German Literature Commons^™

Perspektif Anak Dalam Negosiasi Stereotipe Dan Prasangka Di Ruang Publik Pada Serial Anak Jerman Moooment!: Shopping (2021), Greisye Nathaly Salsalina Ginting, Lisda Liyanti

Multikultura

Stereotypes and prejudice are forms of judgement that appear in daily life, including toward children. Children are often targeted to judgments based on stereotypes and prejudice in social interactions. One media that addresses this issue is the children’s series Moooment! Episode Shopping (2021), which depicts the experience of a child character facing suspicion and judgement from people in public spaces. This study examines the child’s perspective through the position of the child character as both object and subject of stereotypes and prejudice, as well as the negotiation strategies employed in response. The series is analyzed using a descriptive qualitative method, …

Mountains And Mythology: Folklore In The Alps, Arya Karki

Honors Projects

From nature spirits to secret doorways, an air of mystery and magic surrounds the mountains of Austria. All over the world, mountain ranges inspire rich folklore, each set of tales unique to its respective culture. The purpose of this Honors Project is to answer the question: how does mountain-inspired folklore mirror cultural values and fears? A comparative analysis between Austrian Alpine and American Appalachian folktales is conducted in order to isolate the variables that cause folklore to differ region-to-region. Through research consisting of primary-source folklore anthologies, secondary texts on mountain theory, and direct observation from a study abroad experience, this …

Reconsidering Karl Marx’S Concept Of World Literature, Kenneth Cheng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

It is widely assumed that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarded world literature as an epiphenomenal product of the capitalist world market, and therefore as a symptom of rather than potential cure to the crisis of modern society. However, this conflicts with the fact that they designated the Communist Manifesto itself as a world-literary production—the joint work of communists of various nationalities—and opposed it to the national limitations of German socialist literature. This article challenges existing interpretations by outlining how Marx and Engels incorporated the humanistic idealism of the Goethean Weltliteratur tradition into the theoretical framework of historical materialism. It …

The Desire Of Strict Souls: The Poetry, Criticism, And Letters Of Paul Valéry And Wallace Stevens, Michael Healy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation compares the poetic, critical, and epistolary oeuvres of Paul Valéry and Wallace Stevens and the influence of the former on the latter. Valéry famously advocated for the pursuit of “poésie pure” (“pure poetry”) and influenced Stevens especially in this way, though both of them concluded it was not achievable. I establish an approximation of a critical framework based on the work of the following critics and scholars: Wendy Lesser, Wendy Steiner, Anthony Cuda, Michael Clune, Paul Bové, and Liesl Olson. Harold Bloom’s passionate advocacy and deep, sustained engagement with Stevens and his work strongly influenced my choice to …

The Magic Wand: The Transformation Of Literary Journals And The Middle Class In Early Nineteenth-Century Germany, Charlotte Bayer

University Honors Theses

Compared to other products of German Romanticism, scholarship has almost entirely overlooked the magazine Wünschelruthe (1818). No in-depth, original research has been made on the magazine since 1929. Investigations into the Wünschelruthe have only been within the frame of its connection to more influential works and authors within the German canon or as digression in biographies on its main contributors, and these writings usually neglect the actual content in the magazine. From a catalogue of dozens of literary magazines produced in Germany during the late Enlightenment and Romantic eras, the Wünschelruthe is also one of a select few (if not …

Thomas Mann’S Unbound Bodies: A Formal Analysis Of Disease In The Magic Mountain, Julia Shi

Student Theses and Dissertations

My senior thesis argues that disease is a formal element in Thomas Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain, through the lens of a newly theorized genre: the “Bindungsroman” (“binding-novel”). The scholar Jonas Rosenbrück proposed the Bindungsroman as the successor genre to the Bildungsroman after the latter fell out of public favor after World War I.  Whereas the Bildungsroman narrates its hero’s maturation as a process of integration into society, the Bindungsroman’s hero is ontologically unstable and does not achieve normative resolution. This paper examines The Magic Mountain’s protagonist’s development as defined by the doubled play of binding and …

Greek Basileus "King" As A Possible Borrowing From Semitic Mšl "To Rule’", Gerald Leonard Cohen

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

When The Metamorphosis Turns White: Kafka Reimagined In Igoni Barrett’S Blackass, Bisola J. Ajibade

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Igoni Barrett’s Blackass (2015) has frequently been described as a “race-rewrite” of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915). This framing has shaped much of the critical conversation surrounding the two texts. While these approaches productively illuminate questions of identity and biopolitics, less attention has been paid to situating both texts across the intersecting contexts of German modernism and Nigerian postcolonial literature. This article provides a close comparative reading of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Igoni Barrett’s Blackass in order to examine how Kafkaesque elements are reconfigured within a contemporary postcolonial Nigerian context. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of minor literature, alongside …

A Dialetical Materialist Reading Of Language And Ideology In The Metamorphosis, Sidhanth Sethi

Harriet L Wilkes Honors College Theses

In this paper I use a dialectical materialist conception of ideology to analyze how it functions through language in Franz Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis. Beginning with Hegel’s account of consciousness as constituted through contradiction and its material reorientation in Marx and Engels, this project situates ideology within the social relations that shape human life. I then employ Evald Ilyenkov’s conception of material generation and Valentin Volosinov’s semiotic theory, arguing that signs constitute the material medium through which ideological meaning is produced and through which consciousness learns to misrecognize its own conditions. Using this framework, I interpret Gregor Samsa’s transformation as …

De Vente A Alemania, Pepe A ¿Te Has Venido A Alemania, Pepe?: Aspectos Económicos Y Culturales De La Emigración En Dos Generaciones Distintas, Daniel López Fernández

Homage to Alexander von Humboldt: Travels to and from Spain Throughout the Centuries / Homenaje a Alexander von Humboldt: Viajes hacia y desde España de todos los siglos

En Vente a Alemania, Pepe, el epónimo protagonista decide seguir el camino de muchos de sus compatriotas y abandonar temporalmente España con la intención de ganar más dinero en el extranjero, una esperanza que se ve pronto frustrada. Décadas más tarde, la crisis económica que comenzó en 2008 parece haber dado lugar a una repetición de este capítulo tragicómico de la historia española. No obstante, existen diferencias notables entre ambas generaciones. La migración actual atañe a una generación muy distinta de la que se marchó en los años sesenta y setenta. Se trata, en muchos casos, de inmigrantes con una …

Esperanza, De Marina Caba Rall, Y Blutorangen, De Verena Boos: Recuperación De La Memoria Histórica De La Migración Española A Alemania, En Dos Novelas Alemanas Del Siglo Xxi, Adriana Haro-Luviano Ma, Dietrich J.G. Rall Dr.

Homage to Alexander von Humboldt: Travels to and from Spain Throughout the Centuries / Homenaje a Alexander von Humboldt: Viajes hacia y desde España de todos los siglos

Las novelas Blutorangen (2015) y Esperanza (2016) narran dos sagas familiares ficticias que integran en la complejidad de su estructura temas como la memoria y la represión del recuerdo, la post-memoria, la historia y el olvido, los conflictos culturales y la manera de enfrentarse con el pasado. Desde su formación profesional como historiadoras, ambas autoras vertebran sus novelas con la construcción de imágenes históricas que reflejan la migración española a la Alemania de mediados del siglo XX, la integración de las dos protagonistas a la sociedad y cultura alemanas, así como su regreso a España, para esclarecer tanto las causas …

Returning Into The Deep Forest--A Methodological Practice Around Memory, Asianness, And Speech, Yu Ye

Masters Theses

">">The title of this thesis is borrowed from the Tang dynasty poem Deer Enclosure by Wang Wei: “Empty mountain, no one in sight—only the echo of voices. Returning sunlight slips into the deep forest, shining once more on moss.” I feel like my essay is responding to this kind of sensation: light does not shine head-on, but folds back, glancing sideways through dense branches, illuminating what is often overlooked. In that gesture of return—quiet, angled, persistent. This thesis unfolds in three chapters, each following a distinct path—image (Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes), movement (The Rings of Saturn by …

The Small Worlds Of Childhood: Philosophy, Poetics, And The Queer Temporalities Of Early Life, Lauren Shizuko Stone

Gender & Sexuality

The Small Worlds of Childhood argues that prose representations of bourgeois childhood contain surprising opportunities to reflect on the temporality of experience. In their narratives of children at home in their everyday worlds, Adalbert Stifter, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Walter Benjamin are not only able to shed a unique light on key issues in the history of philosophy. They also offer a queer critique of the normative expectation that the literature of childhood is oriented toward the future.

Stone shows that when writers engage in philosophical storytelling, showing children tarrying in quotidian experience, they dislodge childhood from its nostalgic value …

Portrait Of A Fascist: Identity And Independence In Joseph Roth’S Das Spinnennetz (1923), Braden M. Ross

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Three days before Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, the last chapters of Joseph Roth’s Das Spinnennetz were published in the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung. Detailing the decent of World War I veteran Theodor Lohse into the nascent Nazi party, Roth’s novel could not have been more prescient—and yet, it remains the least well-known of his works. Das Spinnennetz is not only a work of great fiction, but an eerie cautionary tale more prophetic than Roth could have ever imagined. In this article, I examine the metaphor of the spider’s web and how ordinary people like Lohse futility navigate their search for individual meaning …

The Roles Of Literature And Film In Shaping Culture: An Examination Of All Quiet On The Western Front And The German Lesson, Charles Hansen

Senior Theses

This paper examines the cultural impacts of All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) and The German Lesson (Deutschstunde). More specifically, it examines the impacts of the works through the shaping of German identity and public memory following World War I and World War II, as well as any long-term impacts that have lasted into the present day. These two works of literature, as well as their respective film adaptations, can serve as vehicles for national reflection, education, and confrontation of the past. This paper will examine the key themes of All Quiet …

Migration, Trauma, And Tweeback: Perspectives On Russian Mennonite Identity In Elina Penner’S Novel Nachtbeeren, Berit Jany

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, a group of about 2.5 million Russia Germans immigrated to Germany, benefiting from the German law that recognizes citizenship to ethnic Germans who arrived in the territory as late ethnic Germans resettlers. Including their children, this subset of Germany’s population now numbers about 3.5 million, and about 350.000 Russia Germans have a Mennonite background. Of the 500.000 Plautdietsch-speaking people worldwide, about 200,000 of them live in Germany. In her debut novel, Nachtbeeren, the author Elina Penner illuminates the everyday life of German Mennonites from the Soviet Union and the successor …

Metamorphosis And Fairy Tale Tropes In Christa Wolf’S Patterns Of Childhood, B. E. Lara

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This study is a sociohistorical analysis of East German writer Christa Wolf’s use of fairy tale tropes in her novel Patterns of Childhood, first published in German in 1976 in East Germany as Kindheitsmuster. Wolf uses fairy tale tropes to explore themes that she could not write about openly under East German censorship, which prohibited East German authors from exposing their culpability for prior acts committed under the Nazi Regime. Furthermore, Wolf introduces metamorphosis to explore the intrinsic evil and subsequent guilt of her child protagonist, and she uses the child’s capacity for evil to illustrate the German people’s similar …

Revisiting Paradise Lost Through K-Pop: A Global Approach To Teaching Writing, Nayoung Bishoff

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The short film series Wings (2016) by the Korean musical group BTS (Beyond the Scene) revisits John Milton’s Paradise Lost. BTS reinterprets Adam and Eve’s leaving of Eden as youths’ self-discovery process, overcoming a binary mindset. BTS emphasizes how experiences—trials, pains, and the struggle of youths to walk out of black-and-white perspectives—turn out to be “all so beautiful” as resources to grow. Wings demonstrates how the themes and elements in Paradise Lost can be used as a tool not only to explore Biblical concepts, but also to understand what pedagogical environments youths need to fully express themselves as writers. …

From “Total Destruction” To “Total Dictatorship”: The Influence Of Ernst Jünger’S Visionary Fascism, Nick Schiff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper seeks to answer one central question: How can the life and work of Ernst Jünger help illuminate the development of fascist ideas, culture, politics, and power across Europe from 1920-1945? The components of that question are: what were the core elements of Jünger’s aesthetics, morality, and politics? How did he synthesize these elements to create his influential vision of German fascism? What were Jünger’s interactions and exchanges with other European fascists, as well as influential Nazis including Carl Schmitt, Joseph Goebbels, and Adolph Hitler himself? How did Jünger’s new Fascist politics and aesthetics affect them? I argue that …

When Critics Are Artists: Ekphrasis In Erotic Art Criticism, Joanna A. Ligon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag argues for an erotics of art in art criticism in place of hermeneutics. In this thesis, I examine erotics of art, a focus on form and experiencing art instead of exclusively on content, in practice. Drawing on other essays by Sontag, specifically the essay “Godard” in comparison with the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s own filmic criticism in Breathless, criticism according to an erotics of art becomes a new artwork itself. Subsequently, I present a definition of erotic through Anne Carson and Roland Barthes and juxtapose the term with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The comparison ultimately undoes …

Wordflight, Joey Gonnella

Theses and Dissertations

Exploring subjects revolving around the nature of images, language and their subsequent disseminationn through time, this paper weaves together seemingly unrelated topics from the hot air balloons of the Franco-Prussian war to the envelope poems of Emily Dickinson.

Homemade Language, Conservative Fro-Yo, And Sci-Fi Sloths: How Speculative Migration Fiction Confronts The Ends Of Worlds By Challenging The Nation-State, Zoe R. Scheuerman

English Honors Projects

This English literature thesis project explores an emerging, genre-defying body of fiction which I call “speculative migration fiction.” Speculative migration fiction imagines how ongoing global developments like climate change, technological development, and war may shape future migrations. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s conception of national culture, Wendy Brown’s theory of the border, and Caroline Levine’s understanding of literary form, as well as close readings from Scattered All Over the Earth by Yōko Tawada, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, and 2 A.M. in Little America by Ken Kalfus, I argue that transnational migrations move toward becoming postnational migrations as migrants evade border …

The Sacred And The Supernatural: Christianity And Teutonic Folklore In The Grimms’ Briar Rose, Amelia Stefanescu

Honors Theses

During the nineteenth century, the Brothers Grimm undertook the task of preserving German folklore during a time of cultural upheaval and struggle for national identity. One such tale, Briar Rose, emerges as a site of ideological interplay between Christian themes and Teutonic traditions. By analyzing the Grimms’ 1812 (first) and 1857 (last) editions, this thesis investigates how the text reflects and synthesizes these distinct belief systems into a coherent narrative.

The research explores how Christian and pagan elements co-exist within Briar Rose and what these interactions reveal about the cultural and religious dynamics within the folktale. The study argues that …

Paul Celan And The Processes Of Survival In Post-Shoah Jewish Writing, Ari Savage

Theses

The following is a study of the poetry of Paul Celan as a representation of psychological and social processes present in the written works of Shoah survivors. It begins with an analysis of the place of writing in Jewish culture, then identifies three primary processes which operate in sequence: alienation, individuation, and integration. By examining Paul Celan’s highly personal and autobiographical texts in the context of his life experience as a Shoah survivor it is possible to discern the social and psychological forces at work which compel survivors to express their traumas in written form, and to gain a better …

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 …

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 …

Thirty-Sixth Annual Bibliography 2022 (Mike Lützeler Contemporary German Literature Collection), Walter Schlect, Kristian Svane

WashU Libraries Publications

The 36th bibliography of 850 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 …

Faithful Partner: The Role And Agency Of Pastors' Wives In The Protestant Reformation, Elizabeth M. Dubendorfer

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis explores the critical yet often overlooked roles of pastors' wives during the Protestant Reformation, focusing on three key figures: Katharina von Bora, Katharina Schütz Zell, and Elisabeth Cruciger. It examines how these women navigated the complexities of Reformation-era Germany, blending traditional gender roles with new practices that emerged from their unique positions as clerical spouses. By investigating their personal histories, theological contributions, and community engagements, the thesis demonstrates that these pioneering women established a distinct archetype for pastors' wives. This archetype was characterized by a profound commitment to faith, an expanded view of motherhood and wifely duties, and …

At Noon: (Post)Nihilistic Temporalities In The Age Of Machine-Learning Algorithms That Speak, Talha Issevenler

Publications and Research

This article recapitulates and develops the attempts in the Nietzschean traditions to address and overcome the proliferation of nihilism that Nietzsche predicted to unfold in the next 200 years (WP 2). Nietzsche approached nihilism not merely as a psychology but as a labyrinthic and pervasive historical process whereby the highest values of culture and founding assumptions of philosophical thought prevented the further flourishing of life. Therefore, he thought nihilism had to be encountered and experienced on many, often opposing, fronts to be fully consumed and left behind. Thus, just as Nietzsche captured the subtle reinventions of nihilism in new forms …

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