Arts and Humanities Commons^™

2010-12 Ger 100-X

Library Impact Statements

Library Impact Statement submitted in response to new course proposal for GER 100-X Introductory German. New course was supported with the purchase of updated reference materials. Responding library fuculty member: Mona Niedbala. Requesting Faculty member: Norbert Hedderich

Technik Und Machenschaft Bei Martin Heidegger Und Günther Anders. Mit Einigen Bemerkungen Zu Ray Kurzweils Urknall, Babette Babich

Working Papers

No abstract provided.

"Heimatlos In Dieser Welt": The Isolated Modern Woman In Edith Södergran’S Vaxdukshäft Poetry, Kajsa M. Spjut

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I explore how, although Edith Södergran’s Vaxdukshäf poems seem to support new female roles in early 20th century European society, they also reflect on the danger in changing from traditional to modern roles. As the poems illustrate, this change can create an isolated woman, who becomes trapped in her new independence and is unable to alter herself to connect with others. In order to understand what is meant by traditional and modern female roles, I present a historical background that contrasts the woman of pre-20th-Century Europe with the new woman that emerged around the Turn of the …

In Memoriam Karl Heinz Göller (May 13, 1924 - April 22, 2009), Richard Utz

Richard Utz

Eulogy on academic teacher, adviser, and mentor; founding dean of the College of Languages and Literatures at the University of Regensburg, Germany; and founder and honorary president of the German Medieval Academy (Mediävistenverband).

In Memoriam Karl Heinz Göller (May 13, 1924 - April 22, 2009), Richard Utz

Medieval Institute Affiliated Faculty & Staff Publications

Eulogy on academic teacher, adviser, and mentor; founding dean of the College of Languages and Literatures at the University of Regensburg, Germany; and founder and honorary president of the German Medieval Academy (Mediävistenverband).

Minhag And Migration: A Yiddish Custom Book From Venice, 1553, Lucia Raspe

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation focuses on a Yiddish book of customs written in Venice in the mid-sixteenth century, which describes synagogue and home observances over the course of the Jewish year. Comparing MS Oxford Can. Or. 12 to the fifteenth-century Hebrew custumal it is based on (MS Frankfurt hebr. oct. 227), the presentation will discuss the efforts of Ashkenazic émigrés to northern Italy trying to preserve their identity in the face of a Jewish world suddenly become complex.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

• Book of Customs (MS Frankfurt hebr. oct. 227)
• Book of Customs (MS Oxford Can. Or. 12)

The Work Of Architecture In The Age Of Its Technological Reproducibility, Elizabeth Rae Guthrie

Theses and Dissertations

Dresden's historic reconstructions bring up questions that reach far beyond the city's new/old Neumarkt district. In this thesis, I would like to take a closer look at the current ideological discourse surrounding the reconstruction of destroyed historic buildings in Dresden and other cities in the former DDR. What seems at first to be a simple culture war between progressive and reactionary city planners is actually, I will argue, a unique historical moment that blurs the dogmatically held ideas of rationality and nostalgia, ornament and function, and high art and kitsch. From the uncanny shadow of a church recently raised from …

Hallo, Welt! Adolescent Angst Und Das Erwachsenwerden In Marisha Pessls Special Topics In Calamity Physics Und Zoe Jennys Das Blütenstaubzimmer, Franziska Ludemann

Masters Theses

Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) by Marisha Pessl and Das Blütenstaubzimmer (1997) by Zoё Jenny both feature strong female characters who go through difficult times because they experience genuine disillusionment with regard to their friends, the opposite sex, and, especially, their family.

The focus of this thesis was to analyze if the authors depict their characters in such a way that one can see correlations between the emotional behavior of these characters and a phenomenon that is often referred to as adolescent angst. The theoretical foundation for defining adolescent angst and for understanding mechanisms that trigger adolescent angst was …

Ein Kleiner, Schwarzer Punkt Am Weisslichen Himmel: Antarctica & Ice In German Expressionism, Joy M. Essigmann

Masters Theses

This work explores a fascinating and disturbing literary trope found in select German Expressionist prose in the years 1910-1920. Key Expressionist-era authors, including Georg Heym, Robert Musil, Egmont Colerus and Franz Kafka employed Antarctic and ice metaphors in their poetry and prose to exemplify inner feelings of displacement resulting from modernity. Expressionist discontent, as well as the “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration” that occurred from 1895 to 1922, led to the creation of polar dystopias in some literature. These dystopias explored abstract interpretations of the South Pole, not as a place of excitement and adventure, but rather as a journey …

Spuren Visionärer Multikulturalität: Fantasie Und Wirklichkeit In Campes "Robinson Der Jüngere": Auf Dem Weg Vom Kolonialismus Zum Kosmopolitismus., Claus Huxdorff

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to investigate the traces of multicultural implications in Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere 1779/80. On one level, Campe’s adaptation of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe appears to awaken or sustain potential colonial fantasies among its German readers. However, Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere does not follow colonial conventions, such as exhibited in Defoe, but instead depicts a society based much more on the concept of a common humanity shared by Europeans and Caribbean natives alike. It conceives of cooperation and exchange as a mutual gain for both parties. Robinson’s island functions as a kind of social testing ground offering …

Sexuality, Gender And Identity In Selected Works Of Arthur Schnitzler, Michelle L Webster

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to investigate Arthur Schnitzler’s depiction of three female figures in short stories with a specific focus on how the figures are portrayed in relation to socially sanctioned roles in late nineteenth and early twentieth century German-speaking Europe. The figures and works selected as subjects of this study were Friederike in Die Frau des Weisen (1898), Elise in Der Mörder (1921) and Else in Fräulein Else (1924). The primary question that was investigated was whether Schnitzler depicted these female figures in a manner that could be interpreted as impacting the loosening of the grip of …

Reinventing The Colonial Fantasy In The Post-Wwii Era: Jovita Epp's Amado Mio, Ivana R. Klammer

Theses and Dissertations

Austrian playwright Jovita Epp's German language novel Amado mí­o, which takes place in post-WWII Argentina, is a modern adaptation of the traditional colonial novel. As such, the romances between the female main character, an Argentine of German descent, and her two love interests, an Argentine of Spanish descent (Criollo), and an Austrian Argentine, reflect the hopes and fears of persons and/or cultures caught up in the imperialist dreams of their nation. In the wake of WWII, Argentina becomes a space in which European(-descended) settlers can look back at Europe's "barbarism," questioning the imperialist worldviews that brought Europe …

Deutsch-Österreichische Beethoven-Bilder: Richard Wagner, Elfriede Jelinek Und “Der Zorn Der Schreiber”, Solibakke Ivan Karl

Karl Ivan Solibakke

The article explores how Richard Wagner’s Beethoven and Elfriede Jelinek’s Das Lebewohl draw on music and musical aesthetics to signify national and cultural aspirations in Germany and Austria. As an artistic experience that transcends borders, Beethoven’s music has often provoked questions about cultural memory, “national art forms,” and collective identity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German intellectual history. Though very different in nature, Wagner’s politically charged Beethoven and the monolog that Jelinek ascribes to the right-wing Austrian politician J¨org Haider show how important music and language can be when national goals and cultural politics join forces.

Deutsch-Österreichische Beethoven-Bilder: Richard Wagner, Elfriede Jelinek Und “Der Zorn Der Schreiber”, Solibakke Ivan Karl

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

The article explores how Richard Wagner’s Beethoven and Elfriede Jelinek’s Das Lebewohl draw on music and musical aesthetics to signify national and cultural aspirations in Germany and Austria. As an artistic experience that transcends borders, Beethoven’s music has often provoked questions about cultural memory, “national art forms,” and collective identity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German intellectual history. Though very different in nature, Wagner’s politically charged Beethoven and the monolog that Jelinek ascribes to the right-wing Austrian politician J¨org Haider show how important music and language can be when national goals and cultural politics join forces.

Ladies, Whores, And Holy Women: A Sourcebook In Courtly, Religious, And Urban Cultures Of Late Medieval Germany, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Sarah Westphal-Wihl

TEAMS Medieval German Texts in Bilingual Editions

This sourcebook presents editions and translations of seven fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts that advance our understanding of gender, sexuality, and class in the late medieval German-speaking world. Three of the translated texts are fiction. Additionally, there is a religious treatise, a religious legend, an inventory of books, and a legal document. While each of these texts is instructive in and of itself, they gain in complexity when brought into dialogue with one another.

"Thus Spoke Zarathustra" Or Nietzsche And Hermeneutics In Gadamer, Lyotard, And Vattimo, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Apart from reading Nietzsche's words on his characterization as an educator in suspicion with some suspicion, what does Nietzsche offer hermeneutics? This essay takes up this question by talking about the politics of interpretation, hermeneutics, and genealogy. In the process, we can address Lyotard's enthusiastic fealty to technology and offer yet once more requiem for the postmodern, understood here through (and hence contra) Lyotard as the simulacrum of communication that is the internet.

Verbal Complex Phenomena In West Central German: Empirical Domain And Multi-Causal Account, Shannon A. Dubenion-Smith

Modern & Classical Languages

This paper is a synchronic investigation of verbal complex phenomena in the West Central German dialects. The types of verbal complexes attested in 187 recordings of West Central German from the Zwirner Corpus are first classified and analyzed. A GoldVarb analysis reveals that in subordinate clause two-verb complexes, the factor groups syntagm and verbal prefix type have statistically significant effects on word order, while in main clause two-verb complexes the factor groups syntagm, verbal prefix type, and a grammatical correlate to focus have statistically significant effects. Taking as a point of departure Lötscher 1978 and Sapp 2007, a multi-causal account …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote. German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990 by Helen Cafferty

Herschel Farbman. The Other Night: Dreaming, Writing, and Restlessness in Twentieth-Century Literature by Sidney Feshbach

Richard Neupert. A History of the French New Wave Cinema by Candice Nicolas

Dianne Marie Zandstra. Embodying Resistance: Griselda Gambaro and the Grotesque by James Gustafson

Matthew J. Marr. Postmodern Metapoetry and the Replenishment of the Spanish Lyrical Genre, 1980-2000 by John Wilcox

Gail A. Bulman. Staging Words, Performing Worlds: Intertextuality and Nation in Contemporary Latin American Theater by Patricia Tomé …

The Modernist Mirror And The Hold Of Being: Rilke And Zamiatin, Petre Petrov

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The article approaches the image of the mirror as a metaphorical vehicle for the experience of modernity in the work of Rainer Maria Rilke and Evgenii Zamiatin. The argument builds upon a duality that informs the folkloric and artistic representations of mirrors from ancient to modern times: that between flat and deep reflection. Flat reflection refers to the idea of images projected outwardly from the specular surface, while deep reflection implies an imaginary space behind this surface, where objects are caught and held. By examining two of Rilke’s elegies and Zamiatin’s novel We, the article shows the way in …

Termwiki: A New Wikibased Terminology Management System, Uwe Muegge

Uwe Muegge

TermWiki is a free open source initiative that employs the familiar wiki technology to provide a powerful yet user-friendly terminology management solution to organizations of any size - including freelance translators. This presentation introduces attendees to the promise and limitations of TermWiki, and suggests possible uses in translator training

Formalism, Self-Referentiality, And The Avant-Garde, Siarhei Biareishyk

German and Russian Studies Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

Text As Resistance In Holocaust Literature: Struggles For Personhood In Wiesel, Levi, And Delbo, Gillian M. Mozer

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis is an examination of the memoirs of three core Holocaust writers, Elie Wiesel (Night and Day), Primo Levi (If This is A Man), and Charlotte Delbo (Auschwitz and After), exploring the ways in which each of the three authors uses his or her memoir to simultaneously document and resist the dehumanizing influence of the concentration camp experience.

Decoding Charlotte's Prevalence. A Kristevian Approach To The Representation Of Femininity In Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Zsuzsanna Rothne Zadori

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines Goethe’s portrayal of femininity in Die Wahlver-wandtschaften and how his depiction of all three central female characters relates to feminine ideals that were promoted through the theoretical gender debate of the late 1700s in Germany and Western Europe. I analyze Charlotte’s, Luciane’s, and Ottilie’s actions and interactions in various triadic character constellations in order to offer new insights into Goethe’s portrayal of femininity. In so doing, I argue that Goethe’s depiction of Charlotte holds the key to understanding how far Die Wahlverwandtschaften functions as (critical) commentary on the late Enlightenment gender discourse.

I maintain that the actions …

A Comparative Analysis Of The Correct Usage Of "Nicht" And "Kein" In Satznegation According To Daf Grammars, Kathleen Maureen Schuster

Masters Theses

The varying presentations of the rules for nicht and kein found in intermediate grammar books for students in North America and DaF-learners in Germany highlight the difficulty in finding sources that are both reliable and consistent as well as easily applicable. This thesis seeks to compare the explanations found in A.E. Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage (revised by Martin Durrell), Helbig/Buscha’s Deutsche Grammatik, and Hall/Scheiner’s Übungsgrammatik, comparing all three to the basis of their information, Duden: die Grammatik. In order to assess how and where these sources converge and diverge, the analysis compares the intended use of each book, followed …

Focus On Frequency: A Comparison Of First-Year German Vocabularies, Ronald Eric Johnson

Masters Theses

Foreign language teachers, experts of pedagogy, and textbook publishers often cite frequency as an important tool in the creation of textbooks, as well as in teaching students a foreign language. These same figures, however, rarely question the application of frequency in these works. This thesis examines the application of frequency over a range of first-year German textbooks compared to a textbook that is explicitly based on a particular frequency dictionary. These textbooks are compared to each other and to the Jones and Tschirner Frequency Dictionary of German and Pfeffer’s Grunddeutsch: Basic (Spoken) German Word List, Grundstufe.

Faith And Family: Images Of The Lutheran Church As Family In Erich Loest's Nikolaikirche, Bethanne Roberts, Sonja Fritzche, Faculty Advisor

John Wesley Powell Student Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Ex Aliquo Nihil: Nietzsche On Science And Modern Nihilism. Acpq, 84-2 (Spring 2010): 231-256., Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This essay explores the nihilistic coincidence of the ascetic ideal and Nietzsche’s localization of science in the conceptual world of anarchic socialism as Nietzsche indicts the uncritical convictions of modern science by way of a critique of the causa sui, questioning both religion and the enlightenment as well as both free and unfree will and condemning the “poor philology” enshrined in the language of the “laws” of nature. Reviewing the history of philosophical nihilism in the context of Nietzsche’s “tragic knowledge” along with political readings of nihilism, willing nothing rather than not willing at all, today’s this-worldly and very planetary …

The Biopolitical Unconscious: Not-All Persons Are Political, Ross G. Shields

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

It is a tenet of post-structuralist theory that discursive series fail in their attempts to constitute themselves as totalities. A system can fail in two distinct ways—from Kant’s dynamic and mathematic failures of reason, to Jacques Lacan’s equation of the two failures of language with the two failures (male and female) of sex. Biopolitical theory offers the most recent account of failure and collapse, now on the geopolitical scale. Given that the biopolitical subject too is sexed, this thesis asks the question: How does biopolitics fail? Franz Kafka’s aborted novels offer a premonition to a possible answer.

Faust And The Faustian (Fall 2010), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

Faust—the scholar who makes a deal with the devil in order to achieve knowledge, love and power—is one of the great myths of modernity. Faust makes his deal with the devil because he despairs of living in the ivory tower and wants to effect real, positive, change in the world. This course thus gives us a chance to think critically about their own desires to “challenge convention and change the world.” Clark University’s Motto, “Challenge Convention and Change the World,” comes directly out of the Faustian tradition, as does the very conception of a socially activist research university.

A photo …

Germans, Jews And Turks (Spring 2010), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

This class studies the expression of cultural identity in central European literature. How have people come to think of themselves or others as “Germans,” “Jews,” “Turks,” or some combinations thereof? While the Holocaust is obviously central to the German-Jewish relationship, it is not the only focus of this course—we will read literary reflections of the emancipation of the Jews, of German-Jewish assimilation and symbiosis, of the rise of anti-Semitism and Zionism, as well as attempts to remember the past. And while the long history of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in Germany will be a major component of our …