European Languages and Societies Commons^™

The Weight Of The Spring: "The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" And The Fate Of The Prague Spring, Thea J. Toocheck

Student Publications

Two of the many watershed events Czechoslovakia experienced in the twentieth century were the 1968 Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion, which determined the course of the nation for the next twenty years. Czech author Milan Kundera experienced these events firsthand and recounted a narrative of the events in his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Today, the novel remains an important work for its representation of the Spring and its philosophical discussion of the purpose of human life. Over the last fifty years, the Prague Spring has been represented by a variety of sources as a time …

The Reflected (Un)Real: Space In Ingeborg Bachmann’S “Probleme Probleme”, Emma G. Schilling

Student Publications

In her 1977 short story “Probleme Probleme,” Ingeborg Bachmann plays with space and representations of reality in a way that reflects the disillusionment of Austria’s post-war generation. Beatrix’s two desires in the short story – to look at herself in the mirror and to sleep – both suggest a resistance to living in the real world and a dependence on the illusions of her dreams, mirrors, and the beauty salon. Although the older patrons of the salon and Beatrix try to hide from the responsibility for the past and present, the mirrors and the salon prove to be temporary illusions …

Review Of "Homer's Iliad: The Basel Commentary, Book Xix", Rachel H. Lesser

Classics Faculty Publications

Marina Coray’s commentary on Iliad 19, originally published in German in 2009, is part of the ongoing Basel commentary series on Homer’s Iliad, edited by Anton Bierl and Joachim Latacz. So far thirteen volumes of the series have been published in German, and five in English translation. Coray’s commentary is a work of great erudition and will be an indispensable resource for scholars of Homer. Here I focus on the utility of this slightly revised new English edition for anglophone readers at various levels, and consider how this commentary relates to and supplements Mark W. Edwards’ outstanding commentary on …

Unsettling Stereotypes: Approaches To The French Culture And Society Course, John P. Murphy

French Faculty Publications

Beginning with popular commentary on the 2013 Taubira Affair, this article aims to unsettle some common assumptions about “French identity.” More generally, it asks how best to approach the notion of culture in upperdivision culture and society courses. Drawing on recent debates in anthropology, it suggests an approach that moves away from an understanding of culture as a bound entity that promotes a common sense of orientation and purpose toward one where culture is viewed as a reservoir of references, whose meanings and values are continuously interpreted, negotiated, and contested.

Ms-184: Henry Louis Baugher, Class Of 1857, Travel Diary, Elizabeth P. Steinhour

All Finding Aids

The diary consists of one 351 page travel journal including 7 pages of plant samples included at the end of the diary. He wrote about churches he attended in Europe, the scenery, hikes, and historical events including the French Revolution in Paris and the Glencoe Massacre in the Scottish Highlands.

Fealess Friday: Kelsey Chapman, Christina L. Bassler

SURGE

Kelsey Chapman ’15 fearlessly advocates for human rights, peace, and justice, focusing on the Middle East. An economics major and Middle East and Islamic Studies (MEIS) minor, Kelsey is the house leader for the MEIS House, an Arabic PLA, and the founder of Gettysburg’s chapter of J Street U. [excerpt]

Visualizing Shakespeare: Iconography And Interpretation In The Works Of Salvador Dalí, Emily A. Zbehlik

Student Publications

Although William Shakespeare’s 16th century classical literature is rarely contextualized with the eccentricities of 20th century artist Salvador Dali, Shakespeare’s myriad of works have withstood the test of time and continue to be celebrated and reinterpreted by the likes of performers, scholars, and artists alike. Along with full-text illustrations of well-known plays, such as Macbeth (1946) and As You Like It (1953), Dali returned to the Shakespearean motif with his two series of dry-point engravings (Much Ado About Shakespeare and Shakespeare II) in 1968 and 1971. The series combine to formulate 31 depictions where Dali interprets Shakespeare’s text in a …

Ms-172: Paxton Family Papers, Molly E. Reynolds

All Finding Aids

This set of papers presents a variety of notes and correspondences between members of the family and friends. The bulk of the letters date 1895 and come from Elizabeth D. Paxton and Margaretta Paxton to their mother, Caroline Sophia Denny Paxton, while touring Europe. There are letters from James Dunlop and Harmar Denny to their mother, as well as condolence letters for Mr. and Mrs. William M. Paxton upon the death of Harmar Denny in 1896. This collection may prove useful for a researcher conducting a study of the Paxton family, or one interested in the travels of Americans in …

Making The Invisible Heard: German-Kurdish Cultural Organizations And Transnational Networks, Drew A. Hoffman

Student Publications

The increasing corpus of theoretical literature on transnationalism remains to be applied to many of the transnational migrant communities which have developed since the advent of modern globalization. This literary essay seeks to provide a perspective on the German-Kurdish community in Berlin, and how they fit into the larger European and Kurdish contexts. It illustrates the convergence of opportunities and disadvantages that German-Kurds face in Berlin, while also investigating what it means to be a Berliner-Kurd. The literary essay accordingly explores the role of language, cultural organizations, and regional networks. In doing so, it is hoped that topics about German-Kurds …

Working Towards A Globalized Minority: Regional German-Kurdish Cultural Organizations And Transnational Networks, Drew A. Hoffman

Student Publications

German-Kurdish cultural organizations and the Kurdish Diaspora they represent offer an example of a new type of actor in defining globalization. This paper examines how such organizations act as the lynchpin in transnational networks and how such organizations give a voice to Berliner-Kurds. These relationships are explored at the national, regional, and organizational level, in order to paint a comprehensive perspective. It argues that despite experiencing discrimination, the convergence of a global diaspora and local actors has contributed to the reinvention of the German-Kurdish community as a globalized minority. Such a concept is important for understanding how migrant communities can …

How European Folk Stories Have Misrepresented Indigenous Women, Jacqueline S. Marotto

Student Publications

An examination of Rayna Green's "The Pocahontas Perplex" in reflection of course material about the role of indigenous women in North America.

“An Imperialism Of The Imagination”: Muslim Characters And Western Authors In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Robin K. Miller

Student Publications

This paper specifically discusses the cultural attitudes that made writing fully realized Muslim characters problematic for Western authors during the 19th and 20th centuries and also how, through their writing, certain authors perpetuated these attitudes. The discussed authors and works include William Beckford's Vathek, Lord Byron's poem “The Giaour,” multiple short stories from the periodical collection Oriental Stories, one of Hergé's installments of The Adventures of Tintin, and E.M. Hull's novel The Sheik. Three “types” of Muslim characters emerge in these works: the good, the bad, and the white. All three reflect Western attitudes towards the East as a place …

Ms-136: Temma Berg Collection, Julia D. Marshella

All Finding Aids

This collection contains 107 letters, postcards and telegrams from Temma Berg in Europe, to her parents, Selma and Charles Silverstein, in Philadelphia. While the majority of the letters are sent from her home in Baarn, Holland, a few were sent from London. The postcards were sent from places they visited during their travels, including Amsterdam, Belgium, Germany, London, Paris and Israel.

Cultured, Cara L. Dochat

Student Publications

This memoir piece comprises three parts, each of which tells a humorous and perhaps slightly embarrassing story of interpersonal upsets the narrator experienced while studying abroad in Europe. Their telling exposes the narrator as a naïve American tourist, despite her conscious attempts to be culturally sensitive and respectful. The intent of this piece was neither to make a political statement about being American in Europe, nor to present yet another trite account “the best four months of [my] life.” While my primary goal was to share these stories for their entertainment value (if self-effacing), my hope was to transform the …

Willem Blaeu's 'Asia Noviter Delineata': Expressions Of Power Through Naval Might And Natural Knowledge In Dutch Mapmaking, Joshua W. Poorman

Student Publications

This paper situates Dutch mapmaker Willem Blaeu’s Asia noviter delineata—part of the Stuckenberg Map Collection in the Gettysburg College Special Collections—within the larger framework of Renaissance thought and a shifting colonial balance of power. The map’s pictorial marginalia expresses a Dutch quest for empirical knowledge that echoed contemporary cabinets of curiosities throughout early modern Europe. Similar to these cabinets, Blaeu’s map can be seen as a cartographic teatro mundi, used to propagate Dutch hegemony through both a robust naval presence and an expanding geographic and natural knowledge of the world.

Strange Bedfellows And Their Grandchildren: German Literature As Evidence And Confession Of Reunification, Cory H. Rosenberg

Student Publications

From Hegel to Merkel, from Bismarck to BMW, German culture has defined and re-defined itself through a cycle of reaction; thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Modern Germany has certainly not escaped this pattern, existing in a very deep and surprisingly present way in reaction to the collapse of the East German state and the formation of a unified Germany. This paper examines the ways in which contemporary German authors evidence this reaction in their work. As a nation at the heart of the East/West divide throughout the Cold War, Germany provides an ideal lens through which to view the shifting cultural, economic, …

Mythology In The Middle Ages: Heroic Tales Of Monsters, Magic, And Might, Christopher R. Fee

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

Myths of gods, legends of battles, and folktales of magic abound in the heroic narratives of the Middle Ages. Mythology in the Middle Ages: Heroic Tales of Monsters, Magic, and Might describes how Medieval heroes were developed from a variety of source materials: Early pagan gods become euhemerized through a Christian lens, and an older epic heroic sensibility was exchanged for a Christian typological and figural representation of saints. Most startlingly, the faces of Christian martyrs were refracted through a heroic lens in the battles between Christian standard-bearers and their opponents, who were at times explicitly described in demonic terms. …

Gods, Heroes, & Kings: The Battle For Mythic Britain, Christopher R. Fee, David A. Leeming

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

The islands of Britain have been a crossroads of gods, heroes, and kings-those of flesh as well as those of myth-for thousands of years. Successive waves of invasion brought distinctive legends, rites, and beliefs. The ancient Celts displaced earlier indigenous peoples, only to find themselves displaced in turn by the Romans, who then abandoned the islands to Germanic tribes, a people themselves nearly overcome in time by an influx of Scandinavians. With each wave of invaders came a battle for the mythic mind of the Isles as the newcomer's belief system met with the existing systems of gods, legends, and …

8. The National State In Spain, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section V: The Rise of Capitalism and the National State to 1500

The third national state and strong monarchy to be established by the end of the fifteenth century was in Spain. Separated from the rest of the Continent by the lofty and forbidding Pyrenees, Spanish culture developed in relative isolation from the main currents of Europe. The Iberian peninsula had a semi-arid climate, poor soil, and a scarcity of mineral resources. Only when they exploited the mines of Mexico and Peru, or those European lands gained through inheritance or marriage, were Spanish kings wealthy. The country' s poverty obstructed the rise of commerce and industry, limited the cosmopolitanism that accompanied them …

7. The Making Of France As A National State, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section V: The Rise of Capitalism and the National State to 1500

The west Frankish kingdom of Charles the Bald, which he had received in 843 as his portion of his grandfather's great empire, is geographically the genesis of modern France. In the century of disorder and confusion following the partition of Charlemagne's realm into three kingdoms, government fell into the hands of powerful vassals. From the first, therefore, great lords in France exercised the functions of independent rulers. In 987 they chose one of the weaker of their number, Hugh Capet (987-996), to be king. He and his successors faced two great problems in establishing nationhood in France: how to recover …

5. The Rise Of National Feeling, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section V: The Rise of Capitalism and the National State to 1500

In the centuries under review in this chapter the self-sufficient manor, the feudal aristocracy, and the cultural isolation of Europe fell before the forces of economic change. In much the same way and for many of the same reasons the political institutions and practices of feudalism succumbed to the joint attacks or monarchs and the middle class. Even in its day of glory feudalism had within itself certain weaknesses. It had never been able to maintain more than a modicum of order, and indeed under the chivalric code the proper occupation of the knight was warfare. To the interminable civil …

6. England: A Case Study In Successful Monarchism, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section V: The Rise of Capitalism and the National State to 1500

England led the way to national consolidation and a strong monarchy for a number of reasons. The geographical advantages have already been briefly mentioned. Of some importance were the Anglo-Saxon precedents in force between the seventh and eleventh centuries. Roman Civilization was never much more than a thin veneer in England and with the withdrawal of the Romans this veneer wore away. In its place rose Saxon England, and despite the partially successful invasions of the British Isles by the Northmen a degree of cultural homogeneity developed. In fact, these invasions promoted the levying of a royal tax known as …

9. The Holy Roman Empire: A Monarchial Failure, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section V: The Rise of Capitalism and the National State to 1500

Royal efforts to create national states and strong monarchies during the later Middle Ages succeeded in England, France, and Spain for different reasons and under different circumstances. In two of the great geographical subdivisions of central Europe the monarchs were not so successful. Eventual unification of Germany and Italy was delayed until the nineteenth century and may be explained by a number of factors, some beyond the control of individual kings and others based on weaknesses in the character of the monarchs themselves.

The political destinies of Germany and Italy became inextricably interwoven with the creation of the Holy Roman …

10. The Political Thought Of Machiavelli, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section V: The Rise of Capitalism and the National State to 1500

The national state in Western Europe was a new institution, without precedent in the European World. Its rise and almost immediate conflict with the Church challenged political theorists to reexamine the assumptions of a universal church in a universal empire upon which the theory of the two swords was based. These assumptions were so generally accepted that they were not easily abandoned. In the fourteenth century Marsiglia of Padua, for all his disinterest in the two swords, had arrived at his conclusions without denying either the existence of a universal church or the validity of the traditional morality. Other writers …

1. The Goliard Poets, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section IV: The Medieval Ferment

One aspect of medieval variety was a love of this world and of nature. This naturalism had many bases in addition to the fact that man has always found nature unavoidable. It was due also, in part, to the pronounced emphasis on the other world, and arose as an understandable reaction to the prevailing concern for things spiritual. It was also due in part to the fact that, according to Christian teachings, this world of nature was in and of itself good because it had been created by a good God. Therefore it was not to be despised. Naturalism was …

2. St. Francis Of Assisi, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section IV: The Medieval Ferment

A much different expression of the love of this world, and yet one which had certain similarities to the Goliard's, came from St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226). He is probably the one person most people would name as having been most like Jesus. Born in the Italian town of Assisi, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant, he early enjoyed the good things of this life which easily came his way. A desire for military glory was frustrated by illness and imprisonment in an enemy city. During his convalescence something within him began to change. His father, perfectly willing to …

5. Marsiglio And The Defensor Pacis, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section IV: The Medieval Ferment

While the struggle between Boniface VIII and Philip IV of France may have marked the decline of papal temporal power, it did not end the efforts of the popes to restore themselves to their former position in European politics. Despite the fact that such a restoration became increasingly unlikely during the fourteenth century, these efforts were vigorously pursued by the Avignon papacy. At times they were merged with the execution of the historic papal policy of discouraging the creation of any strong power in Italy which might threaten the security of the Papal States. On one of these occasions the …

4. Roger Bacon And Medieval Science, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section IV: The Medieval Ferment

Throughout the Middle Ages there was little interest in theoretical science as such. Not since the Greeks had nature been considered a sufficient object in and of itself for most of the study that we would call scientific. The Middle Ages ' concern with nature was not its primary concern. The medievalist was interested in nature either as a mirror of the supernatural or as something which could be used in reaching the supernatural. The reappearance of Aristotle's thought and the development of those practical and technical interests which grew up around the problems of trade and industry demanded a …

6. John Wyclif's Divine Dominion And The End Of The Middle Ages, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section IV: The Medieval Ferment

John Wyclif (c. 1320-1384) has been called both the last of the schoolmen and the morning star of the Reformation. A native Englishman and a Franciscan, he spent most of his life at the University of Oxford, first as scholar, later as teacher of theology, and, from 1356 to 1382, as master of Balliol College. He witnessed the opening battles of the Hundred Years' War between England and France (1337-1453) with its heavy toll of life, the beginning of the Great Schism (1378-1417) during which there was one pope at and another at Avignon, and finally the spectacle of peasant …

Xiii. Political Liberalism And Nationalism, 1815-1871, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XIII: Political Liberalism and Nationalism, 1815-1871

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of two secular faiths which became key features of Western thought: political liberalism and nationalism- Their tenets were not wTiblly ne^ As~early as the lourteenth century when medieval feudalism was giving way to the rising national state, Marsiglio of Padua (c. 1275 - c, 1343) had announced that political authority was properly lodged in the people. The seventeenth century had produced in John Locke (1632-1704) a man whose ideas on government later became a wellspring for political liberalism. The same era also found nationalism accentuated by colonial rivalries and mercantilist …