Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Megan Brandow-Faller. The Female Secession: Art And The Decorative At The Viennese Women’S Academy. Penn State Up, 2020., Christa Spreizer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Megan Brandow-Faller. The Female Secession: Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women’s Academy. Penn State UP, 2020. 304 pp.

Introverse Arrangements: Rediscovering The Typewritings Of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Savannah M. Champion

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to understand Wolf-Rehfeldt’s place in the unofficial art world of the GDR by examining her work in light of her status as a clerical worker with social rather than professional ties to the art world. She stands out within the East German Mail Art context, not just for her inventive use of a typewriter to create abstract figurations, but for the way she used it to interject considerations of gender and power into a network of artists overwhelmingly dominated by men with her open-ended Typewritings.”

Through historical research and close readings of her work, this study uncovers …

Bettina Von Arnim And Civil Action: How To Defy Oppression By Championing Others, Tesla L. Gontjes

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Children, cooking and church: Like most of the European world before 1900, these were “the three Cs” designated by society for women in Germany. However, some women broke through these expectations and pursued a fourth “C”: Civil action. Such a woman was Bettina von Arnim (1785-1859). A writer, activist, feminist, and intellectual, von Arnim was politically active during a time when women were delegated to domestic duties and expected to be completely subservient to their husbands. She lived during a tumultuous era of French, Prussian, and Austrian occupation of Germany during the early 19th century. Instead of being a mild-mannered …

L’Universalité De La Voix Féminine : Interprétations Genrées De La Poésie Romantique Française Et Allemande, Mimi Mackilligan

Senior Theses and Projects

Contemporary French feminist literary critics have debated whether the category of woman is an empowering or limiting paradigm through which to analyze women writers. Hélène Cixous coined the term "feminine writing [écriture féminine]" in order to link femininity to a radical particularity, whereas Monique Wittig has asserted that this concept confines women writers to their minority identity rather than allowing them to be read universally. Such discussions serve as a useful lens through which to analyze women writers who grappled with their gendered position far before the advent of 20^th-century feminism.

Despite the abundance of woman …

Christina Gerhardt And Sara Saljoughi, Editors. 1968 And Global Cinema. Wayne State Up, 2018., Anne Cunningham

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi, editors. 1968 and Global Cinema. Wayne State UP, 2018. 422 pp.

Margaret Mccarthy. Mad Mädchen: Feminism And Generational Conflict In Recent German Literature And Film. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017., Bridget Swanson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Margaret McCarthy. Mad Mädchen: Feminism and Generational Conflict in Recent German Literature and Film. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017.

Finding Sources For The Red Vienna Sourcebook, Madeline Mcfarland, Dr. Michelle James

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In between the World Wars, German-speaking Europe was split into two major groups: The Weimar Republic, which consisted of current Germany, and the SocialDemocratically run Austria. Due to this SocialDemocratic government, the capital (and eventually time period) was referred to as “Red Vienna.” While the Weimar Republic has many firsthand accounts that have been made available to scholars, teachers and historians, relatively little has been compiled from Red Vienna. Our goal with this project was to discover more sources that dealt with Gender and Feminism in Red Vienna, as well as more female authors to gain a more complete and …

Mädchen Und Girls: Gender In Serie, Lisa Jasmin Merkel

Masters Theses

Gender topics are an often discussed theme in both the English as well as in the German speaking world. Academic research in the discipline of media studies is addressing gender questions in film, TV series and media in general. In recent years gender media studies grew in a number of directions. This thesis discusses how women, specifically their negotiations of conventional gender roles in romantic relationships and in the work place are depicted in contemporary American and German TV series and what it means for societal development. It discusses the German telenovela Verliebt in Berlin (SAT.1, 2005-2007) which was adapted …

„I Am God“ Und „Femen Akbar“: Die Beziehung Der Aktivistischen Frauenrechtsbewegung Femen Zu Christentum Und Islam, Lisa Breddermann

Masters Theses

Feminist movements that arose in the early 2000s have triggered renewed discussions in academia and in the media about the validity and the future of feminism in the 21^st century. One important protest group in the context of post – and popfeminism is the group FEMEN, a feminist protest group that originated in Ukraine. Research has already begun to discuss FEMEN’s protest forms and their ideologies, and their bare-breasted calls for the demolition of patriarchy. So far, researchers mostly concentrated on the question if FEMEN are feminists and if FEMEN’s naked protest is effectively reaching their goal to liberate …

“Knaller-Sex Für Alle”: Popfeminist Body Politics In Lady Bitch Ray, Charlotte Roche, And Sarah Kuttner, Carrie Smith-Prei

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Germany has seen a recent upsurge in publications proclaiming that feminism is again an urgent matter for a new generation of women. Faced with the reactionary demography debate and the hegemony of second-wave feminism, young writers, musicians, journalists, and critics call for new models of feminism relevant to women today. As one of these viable models, popfeminism draws on dominant trends in mass culture, on pop’s forty-year history as a cultural prefix in Germany, and on traditional feminism in order to create a new, ostensibly apolitical, feminist subculture based in self-stylization and individual autonomy. Shared by many popfeminist sources is …

Intercourse As Discourse In Alexa Hennig Von Lange’S Relax, Corinna Kahnke

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

While gender has long been an abiding concern of Popliteratur, pop writers (in particular female authors) are often criticized for simply reflecting, if not positively endorsing, negative forms of postfeminism—an attitude that negates the accomplishments of emancipation by regressing to traditional ideas of what it means to be a woman. Some critics suggest that pop texts re-inscribe the gender binary by presenting, even glorifying, long-established gender roles. In response to such a reception, this article investigates Alexa Hennig von Lange’s iconic but much criticized novel Relax (1999) in order to illustrate the reflective and critical nature of Popliteratur. …

Introduction: Resignifications Of Feminism In Contemporary Germany, Hester Baer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

During the past decade, the German-speaking world has witnessed both a new wave of writing by women and a resurgence of interest in and debate about feminism…

Motherhood As Performance: (Re)Negotiations Of Motherhood In Contemporary German Literature, Alexandra Merley Hill

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

While the birth rate in Europe remains low, the role of motherhood is hotly debated in Germany—particularly in conjunction with the revival of feminism in that country. In the context of these debates, this article analyzes the representation of mothers in three contemporary novels by German authors: Himmelskörper (2003) by Tanja Dückers, Die Gunnar-Lennefsen-Expedition (1998) by Kathrin Schmidt, and Die Mittagsfrau (2007) by Julia Franck. All three books are informed by a feminist perspective, but only Die Mittagsfrau offers a new way of thinking about motherhood; while Dückers and Schmidt ultimately do not depart from the connection between motherhood and …

Feminism And Generational Conflicts In Alexa Hennig Von Lange’S Relax, Elke Naters’S Lügen, And Charlotte Roche’S Feuchtgebiete, Margaret Mccarthy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The publication of Charlotte Roche’s controversial novel Feuchtgebiete, along with a wave of nonfiction popfeminist writings, prompted heated debates in 2008 among different generations of German feminists. Despite their attempts to call attention to historically persistent forms of sexism, popfeminists quite emphatically distanced themselves from Alice Schwarzer, the face of German feminism for over thirty-five years. Yet casting themselves as rebels who break away from Schwarzer’s second-wave feminism has necessitated that they suppress affinities and shared blind spots in order to underscore their ostensibly less dogmatic, more fun approach. Feuchtgebiete, Alexa Hennig von Lange’s Relax and Elke Naters’s …

Dialogues With Tradition: Feminist-Queer Encounters In German Crime Stories At The Turn Of The Twenty-First Century, Faye Stewart

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Pieke Biermann’s feminist crime collection Mit Zorn, Charme, und Methode (1992) and Lisa Kuppler’s gay and lesbian anthology Queer Crime (2002) engage in a common project, the rewriting of a popular genre to give voice to previously marginalized identities and perspectives. This article investigates the ways in which each volume negotiates the gendered conventions of crime fiction and its subcategories, feminist and queer crime. A comparative analysis of three mysteries from each collection demonstrates the converging and diverging tendencies of feminist and queer representation in turn-of-the-twenty-first century crime narratives. Feminist mysteries by Edith Kneifl, Birgit Rabisch, and Barbara Neuhaus shift …

“Obscene Fantasies”: Elfriede Jelinek’S Generic Perversions, Brenda L. Bethman

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines Elfriede Jelinek’s investigation of Austria’s and Western Europe’s “obscene fantasies” through her “perversion” of generic forms in three of her best-known texts (Die Liebhaberinnen, Lust, and Die Klavierspielerin). It also investigates how these texts, at first glance less overtly political than Jelinek’s later work, can be seen as laying the groundwork for her later, more political, analysis of Austrian fascism and racism. The dissertation is composed of three chapters; each investigates a central psychoanalytic concept (alienation, jouissance, perversion and sublimation) and reads a Jelinek text in relation to the genre that it is perverting, exposing the “obscene …

Mission Propaganda: A Study Of Form, Colonial Attitudes, And Feminism In Maria Theresia Ledóchowska's Newspaper Publication, Jakob N. Jarvis

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines Mission Propaganda, a newspaper-style publication distributed by the St. Peter Claver Sodalität, an association of nuns, lay-members, and subscribers founded by Maria Theresia Ledóchowska in 1894. The “sodality” was dedicated to supporting Catholic missionary work in Africa, and advocated for the liberation of African slaves. Ledóchowska used Mission Propaganda to encourage Europeans to support the African missions. She also used it to inform Europeans about African culture. She attempted to create a connection between the need for Catholic missionary work in Africa and the need for reform in Europe. She believed Europeans needed moral, religious, and social …

Improved Versions: Feminist Poetics And Recent Work By Ulla Hahn And Ursula Krechel, Charlotte Melin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay analyzes how Ulla Hahn and Ursula Krechel in their recent poetry and essays have drawn a connection between feminism and their writing. The feminine/feminist outlook they advance is exemplary for their generation of women authors because they have sought to expand the poetic canon by interrogating assumptions made by modernism. A reappraisal of their poetry suggests that interpretations of their work must take account of the feminist poetics of these authors.