Arts and Humanities Commons^™

An Exploration Of Horror In Franz Kafka’S "The Metamorphosis", Christa M. Neumann

Honors Program Theses and Research Projects

Readers often identify Gregor’s vermin body as the only horrific element in Franz Kafka’s “The
Metamorphosis.” But what about the walls that he lives in? This study will deemphasize the horror of Kafka’s creature and offer new themes to consider. The following collects scholarship around Kafka’s time to understand how he used the domestic space to create horror. It includes studies on Gothic literature and Freud’s term “unheimlich” from his essay “The Uncanny.” The findings bring light to a type of horror often overlooked – the horror in the liminal, the “in- between” state of being. This space belongs to …

Of Method: A Propaedeutic To Coleridge's Prose Works, Michael A. Granger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Coleridge’s prose works, published and unpublished, demonstrate a thorough and critical testing and understanding of British and German philosophical responses to skepticism and the ability of philosophy to progress by maintaining a double-minded and conflicted suture of both the practical or imaginative eclipse of knowledge and theorizing the hypothetical epistemological absolute that explains the relativity of facticity. Any inadequate method of inquiry stagnates within attempting a purely figurative or purely demonstrative solution to skepticism. Thus, the appropriate way to approach Coleridge’s understanding of philosophy is the struggle to make inquiry adequate though progression. Coleridge’s methodological impulse originates explicitly in a …

Sttcl Editorial Board

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

STTCL Editorial Board

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Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

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Collective, Collage, And Translative Authorship: Writing To And From Multilingual Europe, Jamie H. Trnka

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Letters to Europe (2011) is a collectively authored, transnational literary engagement with Europe as an idea, a place, and a set of socio-political relationships. A print publication and performance, the ambivalent generic status of the Brussels-based project raises productive questions about how collective translation, transnational authorship, and multimedial performance strategies combine to advance new modes of aesthetic and political representation for subjects in transit in twenty-first century Europe. I argue for attention to multilingual and multimedial translations as sites of creative self-documentation on the part of mobile subjects as a critical counterpoint to state-sanctioned forms of documentality (Favorini). To that …

Nichole Coleman. The Right To Difference: Interculturality And Human Rights In Contemporary German Literature. University Of Michigan Press, 2021., Priscilla D. Layne

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Nichole Coleman. The Right to Difference: Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature. University of Michigan Press, 2021. 270 pp.

Martin Kagel And David Z. Saltz, Editors. Open Wounds. Holocaust Theater And The Legacy Of George Tabori. University Of Michigan Press, 2022., Janine Wulz

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz, editors. Open Wounds. Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori. University of Michigan Press, 2022.

Special Focus Introduction: Translating Multilingualism, Yasemin Yildiz

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Special Focus Introduction: Translating Multilingualism

Multilingual Lifeworlds And Textual Monolingualism: Pseudotranslation In Katerina Poladjan, Olga Grjasnowa, And Nino Haratischwili, Marie-Christine Boucher

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A great deal of existing research on literary multilingualism focuses on the explicit presence of multiple languages in literary works. Yet these texts represent only a relatively marginal portion of contemporary literary production. To focus on this rare literary phenomenon neglects the fact that literary systems pressure most authors to write increasingly monolingual texts—which does not preclude them from portraying scenes of everyday multilingual life. Rather than rendering different languages directly in the text, however, this multilingualism is often excluded: in a monolingual (literary) world, authors translate worldly multilingualism into textual monolingualism. I analyze the distinct strategies authors employ in …

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Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

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Moral Exemplars Of Note - Horst-Klaus Hofmann, Sam And Pearl Oliner

Moral Exemplars Study

Moral Exemplars of Note - Horst-Klaus Hofmann, Sam and Pearl Oliner

What Makes A Woman "Pious And Good": The Function Of Several Grimm Brothers' Cautionary Fairy Tales, Hannah Montante

English (MA) Theses

This thesis explores how several of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, “Little Snow-white and the seven dwarfs,” “The Juniper Tree,” and “Cinderella” exhibit patriarchal expectations of women that fairy tale protagonists strive to uphold, while female villains feel driven to violence and artifice because of their inability to fit into this role. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published these stories in nineteenth-century Germany, which was predominantly Protestant and held the belief that women should be nurturing homemakers who took care of their husbands and children. These cautionary tales instruct women on how to behave and appear physically, likely because these stories …

“Vom Verstehen Rede Ich Vorsichtshalber Nicht”: Discourses Of Memory And German-Jewish Literature In Selected Literary Award Speeches By Barbara Honigmann, Achim Schmid

Masters Theses

The literary prize speeches of German-Jewish author Barbara Honigmann make up only a small part of her mainly narrative oeuvre, yet they are relevant to her writing. On the one hand, they provide insights into the difficulties of being a German-Jewish author in the twenty-first century, on the other hand, they are also politically significant. In them, Honigmann recalls the crimes of the National Socialists against the Jewish population during the Third Reich, as well as the suffering under the socialist dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic.

Analyzing three of her speeches that were delivered between 2001 and 2015 in …

Faszination Mond – Das Mondmotiv In Der Deutschsprachigen Gegenwartslyrik Vor Dem Hintergrund Seiner Literarischen Tradition, Lara-Mareen Foerster

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This master thesis explores the moon motif in contemporary poetry in relation to its literary history. Contemporary poetry is understood as poetry after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. My research seeks to provide an overview of the moon motif in German contemporary literature where hitherto only scholarship on Durs Grünbein has considered the importance of the moon motif.

Therefore, this work taxonomically explores the functions of the moon motif in general instead of aiming at a close reading of selected poems. I am taking a stance against the notion that the moon motif and the fascination for …

Zur Ästhetik Des Widerstands Im Afrodeutschen Theater: Am Beispiel Von Olumide Popoolas Also By Mail, Bertrand Collins Ngong M.A.

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This research is titled On the Aesthetics of Resistance in Afro-German Theater: A Case Study of Olumide Popoola's Also by mail. The main purpose of this research is to show how Afro-German theater resists through creative processes on a symbolic and aesthetic level to address crucial challenges faced by the black minority in Germany. The play Also by mail by Nigerian-German playwright Olumide Popoola is an interesting example of this, as it is situated at the intersection of gender, race, and identity. Popoola’s engagement with the aesthetics of resistance provides a way to understand how Afro-German activism today uses …

Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel In A Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022., Emily Hall

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022. 315 pp.

War On Humor: Killing Laughter In Times Of Strife, Maria Christina Kardash

CAFE Symposium 2023

This project explores the use of humor as a coping mechanism throughout the first World War. It focuses on three main aspects: (1) the evolution of humor prior to, contemporary to, and after WWI; (2) the contrast between Germany's strict oppression of humor and France's more free approach; (3) and the distinction between civilian and soldier humor.

“Since When Is Steve Urkel White?” – Vocal Blackface In The German Dubbing Landscape, Patrick Ploschnitzki

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Dubbed (i.e., lip-synchronized audiovisual translation of) movies and television are ubiquitous in German-speaking countries and often consumed without active reflection of their production. Due to this inattention, the domestication / replacement of cultural references in US media translated into German often goes unnoticed. Translational decision-making becomes highly problematic, however, when entire cultures are replaced or disregarded as a result. In 2004, applied linguist Robin Queen demonstrated that Black actors were dubbed by white voice actors with German dialects and sociolects traditionally read as “blue collar.” There has not been any follow-up research to her crucial contribution that remains topical: the …

Feeling Beyond Words: Ineffability And Haptic Translational Praxis Of Black German Writings, Adrienne N. Merritt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In this article, I focus on selections from Black German essayistic and creative writings that center experiential knowledge that is personal and often multisensory. My case studies are excerpts from Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (1986), its English translation by Anne V. Adams (Showing Our Colors 1992), and Natasha Kelly’s collection of interviews from her documentary film, Millis Erwachen (Milli’s Awakening) (2018), which Kelly herself translated. These texts, I argue, explore the ways in which words fail to fully express the visceral reaction of living while Black in Germany, particularly those that seek …

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.

Guido Mazzoni. On Modern Poetry. Translated By Zakiya Hanafi. Belknap Press, 2022., Anthony Degenaro

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Guido Mazzoni. On Modern Poetry. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Belknap Press, 2022. 294 pp.

Brian Britt. Religion Around Walter Benjamin. The Pennsylvania State Up, 2022., Doris Mcgonagill

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Brian Britt. Religion Around Walter Benjamin. The Pennsylvania State UP, 2022. xvii + 233 pp.

Special Focus Introduction: Centering Black Cultural Production In Translation, Corine Tachtiris, Priscilla Layne

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Special Focus Introduction: Centering Black Cultural Production in Translation

Towards A Queer Weimar Cinema: Spaces, Narratives, And Influences, Elizabeth M. Lynch Sullivan

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Sttcl Editorial Board

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

STTCL Editorial Board

Thirty-Fifth Annual Bibliography 2021 (Mike Lützeler Contemporary German Literature Collection), Walter Schlect, Paul Michael Lützeler, Tomek Rudel

University Libraries Publications

The 35th bibliography of 811 volumes added to Washington University Libraries' Mike Lützeler Contemporary German Literature Collection. All published in 2021, these acquisitions include novels, poetry, short story collections, graphic novels, essays, autobiographical works, and literary and cultural periodicals from publishers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Organized by author or editor, the bibliography includes local call numbers as well as subject and genre descriptors. This Collection serves as the research arm for the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature's Max Kade Center for Contemporary German Literature. A bibliography of items added the previous year is compiled each year …

English Translations Of Two German All-Souls’-Day Pieces, Taro Omori

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Since the early eighteenth century the Don Juan legend was a popular subject in Austrian theatres on All Souls' Day (November 2); a peculiar custom, given that the main character is a libertine who indulges in excesses without any fear of divine retribution. One such work was Anton Cremeri's Der steinerne Gast (The Stone Guest) published in 1787; coincidentally Mozart's Don Giovanni premiered in the same year.

In the nineteenth century Don Juan gradually disappeared from the stage, but the custom of performing plays on All Souls' Day did not. Ernst Raupach's 1835 piece Der Müller und sein Kind (The …

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 …

Lia Brozgal. Absent The Archive. Liverpool Up, 2020., Aubrey Gabel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Lia Brozgal. Absent the Archive. Liverpool UP, 2020. 368 pp.

Candelas Gala. Clara Janés: La Poética Cuántica O La Física De La Poesía. Csic, 2021., Nicolás Fernández-Medina

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Candelas Gala. Clara Janés: La poética cuántica o la física de la poesía. CSIC, 2021. 203 pp.