dramas: Charlotte Corday. Eine TragÃ¶die in fÃ¼nf Akten mit ChÃ¶ren (1804), by Engel Christine Westphalen (1758-1840); Wilhelm Tell, by Friedrich Schiller (1759-1804); and Dantons Tod (1835) Georg BÃ¼chner (1813-1837). The concept of Volk underwent a significant semantic shift in the period around 1800 and has continued to occupy a range of meanings central to topics of nation, class, identity, and politics. The central approach of my study, which my title alludes to, is the stark division between descriptive and prescriptive instantiations of this term. Starting with Herder’s earlier writings on aesthetics and language, my analysis finds that the tensions within his varied and influential applications of Volk contribute to a fundamental problem of signification within the term. Compounded by the subsequent outbreak and course of the French Revolution, this problem appears with particular clarity in the three historical dramas examined in chapters two through four. Each of these dramas portrays Volk in a different way, both in the manner through which it actually appears on stage and in what is signified by this term. I demonstrate the extent and implications of this by analyzing each depicted Volk’s capability of engaging in action, Hannah Arendt’s theory of political participation. From these readings, I argue that the concept of Volk is inherently prescriptive and functions as a floating signifier, a term capable of adapting its variable meanings to fulfill almost any political narrative.
Era of Uncertainty: Catastrophe in Nineteenth-Century German Literature
(2024-09-09) Childs, Matthew Robert; Groves, Jason
This dissertation examines the function and forms of catastrophe in several works of nineteenth-century German literature. In the context of literature, catastrophe is a narrative event that disrupts the status quo, generating time and space in which the heretofore unseen structures of society or even life can come into focus and be critiqued. This definition of catastrophe’s function remains stable throughout the nineteenth century, as evidenced by the texts examined here. Yet, catastrophe’s form changes. Variations in form derive from the particular political, social, economic, and intellectual currents of the time in which the texts are written, which means that a proper analysis of the narrative catastrophes can assist in the deeper understanding of nineteenth-century German society and its most prominent concerns. This work brings together scholarship from catastrophe studies, literary studies, eighteenth and nineteenth century studies, intellectual history, and German Studies to define literary catastrophe’s function and to trace the contours of their varying forms back to their possible historical causes and motivations.The chapters are organized chronologically. Heinrich von Kleist’s Das Erdbeben in Chili establishes the paradigmatic function of catastrophe in literature through an earth-shattering quake that recalls the eighteenth-century discourse surrounding the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust offers a more reparative and qualified depiction of catastrophe as a cosmological event-that-must-be through which human life remains a tragedy but also attains meaning. Wilhelm Raabe’s Pfisters MÃ¼hle: Ein Sommerferienheft, through water pollution, offers a glimpse into industrial catastrophe and the modern world whose complexities have grown so immense that literature struggles to render it comprehensible. The dissertation then ends with the near-destruction of the dike in Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter to discuss how the specter of catastrophe haunts the literature of late nineteenth-century Germany and portends a change in the conceptual understanding of catastrophe in the twentieth century. In the course of the dissertation’s analysis and in addition to the conclusions about catastrophe’s function and forms, one thing becomes abundantly clear: the nineteenth century is one in which life is increasingly uncertain. Political revolutions, economic upheavals, sudden advancements in technology—all such factors and more work in tandem to undermine any attempt to establish a uniform and enduring system by which to navigate change. Not stability but contingency becomes the byword of the era. Recognition of this fact should inform scholarly understandings of the period and also be a point of reflection for the unsettled world we are confronting today.
Rajžaliteratur – A Journey Across the Shifting Words of Traumatic Narratives
(2024-09-09) Carpenter, Aaron Wade; Groves, Jason
The authors in this dissertation all write against a national narrative in their respective countries that exposes where their communities’ experiences are left out or disregarded. They do so by using various strategies and this dissertation will focus on their use of loanwords to fight against nationalistic impulses. As a foreign element within society, loanwords can be an explosive force that represents different perspectives on issues where multiple groups do not see concerns or events the same way. The explosive force of these loanwords also leads them to create profane narratives, which counter national narratives that can take on an almost theological quality. Maja Haderlap activates this force most directly with Rajža and the history of how her grandmother, like other oppressed or resented ethnic Slovenes in Carinthia, was sent to a concentration camp by Austrian authorities under the Nazi government, a role Austria long denied playing. Saša Stanišić also disrupts nationalist narratives, specifically of former Yugoslavia, in his writing for an audience in Germany where he explains how describing inter-ethnic relations is not as simple as either love or hate between the different groups. Marica Bodrožić critiques a trend in now-independent Croatia to remove loanwords from the language, arguing that the resulting language is artificial and does not help the speaker communicate effectively. The project of Nicol Ljubić’s protagonist, Robert, begins when he does not understand the meaning of the loanword bonaca, which his girlfriend, the Bosnian-Serb Ana teaches him. He must translate and deconstruct its German equivalent, Meeresstille, to understand how she is still affected by the trauma of the war.
Beastly Specters: from Hubris to Hybridity in German Romanticism and Beyond
(2022-07-14) Mohler, Justin; Wilke, Sabine
This dissertation project investigates narrative modes and strategies for writing about non-human animals that challenge the idea of a clear animal-human divide. Beginning with works from German Romanticism, the first half of the project analyzes texts popularized at a time when humans’ relationship to other animals underwent a seismic shift, stemming from an increasing drive toward objectification and commodification of nature brought on by the Industrial Revolution and urbanization. Chapter one begins with an analysis of Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and Ludwig Tieck’s Der Blonde Eckbert, arguing that each implies that a kind of hybrid paradise exists beyond the human-animal dichotomy as traditionally understood. In both works love appears as a powerful unifying force, uniquely capable of bridging divides of all kinds. Yet in each case the protagonists find their attempts to reach or even describe a utopia beyond such simplistic categories sabotaged by a persistent anthropocentrism; unable to acknowledge their hubris, these figures falter in the face of a divide the crossing of which appears both necessary and impossible. Chapter two further explores this tension, reading Friedrich de la Motte FouquÃ©’s famous tale of a love-lorn mermaid Undine through the lens of Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species. Here too, love appears as a possible means of overcoming the mutual alienation of humans and animals. In practice, however, Undine’s husband proves unable to recognize the significant otherness of his new companion. Appalled by her irreducible alterity, he withholds the openness and respect that Haraway’s concept would demand of each party. In attempting to sever their bond, he soon finds himself haunted, like Eckbert’s wife, by a vengeful specter intent on showing him the error of his ways. This inability to acknowledge and remedy his anthropocentrism connects him to the discourse surrounding human animality in chapter one; the impossible necessity of crossing the divide leads to the destruction of both parties, resulting in harmonious hybridity only in death.Shifting focus to examples from contemporary literature, chapters three and four explore the ways in which this contradictory understanding of the divide continues to influence modern conceptions of animality and its relation to the human. The third chapter focuses on Carmen Stephan’s 2012 debut novel Mal Aria, which relates the final days of a young malaria victim through the eyes of the mosquito who bit her. Published almost exactly two centuries after Undine, Mal Aria offers a more urgent critique of rigid hierarchical thinking, omitting FouquÃ©’s redemptive coda that sees the hybrid couple united in death. With the horrors of DDT fresh in her mind and faced with the looming prospect of ever-increasing human control over the environment, Stephan’s narrator challenges anthropocentric orthodoxy through the recruitment of her reluctant “blood sister.” In a process analogous to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, the mosquito and her victim achieve a strange new kind of hybrid existence, the significance of which fails to be recognized until it is too late. Pivoting to post-apocalyptic literature, chapter four explores animal-human relations in Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand. Unlike Mal Aria, which resolves the tension present in its romantic forebears negatively through the deadly dissolution of the hybrid family at its center, the protagonist of Die Wand enjoys a modicum of success, creating a hybrid utopia which appears as the antithesis of the failed anthropocentric patriarchy. By drawing on theoretical understandings of care from scholars like Rachel Adams, this chapter argues that the protagonist’s nascent society is characterized by an acknowledgement of cross-species interdependencies. This admission of mutual reliance serves as a basis for something akin to non-human personhood, an expanded notion of more-than-human morality whose power in the novel is matched only by its precarity. The concluding section revisits the works analyzed in previous chapters to draw out similarities between them in their use of the “beastly specter”, an animalistic figure who persists from the 19th century texts analyzed in the first half of the project through to the modern examples handled in chapters three and four. This liminal figure is shown to present particularly effective and increasingly urgent critiques of anthropocentric hierarchical thinking by repudiating human attempts at domination and misguided individualism.
Invisible dangers : the Presentation of Modern Environmental Threats and the Anthropocene in Contemporary German Literature
(2021-07-07) Hester, Vanessa; Wilke, Sabine
This dissertation project examines how contemporary German literary texts depict modern environmental threats that are characteristic for the new age of the Anthropocene. Joining the larger conversation in environmental literary studies, and the Environmental Humanities in general, this project focuses on how written narratives overcome the visual obstacles that are a significant part of the environment and its current perils. Divided into thematical chapters, the dissertation analyzes narratives that deal with climate change (Ilija Trojanow, Liane Dirks), the nuclear threat after the catastrophe in Chernobyl (Christa Wolf, Gudrun Pausewang), and extinction (Marlen Haushofer, Max Frisch). The fourth and closing chapter summarizes the narrative characteristics evident in the German texts and compares them to the distinct aspects in Anglophone literary texts (Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver). This concluding, comparative analysis demonstrates that the depiction of the environmental hazards is not only specific to literature, but peculiar to a specific culture.My analysis identifies three characteristics that accompany the depiction of invisible environmental threats in contemporary German literature: First, literary texts have transformed into hybrid narratives that resemble the conditions of the environment as neither solely natural, nor urban, nor technological; instead, they can be regarded as a mesh in which countless influences interact and intersect. The boundaries of literary genres have become less stable as more and more texts include the features of several generic literary traditions, most prominently, travel, autobiographical, and disaster writing. The emergence of these hybrid literary texts affects their presentation of place and time within the narratives. For instance, in order to show the slow progression of environmental threats, these texts frequently make use of analepses in order to highlight the hazardous developments in the environment over time. Second, the first-person-narrators become the stories’ focalizers who are depicting the literary plot through their highly subjective lenses. These human individuals from whose perspectives the texts are told are in most cases ordinary people with no scientific background or deeper understanding of the environmental threat. Similar to their readers, they are only witnesses of the changing climate or the nuclear contamination of their home’s environments. Therefore, they document their inner personal thoughts and attempt to describe what is happening, even though it might not be perceptible to their human senses. Additionally, these texts are often arranged in the form of written reports that resemble traditional diaries, hence strengthening the highly personal character of these texts. Third, as the environmental threats remain mostly invisible and imperceptible to these focalizers, they employ language to describe what remains hidden to them. Here, they use established and familiar words and expressions that capture and compare the environmental dangers to everyday occurrences and events. This strategy involves the semantic broadening of individual terms, as well as metaphors and analogies.
Moral considerations in the works of Arthur Schnitzler
(1961) Dausz, Maria; Rey, H. H.
Out of the charming and dusty world of rococo Vienna, sweet melancholy and tired resignation, impressionism and moral relativism emerges the author and moral critic, Arthur Schnitzler. Himself a product of his times, he creates within this world, and his ear ly characters bear the mark of the super-sophistication of the cultural metropolis as well as the philosophical resignation and subjectivism of the era which we designate as the fin de siecle. Although the author never really abandons the world of the Viennese society at the turn of the century, his later works emerge in direct contrast to the impressionistic dream world which he created in his first dramatic success, Anatol. The charm and gaiety which characterize this work, give way to more serious considerations in his later works, in which the author emerges as a definite critic of his times.
Subverting the Gazhe Gaze: Reclaiming Roma Identity in the European World and Beyond
(2019-08-14) Emrys, Brandon Chase; Block, Richard O.
For centuries, the Romani people in Europe and North America have been the focus of a non-Roma gaze which simultaneously fetishizes and vilifies them. This ascription of a tropic identity serves to both reify the constructed identity of the non-Roma as societal elite and to ensure the Roma remain marginalized and divested of any voice or agency Using Gayatri Spivak’s 1988 essay, Can the Subaltern Speak?, as a point of departure, this dissertation explores the various methods by which the Roma strive to make their voices heard. Analyzing depictions of “Gypsy” figures in classical works of the European canon in order to highlight the language within which the Roma are situated, this dissertation then pivots to an examination of several key texts written by Roma authors in order to observe their approaches to working within the context of these tropic ascriptions to negotiate a space from which they might successfully communicate with their non-Roma audience and be recognized as autonomous individuals. While it becomes apparent that cultural blending and invisibility, along with direct communication and engagement, are ineffective strategies met with resistance, the texts demonstrate a third, indirect strategy, running obliquely between passive silence and direct confrontation, which subverts the very gaze fixated upon them.
Negotiating the German Public Sphere: Workers, Soldiers, and Women in Photobooks of Weimar Germany
(2019-08-14) Kick, Verena R; Wilke, Sabine
This dissertation focuses on the intersection of non-fiction writing and visual culture, specifically on the montage of texts and photos as an approach to examine the changing public sphere in Weimar Germany. “Negotiating the German Public Sphere: Workers, Soldiers and Women in Photobooks of Weimar Germany” shows how photobooks employ montage strategies associated both with 1920s Soviet Cinema and Walter Benjamin’s concepts of montage and experience to specifically address workers, soldiers, and women. An analysis of Walter Benjamin’s EinbahnstraÃ e (1928), Kurt Tucholsky’s and John Heartfield’s Deutschland, Deutschland Ã¼ber Alles (1929) and Ernst Friedrich’s two volumes of Krieg dem Kriege! (1924/1926) reveals how these photobooks offer an alternative to the biased portrayals of these social groups in Weimar Germany’s mass media. At the same time, particularly Tucholsky, Heartfield and Friedrich demonstrate to these groups, as the intended readers of their publications, the possibility of creating an effective consciousness to combat impending fascism. This work engages with the larger discussion of the representation of social classes in German literature and media, and it furthermore contributes to the scholarship on photobooks by elucidating previously uninvestigated uses of photographs and montage strategies. Chapter one focuses on Benjamin’s EinbahnstraÃ e, a collection of essays and aphorisms, which form, as I argue, modern emblems. In turning not only his short texts, but also all of EinbahnstraÃ e, including its cover image and dedication into an emblem, Benjamin deconstructs and at the same time reconstructs writing practices and, by extension, reading processes, adapting them to the changes in literary culture at the time. This analysis of Benjamin’s work serves as a framework for the next two chapters that employ certain montage techniques (similar to an emblematic structure) to both de- and re-contextualize workers and soldiers. Chapter two focuses on the working class in Tucholsky’s and Heartfield’s Deutschland, Deutschland Ã¼ber Alles, and examines the structural importance of the photobook’s text-image combinations as, what I call, “functional montages.” Their horizontal dimension on the photobook’s page, combined with a vertical dimension that forms the experience of these montages for the implied readers, enables particularly working class readers to develop a critical view of their representation in the media. Chapter three also employs the idea of the “functional montage” and analyzes the representation of WWI soldiers in Ernst Friedrich’s two volumes of Krieg dem Kriege!. Instead of showing the soldier as a fighting hero at the frontline, Friedrich uses montage methods to show him as a son and a father, as a pet owner, as a “timeless concept” in his miniature toy form, and as a witness, both of the events during the war and for the public after the war. Finally, the coda addresses the photobook’s portrayal of women. Although women constituted a big part of the readership at the time, they were often only represented stereotypically in mass media, for instance, as mothers or as objects of desire. Revisiting the representation of women and womanhood in the photobooks analyzed in previous chapters of my dissertation, I show that they offered a possibility for women to develop a self-awareness that goes beyond mass media’s black and white view of them.
Writing Across Margins: Contemporary Afro-German Literature
(2019-05-02) Pilz, Kristina; Prutti, Brigitte
My dissertation argues that Afro-German literature—a new strand in contemporary German literature since the late 1980s—functions as aesthetic activism by creating collective identity through textual practices. Joining the larger conversation in Black German Studies on Afro-German poetry and autobiography, this project focuses on writing practices in Afro-German feminist poetry by Helga Emde, Katharina Oguntoye, and May Ayim; Afro-German spoken word poetry by Chantal-Fleur Sandjon, Philipp Khabo Köpsell and Samy Deluxe; Afro-German celebrity autobiographies by Abini Zöllner and Detlef Soost; as well as Afro-German memoirs by Theodor Michael and Gert Schramm. Black German textual practices develop parameters of collective identity that range from the emergence of Afro-German voices to a new understanding of Afro-German blackness; from a new recognition of Afro-German identities, to the rise of an Afro-German memory. The writing practices that shape parameters of collective identity—métissage, imagery, autofiction, multilayering—organize my dissertation and provide the categories for textual analysis. By combining close readings with aesthetic (e.g. Lionnet, Bürger, Gates, Wagner-Egelhaaf) and cultural theory (e. g. Du Bois, Gilroy, Hall, Silverman), my project demonstrates that Afro-German writing practices help to bend and transgress literary and social categories. The opening chapter reflects on how the aesthetic development in Afro-German feminist poetry breaks the history of Afro-German silence and establishes critical Afro-German voices by employing a form of textual interweaving, a practice I refer to as poetic métissage. Chapter two illustrates how a contemporary double-imagery in Afro-German spoken word poetry—what I describe as the twoness of textual elements that ignite the senses—defines new conceptions of German blackness that escape single-stranded representations. Chapter three explores how celebrity autobiographies by East German authors deploy autofiction in life writing to bring forth new ways of conceptualizing Black German recognition. The final chapter focuses on the ways in which palimpsestic multilayering—a form of textual layering—extends German cultural memories, while their development within the structure of the memoirs drives the formation of an Afro-German collective memory.
Kasper’s Theater: Avant-Garde and Propaganda Puppetry in Early Twentieth-Century Germany
(2019-02-22) Herschman, Rachel Elizabeth; Ames, Eric C
Kasper’s Theater: Avant-Garde and Propaganda Puppetry in Early Twentieth-Century Germany is a research-driven study of how and why artists turned to puppetry during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Organized chronologically, the project examines the different ways a puppet could be both an icon of rebellious resistance and a vehicle for manipulation and control—and why it matters. Kasper, the tramp-like everyman trickster cousin of Punch, is a central character, but this study follows other puppets, too, and brings together a range of works by canonical, lesser-studied, and newly rediscovered artists. More than just a history of puppetry, Kasper’s Theater argues that puppets blur the line between life and art, and offers a new view of German cultural and political history.
Mind-Crafting: Anticipatory Critique of Transhumanist Mind-Uploading in German High Modernist Novels
(2018-07-31) Bates, Nathan Jensen; Block, Richard
This dissertation explores the question of how German modernist novels anticipate and critique the transhumanist theory of mind-uploading in an attempt to avert binary thinking. German modernist novels simulate the mind and expose the indistinct limits of that simulation. Simulation is understood in this study as defined by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation. The novels discussed in this work include Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg; Hermann Broch’s Die Schlafwandler; Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte von Franz Biberkopf; and, in the conclusion, Irmgard Keun’s Das Kunstseidene Mädchen is offered as a field of future inquiry. These primary sources disclose at least three aspects of the mind that are resistant to discrete articulation; that is, the uploading or extraction of the mind into a foreign context. A fourth is proposed, but only provisionally, in the conclusion of this work. The aspects resistant to uploading are defined and discussed as situatedness, plurality, and adaptability to ambiguity. Each of these aspects relates to one of the three steps of mind-uploading summarized in Nick Bostrom’s treatment of the subject. In addition to transhumanism and simulation, other concepts or areas of inquiry include the posthuman; Heidegger’s fourfold; Benjamin’s definition of translation; free indirect speech; the narratology of Dorrit Cohn, Alan Palmer, and Alfred Döblin; and, to a lesser extent, the deconstruction of masculinity. It is ultimately argued that the location of fictional minds in the novel has a flattening effect, but it is this flattening effect which simultaneously discloses the mind’s resistance to two-dimensionality.
Art, Cinema, and the Berlin School
(2017-08-11) Krakenberg, Jasmin; Ames, Eric
This dissertation argues that the Berlin School (Berliner Schule)—the most important development in German cinema since the New German Cinema of the 1970s—explores the relation between cinema and traditional art genres. The four genres that organize my dissertation—portraiture, landscape, still life, and history—also provide the key categories for analyzing their work. Each genre provides the cinema with historical forms of seeing and representation. The films, for their part, take up these forms and rework them in a new context. In my exploration of the films, I draw on a variety of texts (student work, non-narrative films, experimental films, narrative films, painting, photography, and video installation). This study does not provide a single “reading” of the films, nor does it simply classify them as a portrait films or landscape films, for example. Films can obviously cut across genres, creating a visual and referential richness that allows for even deeper engagement. I build upon discussions of the aesthetic context of the pictorial arts, drawing from art historians, as well as from literary and film scholars, to show how “ways of seeing” specific to these genres of art suggest a way of dealing with the problem of stasis in film. Consequently, this study suggests a revised understanding of the genres that emphasizes mobility and dynamism in relation to the stories being told. This dissertation offers a conceptual framework through art for exploring both the history and aesthetics of the Berlin School. It suggests an understanding of the Berlin School not just as art cinema, but cinema as a reflection on the history of art. Going further, it expands our understanding of film’s visual language and of cinema as an art of seeing. In doing so, it also demonstrates how narrative film is currently redefining the cinema’s relation to the arts. Ultimately, I argue that an understanding of the current German cinema through the framework of art history allows us to connect beyond the German context to film and visual arts more broadly.
Moments of Rupture: Narratological Readings of Contemporary German Literature
(2016-09-22) Albiero, Olivia; Prutti, Brigitte
“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 questions of literary form, narration and storytelling in four major novels published at the beginning of the twenty-first century: Christoph Ransmayr’s Der fliegende Berg (2006), Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Sand (2011), Lutz Seiler’s Kruso (2014) and Saša Stanišić’s Vor dem Fest (2014). The project investigates the use of narrative elements to relate, mend and overcome moments of personal, hermeneutical, political and social rupture. By drawing on influential works of narratology, from Aristotle’s early narratology to pertinent contemporary theories (e.g. Bakhtin, Brooks, Fludernik, Genette, Phelan), my study shows how narratives shape and are in turn shaped by the ruptures they describe. Chapters are organized around key narrative categories, which serve to explore one literary text. The opening chapter discusses the significance of time and space in Der fliegende Berg. It shows how a moment of personal rupture is reflected in the transitions between physical, virtual and mythological times and spaces, and in the encounters that characterize them. Chapter two investigates the plotting of Sand. It examines the tension between (re)cognition and mistakes, between understanding and utter bafflement both on the level of diegesis and of reading. Chapter three examines the characters in Kruso. It shows how the relationship between the main figures translates into a political allegory, which stands for the failure of a utopian project and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The final chapter explores the features of the plural voice in Vor dem Fest and its role in preserving a post-socialist community affected by slow decline and the death of its storyteller.
Preformations of the Amazonian: Strong Women in German Literature of the Early Enlightenment
(2016-07-14) Berk, Seth Alexander; Gray, Richard T
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 by Parisian women during the French Revolution, this thesis explores the possibility that the Amazonian has deeper reaching roots in sociosemiotic practice, particularly in the context of learned women who rose to prominence during the Early Enlightenment. Starting from the archetype of the Amazon, covalent mythological figures of strong women are contextualized with classically inspired texts produced by intellectuals of the emerging German-speaking bourgeoisie. Johann Christoph Gottsched’s efforts to support women’s education finds contextualization through a close reading of his pastoral, Atalanta, oder die bezwungene Sprödigkeit (1741), his Minnesang poems to his wife, and his moral weekly designed for a female reading audience, Die Vernünftigen Tadlerinnen (1725–1726), exploring the possibilities for female autonomy in his play and the importance of the symbol of Minerva in the cultural archive of the Enlightenment. Similarly, the drama Panthea (1744) by Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched is investigated as part of a proto-feminist, emancipatory poetics, where her androgynous protagonist’s suicide is read as a productive failure. Finally, the Electress Maria Antonia Walpurgis Symphora’s Talestri. Regina delle Amazonni / Talestris. Königin der Amazonen (1763) is explored as the self-representation of a female ruler as a Minerva-like Amazon, since she not only wrote the libretto and composed the music, but also performed the main role, literally embodying the queen of the Amazons in the context of court ceremonies. While she attempts to inscribe herself into the patriarchal structure of absolutist rule, her Amazons are also explored as potentially domesticated in favor of enlightened ideals. German Abstract Diese Doktorarbeit untersucht Präfigurationen von amazonenhaften Frauenfiguren in der Literatur der frühen deutschen Aufklärung. Schon Jahre vor der Publikation von Heinrich von Kleists Penthesilea (1808) eroberten starke Protagonistinnen die deutschsprachige Bühne. Obwohl Amazonen erst vermehrt als Symbol während der Französischen Revolution von Frauen angeeignet wurden, untersucht diese Dissertation, ob das Amazonische fundamentale und tiefliegende Wurzeln in der soziosemiotischen Praxis der frühen Aufklärung habe, insbesondere angesichts des Aufstiegs gebildeter Frauen zu dieser Zeit. Ausgehend vom Symbol der Amazone werden vergleichbare mythologische Figuren von starken Frauen in Texten von deutschsprachigen Intellektuellen des erstarkenden Bürgertums interpretiert. Johann Christoph Gottscheds Atalanta, oder die bezwungene Sprödigkeit (1741) wird sowohl mit seiner Unterstützung der Bildung von Frauen als auch mit frühen Minnesang-Gedichten an seine künftige Frau und mit seiner moralischen Zeitschrift Die Vernünftigen Tadlerinnen (1725–1726), die explizit für ein weibliches Lesepublikum geschrieben wurde, intertextuell gelesen. Darüberhinaus wird die Bedeutung des Symbols der Minerva im kulturellen Archiv der frühen Aufklärung betont. Das Drama Panthea (1744) von Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched, in dem die Hauptfigur am Ende sich das Leben nimmt, wird als Teil einer protofeministischen Poetik interpretiert und der Freitod als produktives Scheitern herausgearbeitet. Schließlich wird die Oper Talestri. Regina delle Amazonni / Talestris. Königin der Amazonen (1763) von der Kurfürstin Maria Antonia Walpurgis Symphorosa von Sachsen auf die Selbstrepräsentation der Herrscherin als eine Minerva-ähnliche Amazone untersucht, da die Autorin nicht nur das Libretto schrieb und die Musik komponierte, sondern auch die Hauptrolle der Königin der Amazonen auf der Bühne des Hofes verkörperte. Sie versuchte, soweit die These der Arbeit, sich in die Machtstruktur des patriarchalen Absolutismus hineinzuschreiben, obwohl Amazonen-Figuren bereits als durch die Ideale der Aufklärung domestiziert verstanden werden könnten.
Stages of Inversion: Die verkehrte Welt in Nineteenth-Century German Literature
(2016-03-11) Johnstone, Japhet Philip William Seagull; Block, Richard
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 in the nineteenth century from Ludwig Tieck’s Die verkehrte Welt, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Prinzessin Brambilla, Georg Büchner’s Leonce und Lena, Gottfried Keller’s Kleider machen Leute, and Arthur Schnitzler’s Der grüne Kakadu. The literary and theatrical inversions in these works suggest a potential for queer identities avant la lettre that resists identitarian pressures and raises questions about the intersection of identification, theatricality, and the history of (homo)sexuality. The study stages a dialogue between literary, philosophical, and scientific discourses from the past and the present with a focus on queer theory and concepts like disidentification (José Muñoz) and drag (Judith Butler). While in the end the psycho-sexual-medical discourse seems to appropriate inversion (as perhaps best seen in Proust), there remains an ironic core to inversion in its many forms that elides both propriety and subjection. Indeed, the irony of inversion runs throughout the nineteenth-century texts under examination, proving again and again how difficult it is to instrumentalize inversion, especially in the name of identification. (deutsche Fassung) Die Studie Stages of Inversion: Die verkehrte Welt in Nineteenth-Century German Literature entwickelt eine alternative Literaturgeschichte des “verkehrten” Subjekts. Diese Geschichte, die im 19. Jahrhundert beginnt, läuft teils parallel, teils aber auch gegenläufig zu Verortungen homosexuellen Begehrens, wie sie gleichzeitig in der pathologisierten Figur des “Invertierten” Gestalt annehmen. Die Studie nimmt fünf exemplarische Stationen dieser Geschichte in den Blick: Ludwig Tiecks Die verkehrte Welt, E.T.A. Hoffmanns Prinzessin Brambilla, Georg Büchners Leonce und Lena, Gottfried Kellers Kleider machen Leute und Arthur Schnitzlers Der grüne Kakadu. Die literarischen und theatralischen Verkehrungen, die diese Texte inszenieren, bieten Möglichkeiten an, Identitäten anders zu denken als es die im gleichen Zeitraum entstehende Identitätskategorie “des Homosexuellen” erlaubt. Im Gegensatz dazu unterminieren die verkehrten Identitäten—queere Identitäten avant la lettre—die dominierenden Identitätsdiskurse der Zeit. In der Erkundung der Schnittstellen von Identifikation, Theatralität und Geschichte der (Homo-)Sexualität geht die Studie auch dem Dialog zwischen literarischen, philosophischen und wissenschaftlichen Diskursen nach, deren Wirkmächtigkeit sich bis in unsere Gegenwart erstreckt. Obgleich es dem psychosexuellen Diskurs scheinbar gelingt, die Figur der Inversion für seine Zwecke zu vereinnahmen, bleibt ein ironischer Kern dieser Figur davon unberührt—weshalb die Figur grundsätzlich Vereinnahmung und Subjektivierung widersteht. Ironische Konfigurationen finden sich in allen fünf Akten der Inversion, die in Stages of Inversion untersucht werden. Diese Konfigurationen weisen noch einmal nachdrücklich darauf hin, wie schwierig es ist, die “verkehrte Welt” im Namen von Identitätspolitiken zu instrumentalisieren.
The Postsecular Traces of Transcendence in Contemporary German Literature
(2015-09-29) Bell, Thomas Richard; Wilke, Sabine
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 in an increasingly secular society. Religious themes, while never disappearing, have recently been reactivated in the context of the secular age. This current societal milieu of secularism, as delineated by Charles Taylor, provides the framework in which these fictional texts, when manifesting religious intuitions, offer a postsecular perspective that serves as an alternative mode of thought. The project asks how contemporary literature, as it participates in the construction of secular dialogue, generates moments of religiously coded transcendence. What textual and narrative techniques serve to convey new ways of perceiving and experiencing transcendence within the immanence felt and emphasized in the modern moment? While observing what the textual strategies do to evoke religious presence, the dissertation also looks at the type of religious discourse produced within the texts. The project begins with the assertion that a historically antecedent model of religion – namely, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s – which is never mentioned explicitly but implicitly present throughout, informs the style of religious discourse. Formulating religion with an emphasis on the subjective appeal to “Anschauung” (Intuition) and “Gefühl” (Feeling), he provides a Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, and his response shares structural and thematic similarities to what we find in the postsecular position towards secularism. The dissertation shows that certain contemporary German texts – as they enter into and inform dialogue in the public sphere (Jürgen Habermas) by attempting to find a publicly acceptable language to speak about and critique religious sensibilities – participate in a postsecular religious discourse with its own underlying response to the modern, secular age.
W.G. Sebald and the Cinematic Imagination
(2014-10-13) Pasic, Sabina; Gray, Richard T.
W. G. Sebald's references to films, film directors, and actors pervade in both his critical essays and in his prose fictions. Although there are many different films, cinematic metaphors, and allusions to cinema throughout his work, most of them stand in specific service to memory. This study thus explores the function of filmic images and intermediality more generally in Sebald's prose fictions. It looks at how his writing about film not only mirrors the workings of memory, but also how it produces new and hybrid memories. Sebald's books seek to mark off precisely this liminal space in which new memories are created, a space characterized by a dialectical synthesis of imagination and reality, past and present. The interplay between the polarities leaves the reader with a sense of uncertainty about what is remembered and what is imagined to have been. This is a productive stage for Sebald, because it not only triggers our imaginative faculties but it also advocates for a critical engagement with the ways our memories are remembered and our histories are written. Filmic events in Sebald's writing access a space in his texts, which would have otherwise remained hidden. Sebald's prose fictions contain evidence of both his fascination and uneasiness with the way the film medium transformed human identity and the nature of memory. His ambivalent relationship to film and technology more generally makes him a relevant figure whose work has been embraced by both academics and (visual) artists. His claim to be a "bricoleur"--a collector of pre-existing visual material--resonates with the present era's unprecedented ability not only to store huge digital archives, but also to click, drag, and recontextualize their contents across limitless formats. Always on the move, collecting, reporting, and speculating about images, Sebald suggests that we do not have to be slaves to spectacle but can use film and photography as instruments of thought. This study thus explores Sebald's use of the idiosyncrasies of the film medium to reflect on and explore the nature of memory.
Critical Conditions: The Signature of the Wound in Franz Kafka's Shorter Fiction
(2014-10-13) Coombs, Timothy; Gray, Richard T
This dissertation explores the significance of wounds in four short texts by Franz Kafka: "Ein Landarzt," "Das Urteil," Ein Bericht für eine Akademie," and "Prometheus." Rather than reduce the metaphor of the wound to biographical or psychoanalytic principles, two approaches that have predominated scholarship on these texts, this study examines how the wound promotes a critical undecidability in Kafka's language: a condition in which body and body of text demand and defy "treatment" on several levels. Using a variety of rhetorical, narratological, and philological evidence, this dissertation argues how woundedness functions as a "critical condition" in these texts that paradoxically extends and enriches their interpretive life -- an openness that resists closure of any form.
Accommodating the Nation: Hospitality and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century German Literature
(2014-10-13) Magnusson, Nathan; Gray, Richard T
This dissertation investigates the ways nineteenth-century German literature imagines nationality by examining metaphors and structures of hospitality. This examination is twofold: it takes as its subject hospitality narratives and narrative hospitality. By hospitality narratives, I mean the semantic aspect of texts that figure the hospitable gathering as a metaphor for the national community. By narrative hospitality, I mean that the literary texts perform hospitality on the textual level by taking on the characteristics of hosts, guests, and the spaces they assemble. The first three chapters examine how entertainment, taste, and ritual both unite and estrange members of a national community in Goethe's <italic>Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten</italic>, E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Der unheimliche Gast," Clemens Brentano's <italic>Die mehreren Wehmüller</italic>, Achim von Arnim's <italic>Isabella von Ägypten</italic>, Heinrich Heine's <italic>Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen</italic>, and Adalbert Stifter's "Der Kuß von Sentze." The fourth and fifth chapters argue that the figures of the hostess, the host, and the guest in Louise von François's "Der Posten der Frau," Eugenie Marlitt's <italic>Im Hause des Kommerzienrates</italic>, Theodor Storm's <italic>Der Schimmelreiter</italic>, and Theodor Fontane's <italic>Der Stechlin</italic> function as providers, recipients, and transmitters of narratives that potentially unite the members of an internally fragmented nation. Taken together, the texts function as sites where the idea of the German national community is both enacted and critiqued; they furnish a space where nationality as a category of belonging is at once welcomed and challenged.

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