German Language and Literature Commons^™

I Read To You, And You Relax: Interactive Teacher Read-Alouds Of Picture Books In The Undergraduate Foreign Language Classroom, Mareike Geyer

Doctoral Dissertations

Research Area: This dissertation investigates interactive teacher read-alouds of picture books in the undergraduate foreign language classroom. It focused on reading comprehension and read-aloud enjoyment.

Study Design: The study was conducted in four in-person German language classes at a U.S. university. It consisted of six weekly read-alouds interventions that took place over the time span of 7 weeks. During the interventions, one German picture book was read interactively to the students.

Data Collection Instruments: Reading comprehension was measured with a pre-test and a post-test and read-aloud enjoyment was measured with a pre-intervention survey and a post-intervention survey.

Results: The findings …

The Inner Tragic Of The Sturm Und Drang And Its Dramatic Trilogy: Lenz’S Die Soldaten, Schiller’S Die Räuber, And Goethe’S Faust I, Charles Brown

Doctoral Dissertations

My research examines three German dramas – J. M. R. Lenz’s Die Soldaten (1776), Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: eine Tragödie (1808). The three plays exhibit with remarkable parallel a three-phase dramatic structure that serves as the inner framework for a tragic process. This shared inner tragic process is suggestive evidence of an enlightening intertextuality within the purview of the Sturm und Drang. Featuring prominently in this tragic trilogy of the Sturm und Drang is Lenz, the tragic innovator whose template for inner tragic not only influences works of literature in this sequence of …

Sketches, Impressions And Confessions: Literature As Experiment In The Nineteenth Century, Andrew Ragsdale Lallier

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue for the existence and critical relevance of a program of experimental literature in the long nineteenth century, developed in the aesthetics of German Romanticism and adapted in a set of texts by Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. My introduction positions this argument in context of larger debates concerning form, theory and literary capacity, provides points of connection between these authors, and outlines the most prominent features of experimental literature. In the first chapter, I present an unorthodox reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, accompanied by a brief account of the literary-critical …

‚Literarisch Inszenierte Sprachbiographien’ Familiengedächtnis, Liebe Und Stadt In Dimitré Dinevs Engelszungen, Marica Bodrožićs Das Gedächtnis Der Libellen Und Ilma Rakusas Mehr Meer. Erinnerungspassagen, Anja Katharina Seiler

Doctoral Dissertations

Literary characters as well as the realities that surround them can be portrayed and developed through the lense(s) of the languages that these characters speak and experience. This dissertation analyzes such ‘literarily enacted language biographies’ (‘Sprachbiographien’) in the following German texts: Engelszungen by Dimitré Dinev (2003), Das Gedächtnis der Libellen by Marica Bodrožić (2010) and Mehr Meer: Erinnerungspassagen by Ilma Rakusa (2009).

Drawing upon current research that focuses on literary multilingualism as well as language biographies, this dissertation analyzes which literary strategies Dinev, Bodrožić and Rakusa employ in these texts to narratively (re)construct the protagonists’ language biographies. Three common thematic …

Insurgent Spectacles: Spring Awakening, Woyzeck, Mother Courage And The ‘New’ Broadway Spectacle, Noah Porter Soltau

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the political and ideological work done by what I call "insurgent spectacles," which comprised a historical episode of American theater occurring primarily from 2006 to 2008. The spectacles had liberatory and redemptive potential not in spite of their identity as mass culture, but indeed precisely because of it. They functioned in a contested political and ideological space within the schema of mass culture. The insurgent spectacle is so-called because it superficially resembled other bits of Broadway fluff with its glitziness, over-production, and ham-fistedness that allow the audience to be intellectually disengaged. During this episode, it persisted (often …

Be A Man, Comrade! Construction Of The ‘Socialist Male Personality’ In The Gdr Youth Literature Of The 1950s And 1960s., Joanna Broda-Schunck

Doctoral Dissertations

One of the main goals of the East German government was the education of its population towards Socialism, and the creation of the new type of human – the Neue Mensch. The belief in the possibility of molding the next generation was particularly strong in the first decades of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), – in the 1950s and the 1960s. At the same time, the leaders of the regime presented the new Socialist state as the rightful heir to the German cultural and historical traditions. Both claims were aimed at strengthening the legitimacy of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei (SED …

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 …

Aspects Of First Language Attrition: A Case Study Of German Immigrants In East Tennessee, Raluca Mihaela Negrisanu

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines aspects of first language attrition (L1= German) in a second language (L2= English) environment. It sheds light on language contact and attrition research and focuses on first generation German immigrants to East Tennessee who were administered a series of tests to ascertain their language attrition to establish extralinguistic factors promoting or inhibiting it.

The Study Group consisted of 22 German immigrants to the U.S., both men and women, aged between 27 and 68, who emigrated as late teens or adults and have been here for more than three years. The Control Group consisted of 12 German native …

Images Of War In The Works Of Poet-Soldiers Of The Thirty Years' And Prusso-Austrian Wars, Jacqueline Fields Ratliff

Doctoral Dissertations

This research involves a study of the imagery of war of six poet-soldiers: Diederich von dem Werder, Georg Greflinger, and Christian Brehme, from the time of the Thirty Years' War and Ewald Christian von Kleist, Johann George Scheffner, and Heinrich Wilhelm von Stamford from the time of the Prusso-Austrian Wars. The aims of the study were twofold -- to ascertain how these writers depict war through imagery in their poetic works, and to note changes in such imagery in the intervening century between the two periods of conflict. Attention was focused on certain categories of imagery, including the origins of …