Browsing by Author "Trop, Gabriel"

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Open Access
A Transcendent View of Things: The Persistence of Metaphysics in Modern German Lyric Poetry, 1771-1908
(2022) Jolly, John
My dissertation explores the lyric poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Eduard Mörike, and Rainer Maria Rilke, and it contends that these modern poets retain, albeit uneasily, a view of things as symbols of the transcendent divine. It thus disputes the secularization theory of post- Enlightenment aesthetics. This study specifically challenges the view of symbolism as mere metaphor—an image constructed of arbitrary signs (Nietzsche)—by showing how the epiphanies of modern lyric poetry remain grounded in the metaphysics of analogia, even where (as in Mörike) the writer seems to have left such entanglements behind. The modern poet’s desire to unveil a significant reality beyond subjective impression reveals that symbolic vision necessarily unfolds within the difference between the visible world and the transcendent divine. If signification entails likeness, yet lyric poetry always signifies in and through difference, then a constitutive analogy—that is, the simultaneity of likeness and even greater difference—emerges from within the dynamism of the lyric image itself. Part 1 begins by describing the symbolic image in Goethe’s lyric poetry to recover his view of things as expressing the “holy open mystery” of the cosmos. I show how his symbolism overcomes Enlightenment naturalism by drawing on the antecedent order of analogia. Thus, it reveals the partial yet indisputable relatedness of things to the transcendent. Turning to Mörike, part 2 charts his transition to an equivocal understanding of the symbol that would sever the image from its numinous source of significance by confining the image to the scope of the poet’s own gaze. Yet Mörike’s poetry also evinces a counter-veiling tendency to de-subjectivize the image, thus yielding a vision of things as they are prior to epistemic concerns, sentiment, and subjective preference. Part 3 contends that Rilke’s thing-poetry evinces a similar tendency to neutralize modernity’s biases against metaphysics. For, his poetry recovers an apophatic understanding of symbolism that draws on Dionysian theology. His poems thus focus our attention on the thing’s unfathomable capacity for initiating a vision of the divine, of which the thing itself is a partial and fleeting manifestation.
Open Access
Egoism in the Age of Romanticism
(2024) Takamura , David
Open Access
Faithful Form: On Religion and Politics in German Modernist Lyric
(2023) Hoffman, Lukas
Examining the work of four poets-Else Lasker-Schüler, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Celan-this dissertation reveals surprising conjunctions between these poets’ sustained engagement with religious images and concepts and their attempt to organize individuals into collective bodies invested with political agency. It thereby uncovers a political valence within those elements of German modernist lyric that draw upon mytho-poetic and religious traditions to model the formation of political communities. Lasker-Schüler’s poetic revisions of the biblical garden myth explore a form of abject subjectivity that seeks to harness anti-authoritarian energy while simultaneously expressing vulnerability and solidarity with the outcasts of society. Trakl’s poetry prophesies the end of Western civilization on the brink of the First World War and develops mystical practices of kenosis (emptying one’s particular will—or in the case of Trakl, the normativity of collective forms—as preparation for receiving the divine) within the social and political sphere as a response to apocalyptic temporality. Rilke’s poetry uses mystical tropes to undermine the authority of institutions and the naturalization of economic relations while establishing poetry as a gathering place for human communities. Celan’s poetry not only confronts personal, but also political trauma, and in doing so ultimately gestures towards the possibility of liturgy as a mode of association, of solidarity with unknown others. More generally, this dissertation considers the way that poetic practices draw on religious operations and images in novel ways to reimagine emancipatory politics.
Open Access
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.
Open Access
Love, Power, and the Sovereign in Female Courtly Biographies of the Habsburg Empire. Venus and her Scepter: Tu Felix Austria
(2021-04) Kleinhans-Junghahn, Edana
Before the Austrian Empress Elisabeth (1837-1898) cast her spell over the world in the nineteenth century, a company of early modern female sovereigns of the Habsburg Dynasty fascinated their subjects with tales of love, scandal, glory, and power. In their own courtly biographies, the Empress Maria Theresia (1717-1780), and her ancestors Kunigunde of Austria (1465-1520), Margaretha of Savoy (1480-1530), and Johanna of Castile (1479-1555) were commemorated in works which asserted a bold commentary on the inherent essentiality of female power and the ascendancy of the Habsburgs in Europe. Venus and Her Scepter examines portrayals of Habsburg noblewomen between 1500-1800 as heroines of love, marriage, war, and diplomacy and offers one of the first comprehensive investigations of the female courtly biography as a literary and cultural phenomenon. Focusing on the unique ability of this divergent tradition to fuse fiction and historical narratives together, and to envision a world wherein the heroic female sovereign is an active participant in mending broken hearts, restoring reputations, avoiding bloodshed, resolving treaties, and defeating imperial enemies, this study details how the female courtly biography came to the aid of the Habsburgs during key moments of political crisis when the Dynasty stood to lose it all and helped to make a case for a mythology of power through women. Delving into the rich late medieval and early modern holdings of Austrian and German archives and libraries, and reflecting on the role of original manuscripts, lost documents, newspapers, and forgotten scholarship, Venus and Her Scepter sheds light on these sources and their connection with female patronage and authorship. In the process, this study reveals the female courtly biography’s surprisingly positive assessment of women as vital representatives of imperial government and explores how their reigns generated a legacy of Habsburg culture framed by the female perspective.
Open Access
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.
Open Access
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.
Open Access
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.
Open Access
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.

Browsing by Author "Trop, Gabriel"

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