Browsing by Subject "German literature"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Open Access
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.
Open Access
Egoism in the Age of Romanticism
(2024) Takamura , David
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.
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The Art of Distances or, A Morality for the Everyday
(2010) Stan, Corina
The Art of Distances or, a Morality for the Everyday shows how British, French and German writers have dramatized the dilemmas of the ethical life with others in the twentieth century, and taken up the challenge of imagining new forms of community. Framed by an encounter between the thought of Theodor Adorno and Roland Barthes, the study traces an exemplary arc from 1933 to 1999, bringing together works of fiction, philosophy, critical theory, autobiography, social reportage and anthropology authored by deeply intriguing or controversial figures such as George Orwell, Paul Morand, Henry Miller, Elias Canetti, Iris Murdoch, Walter Benjamin, Annie Ernaux, Günter Grass, and others. Negotiating the ethical and the political, the role that intellectuals can, or should assume in the conflicts and debates of their time, trying to find adequate forms to express their dilemmas, these writers share a sustained attention to the question of the ideal distance between oneself and others in an age deprived of a shared morality.