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 …

A Genealogy Of Victimhood: Empathy And Memory In Recent German Fiction, Catherine E. Mcnally

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses literary representations of empathy and altruism in Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2015 novel Gehen, Ging, Gegangen and Bodo Kirchhoff’s 2016 novel Widerfahrnis. These novels demonstrate continuities and discontinuities between German literature of the postwar, reunification and contemporary contexts.Analyzing expressions of empathy by Erpenbeck and Kirchhoff’s protagonists, I locate them in historical and literary contexts, the roots of which can be traced to the first generation of postwar German literature (1945-1968), particularly Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. In both Grass and Böll’s early postwar fiction, German experiences of the war and its aftermath are foregrounded, and focus is placed …

Postkoloniale Solidarität: Alltagsleben Von Ddr-Bürgern In Mosambik, 1979-1990, Katrin Bahr

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation examines the everyday life and work of development workers[1] and their families sent by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to Mozambique between 1979 and 1990. I investigate the issues of state and individual solidarity and the interactions of Germans and Mozambicans within the development projects. Since the GDR did not see itself as a colonial power or an heir to Germany's colonial past, it acquitted itself of the charge of being an exploitative imperialist in its foreign policy. From its perspective, it stood side by side in “solidarity” (Solidarität) with its “brother states” (Bruderstaaten) …

Epic And Identity: Exploring Genre And Understanding The Self In The Middle High German 'Spielmannsepen', Rachael A. Salyer

Doctoral Dissertations

The cluster of anonymous Middle High German epics known as the Spielmannsepen presents an interesting challenge to notions of genre and identity in the Middle Ages. This project explores some of the issues surrounding those notions in three particular texts, including König Rother, Orendel, and St. Oswald. Discussions of genre and identity complement one another in this work because each functions as a means of categorization. Questions surrounding the poems’ manuscript traditions and presumed composition dates are analyzed, and aspects of the eponymous heroes’ identities are also examined.

Bridging Contradictions: Socialist Actresses And Star Culture In East Germany, Victoria Rizo Lenshyn

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that multiple stakeholders in East Germany (GDR)—the fans, artists, and state— adapted the star phenomenon to help validate GDR socialist culture at home and abroad, and to bridge seemingly contradictory elements within the dualistic context of the global Cold War: the individual and collective, the ordinary and extraordinary, idealism and reality, the past and present, tradition and progress, East and West. As public figures, GDR stars offered audiences multiple points of identification and helped the enlarged working class navigate its new dominant social position in GDR social life. Officially, stars offered an engaging performance of …

The Drama Of Race: Contemporary Afro-German Theater, Jamele Watkins

Doctoral Dissertations

The first investigation of Afro-German theater my dissertation, “The Drama of Race,” argues that Afro-German theater empowers as Black actors take ownership of a German stage, a white German space. My dissertation highlights four crucial Afro-German plays: real life: Germany (2008), Heimat, bittersüße Heimat [Home, bittersweet Home] (2010), Also by Mail (2013), and Mais in Deutschland und anderen Galaxien [Corn in Germany and Other Galaxies] (2015). In Chapter I, I discuss the cultural conditions in which Afro-German theater emerged—after an established literary corpus by Afro-German authors. Chapter II introduces the first Afro-German play and its improvisational methods as empowering for …

From Householder To War-Lord To Heavenly Hero: Naming God In The Early Continental Germanic Languages, Michael Moynihan

Doctoral Dissertations

Using an interdisciplinary approach and building upon earlier work by Northcott, Green, Eggers, Schirokauer, and others, the present study presents a reappraisal of the development of the Germanic vocabulary adopted to designate the divine Lord (God or Christ) in the early stages of Christianization on the continent during the first millennium. The words used to translate Greek kyrios and Latin dominus were drawn from the sphere of Germanic social institutions and thus their adoption was influenced—and to some extent determined—by external conditions and values. In Wulfila’s fourth-century translation of the Bible into an East Germanic dialect of Gothic, the word …

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 …

Children In Frank Beyer's Holocaust Films, Delene M. White

Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT CHILDREN IN FRANK BEYER’S HOLOCAUST FILMS SEPTEMBER 2016 DELENE CASE WHITE, B.A. UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH ALABAMA M.A. UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH ALABAMA Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Barton Byg This dissertation is about central functions children play in the Holocaust films of (East) German director Frank Beyer: Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked among Wolves, 1963), Jakob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar, 1974), and Wenn alle Deutschen schlafen (While all Germans Sleep, 1994). Beyer’s child characters contribute to resistance and challenge oversimplified ways the Holocaust and German division have often been remembered. Beyer’s …

Pessimism In Progress: Hermann Sudermann And The Liberal German Bourgeoisie, Jason Doerre

Doctoral Dissertations

Once ranked among the most internationally read authors at the turn of the nineteenth century, the name Hermann Sudermann (1857–1928) today has been all but forgotten. This dissertation frames the life and work of this once famous author in the context of the liberal German bourgeois milieu. Not only was Sudermann a liberal bourgeois, his works reflected the preferred styles, attitudes, and worldview of this social class. I argue that the rise and fall of Hermann Sudermann’s career, as it was inextricably connected to the fortunes of the liberal German bourgeoisie, mirrors the trajectory thereof. As the appeal of bourgeois …

The Subjects Of Fati̇h Akin's Melodramas: A Genealogical Reading Through The Films Of R.W. Fassbinder, Yilmaz Güney And Atif Yilmaz, Emir O. Benli

Doctoral Dissertations

Fatih Akın's feature films Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007) resonated strongly with Turkish, German and Turkish German communities, albeit for diverse reasons, opening spaces for debate with regard to subjectivites that foreground their alterity and redefine readings of national identity. This dissertation addresses ways in which the melodramatic modality of Akın's films partake in such debates by presenting a dialogic genealogy of melodramas from Turkish, German and Turkish German contexts. An analysis of Fontane's novel "Effi Briest" and of R.W Fassbinder's Fontane Effi Briest and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; Atıf Yılmaz's O Beautiful Istanbul; and …

Young Germans In The World: Race, Gender, And Imperialism In Wilhelmine Young Adult Literature, Maureen O. Gallagher

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation shows how popular reading material for young adults was used to craft a new generation of German imperial citizens in the Second Empire (1871-1918). Uniting insights from contemporary postcolonial theory, gender studies, and the global history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, it shows the intersectional development of German national identity in the children’s and young adult literature of Wilhelmine Germany. As literature written by adults for young people, designed both to entertain and instruct, children’s and young adult literature offers a unique window on how Germany built nation and empire simultaneously during this period. Focusing on texts set …

‚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 …