European Languages and Societies Commons^™

Wilde And The Model Of Homosexuality In Mann's Tod In Venedig, James P. Wilper

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Wilde and the Model of Homosexuality in Mann's Der Tod in Venedig" James P. Wilper examines the influence of Oscar Wilde and the effeminate homosexual identity which cohered as a result of Wilde's trials for act of "gross indecency" in 1895, in Mann's classic homoerotic short novel. Drawing on Alan Sinfield's The Wilde Century (1994) and recent scholarship into the impact of Wilde on German-language writers, as well as German homosexual communities of the early twentieth century, Wilper explores Mann's ambivalent response to Wilde's homosexual legacy. Later in his career, Mann writes of Wilde with Nietzsche …

An Innocent Victim?: The Portrayal Of Anne Boleyn In French Drama, Art, And Literature Of The 1830s, Molly Driscoll

Honors Theses and Capstones

The 1830s in France saw a revival of artistic interest in and representations of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry VIII of England. This thesis traces Anne's influence on artistic, dramatic, and literary works of the 1830s and focuses on how these portrayals differed from one another as well as contemporary and modern opinions of Anne.

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, …

The Partisan And His Doppelganger: The Case Of Primo Levi, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Published in 1982, Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?) is Primo Levi's first novel proper. Perhaps Primo Levi is regretted not fully living life as an Italian Jewish partisan that he re-created his lost dream through its pages, and had his partisan brigade not been captured, perhaps Levi's underground fighting might have continued until the end of the war. If Not Now, When? thus might reflect Levi's need to explore that sought-after life as a partisan, which he had been denied after only three months of activity. Did Live write If Not Now, When? as a …

The National Imagination (Spring 2010), Robert D. Tobin, Belen Atienza, Alice Valentine

Syllabi

What images make people think of the United States of America? Cowboys? The flag? And are there similar icons in other cultures that help define cultural identity? The National Imagination explores the concept of a national community as constructed and critiqued through literary and cinematic narratives, as well as other cultural texts.

Our underlying premise is that national languages and cultures promote the identity of particular communities. We are interested in examining those subjective expressions of culture—images, symbols, narratives—that lead people to feel that they are members of the communities we call nations. We are also interested in discovering points …

Boganis In America: The American Adventures Of Karen Blixen's Father, Wilhelm Dinesen

The Bridge

Sick at heart and world-weary at the age of twenty-seven, Captain Wilhelm Dinesen (1845-95) turned his back on Europe and set sail for America. The year was 1872. Danish immigration was on the rise, and many immigrants dreamed of making their fortune in the land of opportunity. Dinesen had other reasons. His fortune was already secure, for he had been born to wealth and privilege. As a young man, however, he had gone to war, but war had led to defeat, and defeat to bloody civil war. How could he forget the horrors he had seen and experienced? What he …

Piet Hein ( 1905-1996): A Renaissance Man, Inger M. Olsen

The Bridge

A man who in the year 2000 had had his collections of poems and Crooks published in 1,700,000 copies, who had invented lamp shades, a sundial, and the super ellipse as well as games, who had received the Dansk Design Center's annual prize in 1989 should be easy to locate among people whose biography have been written. Those were my thoughts when I started researching this paper, and great was my surprise when I found that was not at all the case.

Three Short Stories By Carl Hansen, J. R. Christianson

The Bridge

Translator's Note. The Danish-American author, Carl Hansen, was born in Jonstrup near Holbcek in 1860, emigrated to America in 1885, taught for a number of years at Danebod Folk School in Tyler, Minnesota, and died in Seattle in 1916. Enok Mortensen once described him as follows:

"[He] had attended university classes in Denmark and studied at the state agricultural school. He knew something about pharmacology, a lot about veterinary medicine, and much about literature and philosophy ... He was a popular teacher. Each Saturday he gave a lecture-often on classics of Danish literature, and the students sat spellbound as he …

Frankenstein: Man Or Monster?, Leigh P. Mackintosh

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Since its first publication in 1818, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein has left a lasting impression upon the world speaking to a multitude of audiences including artists, scientists, philosophers, and society as a whole. Considering the impact of Frankenstein through its evolution as a cultural myth in various plays and films, this thesis will provide a way to gauge the relevance of Shelley’s story as an adaptation. Only by knowing what has been done in the past and how the materials have been used by other playwrights and screenwriters can one understand how to handle them as an original work. The …

The Reception Of Danish Science Fiction In The United States, Kristine J. Anderson

The Bridge

Science fiction is a distinctly American genre. Although scholars have traced its origins back as far as the Latin writer Lucian of Samosata,1 it was Hugo Gernsback, a publisher of pulp magazines in the United States, who first gave the genre its name in the June 1929 issue of Wonder Stories. Gernsback had been serializing the scientific romances of such writers as Jules Verne and HG. Wells, emphasizing their treatment of technology and putting them forth as models for other budding writers to imitate. The magazines that Gernsback initiated became very popular, spawning more from other publishers. Groups of aficionados …

Enok Mortensen And The Immigrant Experience: A View From The Lower Class, Rudolf Jensen

The Bridge

To begin with, I would like to cite several short quotations from Enok Mortensen's fiction to show his primary themes as well as his writing style.

...for jer Emigranter er der aldrig noget, der er saa godt som det var i Danmark...altid skal I sammenligne...1 [for you immigrants there is never anything as good as it was in Denmark...you always have to compare.]

...herover gik man med en underlig Uro i Sindet altid...bare et hundrede Dollars mere, eller Tusinde...eller Millionen...2 [over here in America you are always restless...only a hundred dollars more, or a thousand, or a million.]

...I det …

Karin Michaelis: Famous Danish Novelist And Humanitarian Rebel With A Cause, Merete Von Eyben

The Bridge

Consider the following question: Which Danish author was not only one of the most famous European authors in the early part of the twentieth century, but also one of the most widely read female ones; had all of her books translated into German and some of them into as many as 30 other languages; wrote the most notorious bestseller of that period; celebrated her 60th birthday at a banquet hosted by Austrian PEN in Vienna where she was awarded both an Austrian and a Czechoslovakian medal and honored by the German language papers as Europe's Conscience; had her books banned …

Um 1800 (Spring 2006) (Whitman College), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

This course was taught by Robert Tobin at Whitman College. Professor Tobin worked at Whitman for 18 years as associate dean of the faculty and chair of the humanities, and was named Cushing Eells Professor of the Humanities.

"In this course, we are attempting to get a sense of the richness of the cultural life of German-speaking central Europe around 1800, when there was a flowering of literature, philosophy, music and the arts flowered. We will read a variety of texts in German from a variety of disciplines and develop our skills as literary analysts, cultural critics, and readers of …

Quest And Place In Carl Hansen And Hans Christian Andersen, David S. Iversen

The Bridge

Carl Hansen and Hans Christian Andersen demonstrate a number of similar characteristics as authors. Both wrote their stories with their respective readership in mind. Both authors strove to establish character and setting with as few words as possible. Both knew their audiences well and made use of scenes, places, and experiences that their readers recognized. Each man was also driven to become an author, albeit for slightly different reasons. Hans Christian Andersen was, according to Sven H. Rossel, "single-minded in pursuit of art and recognition,"1 while Carl Hansen relates that "some five years before he emigrated to the United States …

Sabbatical Leave Proposal And Report, Martha Bowser-Kiener

Sabbaticals

I propose to spend the Spring 2005 semester getting generally reinvigorated for and reinvested in my next ten or more years as a teaching faculty member at Parkland College. Specifically, it is my intention to spend all or most of the semester in Europe, particularly in France, in order to 1) update my familiarity with contemporary French culture and idiomatic language usage; 2) collect and catalog cultural artifacts, photo essays, and participatory experiences to enhance and inform my teaching.

Additionally, it is my intention to travel outside of France to explore as much of the former Roman and Byzantine Empires …

Masterpieces Of Classicism And Romanticism (Fall 2000) (Whitman College), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

This course was taught by Robert Tobin at Whitman College. Professor Tobin worked at Whitman for 18 years as associate dean of the faculty and chair of the humanities, and was named Cushing Eells Professor of the Humanities.

"Masterpieces of Classicism and Romanticism is designed to give students a broad overview of European literature of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. Besides gaining familiarity with some of the authors of this period, students should learn to put the texts we read into their social and historical contexts and gain a basic familiarity with approaches to literary texts."

Primo Levi And Bruno Piazza: Auschwitz In Italian Literature, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

To focus on the literature of the Shoah more than 50 years later and 7,000 miles away inevitably creates some sense of dissociation due to both historical and geographic distance. While on the one hand, an analysis of the literature of the genocide might grant further insights through a retrospective look, on the other, however, this distance of time and space risks leading to an oversimplification of the Shoah, in the sense that the plight of the Jews, their individual stories and the overwhelming sense of emptiness caused by the depletion of the intellectual Jewish cultural communities in Europe might …

Primo Levi, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Chemistry and literature, viewed by most people as widely different subjects, come together in the works of Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who was both a professional chemist and a professional writer. Levi said that he wanted to fill the gap between the imaginative world of literature and the analytical world of science. Believing such a gap absurd, he was never daunted by the purported incompatibility between the two fields of knowledge. Levi's literary work is also marked by his experience in Auschwitz's concentration camp, where he was interned from February 1944 to January 1945. Through his characteristically clear and …

Kafka (Spring 1991) (Whitman College), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

This course was taught by Robert Tobin at Whitman College. Professor Tobin worked at Whitman for 18 years as associate dean of the faculty and chair of the humanities, and was named Cushing Eells Professor of the Humanities.

Primo Levi: The Drowned, The Saved, And The "Grey Zone", Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Primo Levi has been well known in Italy for many years. Even though his first book Se questo è un uomo–published in English as Survival in Auschwitz–did not sell well when first published by De Silva in 1947 (2,500 copies published, of which 600 remained unsold and were eventually destroyed by the 1966 flood in Florence), it was accepted unanimously in Italy as a literary masterpiece and a great witness to history when Einaudi republished the volume in 1956. From that moment on, Italian readers and critics have acknowledged the literary beauty and importance of Levi's writings. He …

"Official Science Often Lacks Humility": Humor, Science, And Technology In Levi's Storie Naturali, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Primo Levi's third book, written under the pseudonym of "Damiano Malabaila," was published for the first time in the fall of 1966 by Einaudi. Storie naturali is a collection of fifteen short stories which represent the beginning of a new Cours in the author's narrative. After the autobiographical Survival in Auschwitz of 1947 and his second book of 1963 The Reawakening–both dealing with the Holocaust and its aftermath–Storie Naturali ("Natural Stories," not yet published in English) represented such a break in the literary patter established by Levi up to that point, that the author decided to use a …

The Travels Abroad Of H. C. Andersen, Don Mowatt

The Bridge

A complete appreciation of Hans Christian Andersen has always been limited to Danish-speaking readers because so much of his private life is most clearly revealed in his letters, diaries, and travel books which remain largely untranslated into English. There is a handful of exceptions, the majority of which are mid-nineteenth century translations from England.

Enok Mortensen's Major Fiction, Dorothy Burton Skardal

The Bridge

Enok Mortensen' s literary career was strangely divided. In the 1930s he published a play and three books of fiction in a first burst of activity that began after most other Scandinavian immigrant authors had ceased to publish or had died. After 1936, however, he abruptly ceased to publish fiction except for scattered short stories , and for many years wrote historical works in English instead. In English too was his charming autobiographical account of A Danish Boyhood in 1981. Who would have expected, then, that his last book would return to the novel form after nearly half a century …

Enok Mortensen And The History Of Danish Immigration To America, Eric Helmer Pedersen

The Bridge

Enok Mortensen is probably best known in Denmark through his activity as a guest lecturer at Askov Folk High School in the 1960s and 1970s. Within the confines of a small group of Danes with friends and family in America he also had a name as a writer of fiction. It is true that his first work Mit Folk (1932), a collection of short stories, was published in Askov, Minnesota, but his next, the novel Saledes blev jeg hjeml0s (1934) was published in Holb

Danish-American Literature In Transition, Dorothy Burton Skardal

The Bridge

Danish-American literature was written by Danish immigrants in the United States mainly about and for members of their own group. Their lives were lived in constant psychological and cultural flux undergoing the pressures of assimilation; therefore their literature both grew out of and recorded multifaceted processes of transition. Today the literature Danish immigrants wrote is itself in transition: long unread or forgotten, it is now being rediscovered by Americans of Danish heritage. This brief introduction to the main Danish-American writers is meant to stimulate still more to reclaim their heritage preserved in Danish-language fiction and poetry.

In Debt To Heritage Denmark, Hermansen-Jensen, Nysted, Otto G. Hoiberg, Reviewer, Elise Hermansen Olsen

The Bridge

This is the life story of the late Elise Hermansen Olsen, as portrayed in autobiographical materials edited admirably by her still-active husband, Dr. C. Arild Olsen. It mirrors the various interrelated ways in which Elise "lived her Danish heritage" - by use of the Danish language in speech and song, by a deep appreciation of that country's literature, by perpetuation of its characteristic customs, and by living a life geared to its distinctive values.

"Laegepraksis I Chicago," Brogede Minder, Morris Salmonsen

The Bridge

The Danish-born physician Christian Fenger, whose career was recounted by William K. Beatty in the last issue of The Bridge, was one of many Scandinavian doctors in Chicago during the boom decades one hundred years ago. In a city bursting with immigrants, some Scandinavian doctors catered to their countrymen, and had in most cases to be content with modest financial and social rewards. Others, like Fenger, affiliated with hospitals and made strong contributions to medical science of the day. By today's standards, the practice of medicine was virtually unregulated; the state of the science was in transition as research and …