On the Digital Ocean

Before coming to Duke, Sarah Pourciau (Ph.D. 2007, Princeton University) held positions at Stanford University, Princeton University, the Technical University of Berlin, and the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin. Her research explores the intersections of philosophy and literature, with an emphasis on nineteenth and twentieth-century German and Austrian culture. Related areas of interest include the history of theology, literary theory and aesthetics, gender theory, opera, and the history of science and mathematics. Her first book, The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science (Fordham, 2017), traces the nineteenth-century emergence and twentieth-century transformation of a structuralist approach to language and poetics, teasing out the pivotal role played by the system-transcending concept of Sprachgeist. Her current project, with the working title "The World Suspended: Habsburg Modernity and the King's Double Optic," argues for the existence of an unprotestant, non-national alternative to classical modernist problems of aesthetic and political form. This "other modernity," which has its roots in the Habsburg baroque, finds particularly powerful expression in several twentieth-century Austrian attempts to rethink dramatic (Hofmannsthal), operatic (Schoenberg, Berg), and narrative (Musil, Kafka, Broch) unity against the backdrop of imperial dissolution. Pourciau's articles have appeared or are forthcoming in journals like Critical Inquiry, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, The Opera Quarterly, POETICA, Modern Language Notes, Germanic Review, and Arcadia.