Browsing by Author "Downing, Eric"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Curious Daughters: Language, Literacy, and Jewish Female Desire in German and Yiddish Literature from 1793 to 1916
    (2021-04) Greenberg, Lea H.
    This dissertation examines the interplay of language politics and romantic politics in German and Yiddish literature confronting the challenges faced by Judaism in the long nineteenth century. The project brings into dialogue both German and Yiddish texts, from West Yiddish farces to the literature of a new German Jewish elite to the popular stories of Tevye the Dairyman. This diverse body of literature uses a concern with the sexual purity and loyalty of the Jewish daughter to encode anxieties toward Jewish assimilation into the non-Jewish world. Yet these works also share another layer of the daughter’s subversion: an act of rebellion in the form of a linguistic or cultural departure from tradition. Each of these texts depicts how the Jewish daughter’s adoption of European language and literacy operates in conjunction with her romantic transgressions. I read these works in conversation with the gendered discourse on Jewish language and the history of Jewish women in Europe; these dynamics create a framework for understanding an ambivalence toward new modes of Jewish life. By bearing the onus as cultural gatekeeper, the daughter figure blurs the lines between religious and social categories or explodes these dichotomies altogether.
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    Disruptive Organizers: Wild children in German realism (1850-1900)
    (2020-05) Reif, Margaret
    This dissertation explores the intersection of childhood and wildness within the literary movement of German realism. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw the introduction of mandatory education and the consolidation of the middle-class family, both of which established childhood as a distinct phase. The literary movement of German realism emerged at the same time, with a focus on representing ordinary life and experiences with a particular concentration on bourgeois values and norms.. But many children in the works of this movement prove more fantastical than realistic, more extraordinary than ordinary, and more deviant than safely bourgeois. This study therefore examines how representations of wild children interact with the aesthetics of the average within German realism. Ultimately, this dissertation has two main points: First, depictions of wild children should not be read solely as a means of celebrating the average, middle class reality of the nineteenth-century through a strategy of the literary containment of wild children. Rather, the wild child initiates a redemptive transformation of reality and is a means for introducing that which would otherwise escape representation in realist prose fiction. Second, the frequent appearance of wild children within the literary movement of German realism serves as a rhetorical strategy to depict a changing nineteenth-century reality with regard to education, family, gender, nation and art, as well as a means to question the success of these structures. In order to make these arguments, this dissertation engages with four types of wild children: literary descendants of Goethe’s Mignon, fairytale children, differently abled children associated with the figure of Kaspar Hauser, and criminal children. It also considers the intersection of gender and wildness and the ways in which the language of wildness, culture and civilization have been used in Western literary traditions, particularly in a late-nineteenth-century German context.
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    Duke Forest Carbon
    (2011-12-09) Downing, Eric; Fulton, Erin; Strauss, Joshua
    Duke University is dedicated to achieving climate neutrality by 2024. With over 7000 acres of sustainably managed forest land, the Duke Forest has great potential for generating “in house” carbon offsets to help reach this goal. In this project we quantified the carbon represented in Duke’s forest holdings and analyzed the potential for generating emissions-reducing offsets based on Climate Action Reserve (CAR) and American Carbon Registry (ACR) protocols. Throughout the process we focused on three varieties of forest offsets: Avoided Conversion, Improved Forest Management, and Afforestation/Reforestation, comparing the relative advantages and disadvantages of each under CAR and ACR carbon accounting systems. After completing these carbon calculations we conducted a financial analysis of our results in order to make recommendations to the Duke Carbon Offsets Initiative concerning how they might apply these forest offsets toward the university’s carbon neutrality goal. Ultimately we concluded that the Duke Forest has the potential to produce significant amounts of high quality carbon offsets at a cost considerably below that of purchasing them on the voluntary market. The generation of Improved Forest Management offsets under CAR protocols proved particularly compatible with current Duke Forest management practices, yielding substantial carbon and financial benefits with minimal project development investment. Based on the results of our carbon and financial models we determined that the Duke Forest could generate 358,109 offset credits over the next 50 years, saving the university over $1.5 million.
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    Liberating Laughter: Dramatic satire and the German public sphere, 1790-1848
    (2020-05) Hertel, Jeffrey
    One of the most far-reaching consequences of the French Revolution was the spread of political debate. Across Europe, people of all sorts — not just princes, but peasants and peddlers as well— started talking politics. When, in the face of this, the princes of the German states censored traditional modes of public discourse including newspapers other print media, the burden of sociocritical discourse fell to an unlikely place: ridiculing entertainment in the form of satire and, more specifically, satiric theater. Not a place of reasoned discourse seeking the expression of consensus, satire attacks and ridicules its object, making it a fitting forum for the dawn of partisan politics. This dissertation traces the historical and cultural conditions peculiar to German dramatic satire between 1790 and 1848 as it compensated for a lack of political debate elsewhere. Looking at how satire in the public space of the theater became one of the premier channels of political debate in an age of revolutionary change and heavy-handed censorship, the work chronologically surveys the most important satiric dramas of the era, including works by August von Kotzebue, Ludwig Tieck, Joseph von Eichendorff, Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer, Johann Nestroy, Georg Büchner, and Karl Gutzkow. Through careful explication of the sociopolitical crises in which dramatic satirists intervened, we see how they tried to help the German people laugh their way to liberation.
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    Metamorphoses of the Muse: Rethinking Gender and Creativity in German Poetry from 1800-1850
    (2022) Jones, Amy Louise
    For a significant part of Western European literary history, the muse has been imagined as a female human figure who inspires and entices a male artist with her beauty. This female muse is passive, while the male artist is active. My project unearths a more varied literary history of muse figures in German Romantic and post-Romantic literature, especially poetry, as a genre often associated with the invocation of the muse. The muse figure, while often hidden in the shadows of the more common genius figure, appears in the discourse about creativity and procreation from the mid-eighteenth century onward. Both muse and genius represent the unknown energy and vitality behind the creative act. In nineteenth-century Romantic and post- Romantic texts, such as those by the poets Karoline von Günderrode, Annette von Droste- Hülshoff, and Heinrich Heine examined here, the classical muse figure is reimagined and reinterpreted as an embodied figure – not always human – with which the poet figure in a text must interact. The muse figure takes unexpected forms such as the corpse, the vampire, or the flower. In contrast to the discourse about the solitary male genius, sole authority over his work, the discourse about the muse is one of collaboration. The unconventional muse figures I notice in these texts challenge the normative expectations for the poet/muse roles and for their relationship. In some cases, the poet-muse relationship unsettles philosophical binaries such as gender (male/female), species (human/non-human), organic state (life/death), and agency (active/passive). The variety of new poet/muse relationships that arise in Romantic and post- Romantic texts respond to contemporary aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific trends and flourish into a broad array of possible creative paradigms. Many of these paradigms explicitly challenge pre-existing patriarchal paradigms of creativity, while others do so implicitly. This project therefore attempts to look at the German Romantic and post-Romantic muse through a queer lens, remaining attentive to the unconventional, non-normative, and novel facets of the poet/muse relationship.
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    Storm, Stress, and Sexual Revolution: Economies of Desire in the German Literary Avant-Garde of the 1770s
    (2022) McLean, Ian A.
    This dissertation identifies a queer revolutionary core to the Sturm und Drang movement in German literature that sought to revolutionize the social through the force of the erotic. Drawing on the discourse of queer theory, I claim that these texts question, disrupt, and overthrow contemporary sexual and gender mores. Moreover, I argue, the political economics of the Sturm und Drang are dependent on its queerness: by questioning the structures of social life, authors of the Sturm und Drang sought not mere reform, but the building of a new polity from the ground-up. My first two chapters reveal Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz as the most radical author of Sturm und Drang sexual revolution. In his political-economic writings on military reform, Lenz introduces a radical solution in moderate packaging that utilizes the erotic for social transformation. In his dramas, Lenz demonstrates how thus rethinking sexuality as a means for change opens the way disrupting and making more egalitarian existing structures. The third chapter argues that Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s early Sturm und Drang works Stella and Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers engage in a similar process of sexual revolution. Goethe disrupts the either-or logic of the conventional literary love-triangle and substitutes a polyamorous logic of both-and, where all three partners can define their own relationship against social norms. The fourth chapter explores the theme of infanticide. While Lenz and Gottfried August Bürger seek to liberate desire from what they view as an inherently alien force of destruction, Friedrich Schiller and Heinrich Leopold Wagner see such destruction as an inherent part of desire. Goethe attempts to mediate between these two sides in his own approach. The fifth chapter addresses how Schiller’s Die Räuber and Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften turn definitively away from sexual and social experimentation, ending the movement’s radical potential. I argue that Die Räuber appropriates the aesthetics of the movement against its ideals. Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften utilizes the discourses of botany and chemistry to mobilize the order of nature against his own earlier revolutionary ideas. My project is thus an archaeology of a revolution that never happened and an autopsy of its failure.
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    Transports of imagination: poetry and the rehabilitation of experience, 1830–1860
    (2021-08) Dawson, Martin
    This dissertation examines how poets of the German late romantic and restoration periods between 1830 and 1860 disrupt the systematizing drive of technological, cultural, and industrial advancements during the nineteenth century in Germany by establishing connections with the past: both a large-scale geological past and discrete historical moments. My dissertation focuses on the lyric works of Joseph von Eichendorff, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and Eduard Mörike. Often read as nostalgic, quietist, or political conservatives, I argue that their works enact in their readers an experiential, temporal expansion in contact with modes of "pastness" that can in turn serve as a normative standpoint of critique and explore alternative forms of experience. The first chapter examines how Eichendorff’s transformative poetic practice that at once emphasizes the disruptive and connective potential of acts of "transcription." Transcription involves writing that crosses boundaries: from nature to text (in lyric); from life to text (in autobiography); or from text to text (in translation). In these different domains, I show how Eichendorff' creates texts that at once transcend the life and context of their creator and bear his unmistakable character. The second chapter locates in Droste-Hülshoff’s lyric works what I call uncanny animation, an imaginative strangeness that repurposes the contemporaneous technical advancements of the daguerreotype and the railway in order to disrupt their respective logics of reproducibility and temporal acceleration. In her lyric works, Droste-Hülshoff disrupts the tight fit between subject and technology to reincorporate the reader into a more imaginatively expansive world. She performs an analogous operation in lyric works that focus on more abject aspects of nature—dust, earth, and bones, for example—which are animated in order to challenge dominant patterns of intelligibility. In the final chapter, I show how Mörike mobilizes play as an aesthetic operation responding to the temporally inflected traumas of modernity that prioritize the present's relentless drive to produce a future. I argue that Mörike develops a concept of poetic play with forms in which the past is conserved—such as the fossil and the elegy—to loosen potentially constraining frameworks of time, space, and genre associated with industrialization and modernization.
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    Untimely Steps: The Modern Landscapes and Timescapes of Perambulatory Self-Narration
    (2024) Drapela , Nathan
    This dissertation undertakes a literary history of walking in the German-speaking world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following the development of rail travel in the 1830s, walking takes on an untimely character as a form of movement out of step with a world defined by speed and acceleration. Through an examination of works of first-person narration by Adalbert Stifter, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Robert Walser, I argue that the untimeliness of walking reveals the heterogenous nature of time in modernity and the way in which walking through landscapes marked by this heterogeneity structures self-narration. In Stifter’s Die Narrenburg and Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters, iterative processes of self-writing are linked to walks along paths that have always already been walked. However, the materiality of writing and human alterations to the environment prevent these writing and walking subjects from being able to successfully orient themselves temporally. In Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, this relationship to time is further disrupted by the urban landscape of modern Paris, which continues to serve a mnemonic function for those who walk through it, albeit in a way that resists inscription in narrative form. Robert Walser’s walking texts exhibit a rejection of the strictures of both traditional narrative form and modern temporality. And yet, it is Walser’s preoccupation with the temporal structure of wage labor and rail travel that shape his writings even as he seeks to escape it. An epilogue on the novels of W.G. Sebald consider how walking continues to demonstrate the instability of the past in the wake of war and ecological devastation.
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    Wild Politics: Political imagination in German Romanticism
    (2020-05) Gill, John:
    The political discourse of German Romanticism is often interpreted reductively: as either entirely revolutionary, reactionary, or indeed apolitical in nature. Breaking with this critical tradition, this dissertation offers a new conceptual framework for political Romanticism called "wild politics". I argue that Romantic wild politics generates a sense of possibility that calls into question pragmatic forms of implementing sociopolitical change; it envisions imaginative alternatives to the status quo that exceed the purview of conventional political thinking. Three major fields of the Romantic political imaginary organize this reading: affect, nature, and religion.