Browsing by Author "von Bernuth, Ruth"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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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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    Folk Fiction: Yiddish and the Negotiation of Literary Legacy in Germany after 1945
    (2015-08-05) Woelk, Emma
    Following the Holocaust, when Eastern European Yiddish-language culture was all but destroyed and millions of Yiddish speakers were murdered, the language took on newsignificance in German culture. Whether it be as a symbol of proletarian solidarity in East German theater or as part of West German literary engagement with American Jewish culture, Yiddish shows up all over postwar German literature and performance. Building on scholarship from German Studies, Yiddish Studies, and cultural and political history, the following study connects the study of Yiddish in German literature after 1945 both to discourses from the early 20th century and to broader discussions on German identity and literary legacy in the postwar era. I am primarily interested in the reinvention of the folk tradition following the Nazi era and the creation of a usable literary past at a time in which the German political and geographic present was in flux. This dissertation explores these issues by looking at the ways in which German-language authors on both sides of the Berlin Wall, and those writing after its fall, relied on Yiddish to negotiate national literary identities. By looking at the diverse body of texts that do this and the ways in which these works were received, this dissertation demonstrates that the presence of Yiddish language and culture in German literature after 1945 was used to create spaces in which foundational narratives could be reshaped and new identities defined.
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    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.