German and Scandinavian Theses and Dissertations

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Abjektion und Metamorphose - Metamorphose und Abjektion: Verekelungbilder des Weiblichen in zeitgenössicher österreichischer Literatur
(University of Oregon, 2012) Baumeister, Anna-Lisa; Baumeister, Anna-Lisa; Ostmeier, Dorothee
In this thesis, I examine the figure of the “disgusting woman” in contemporary Austrian literature. I begin by developing a theoretical orientation to disgust and the disgusting woman, drawing from works by Winfried Menninghaus, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and Theodor Adorno. Next, I use this theoretical framework to interpret three prominent texts of contemporary Austrian literature: Barbara Frischmuth’s “Otter,” Christoph Ransmayr’s Die letzte Welt, and Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin. Ultimately, my analysis yields three compelling insights. First, through literary interpretation, disgust can be shown to operate at a cultural level to exclude and oppress women. Second, literary texts can describe and reveal, in a way purely theoretical works cannot, the visceral, embodied effects of disgust on human subjects—and on women in particular. Finally, and more optimistically, many of those cultural practices which exclude and oppress women might be transformed through critical engagement with the phenomenon of disgust.
Open Access
Brechts Kritik des Faschismus als Religiöser Institution Die Parodie der Kontrafaktur
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18) Kilian, Anika; Ostmeier, Dorothee
This thesis examines selected poems from the German author Bertolt Brecht. It critically investigates the claim that expressionist art can be held responsible for opening the door to fascism in Germany. It will place Brecht’s own expressionistic works and his counterfactual approach to traditional church hymns in the context of the Expressionism debate. In 1933 Brecht wrote a collection of songs and poems entitled “Lieder, Gedichte, Choere” during his exile in Paris. Brecht realized early on that with Hitler’s rise, society as he knew it was coming to an end. Because of his sharp and satirical anti-war poetry after WWI, his name was prominent on the black list of the Fascists, and in order to escape prosecution he had to leave Germany in 1933. However, he did not stop criticizing Fascist ideology and especially its re-appropriation of Christian rhetoric.
Open Access
A Derridean-Kierkgegaardian Interpretation of Writing: Imprisonment and Freedom
(University of Oregon, 2013-10-03) Mahan, William; Stern, Michael
My thesis is an argument that writing is a struggle of imprisonment and freedom. I argue that a text gains a certain level of power, such that it controls the writer, reader, and critic alike. Yet at the same time, the work presents all of these people with a possibility of freedom, seducing them in with the task of sharing the text's `secret' or deeper meaning via indirect communication. This `imprisonment' is voluntary if the reader wishes to engage with the text in a way that opens the text for a revelation of a deeper meaning, unique to each reader. The writer offers his text as a `gift', an idea heavily influenced by Jacques Derrida's writings in The Gift of Death. I argue that that the presence and absence of the secret is one element of the author's work, which creates the relationship of confinement and freedom identified with writing.
Open Access
Disability as Epistemic Experience: Autofictional Representations of Disability in German and American Literature
(University of Oregon, 2021-04-27) Yeomans, Kaitlin; Stern, Michael
This thesis seeks to explore how authors with disability create knowledge about the experience of disability that differs from cultural perceptions of disability. This thesis also utilizes autofictional narratives as a distinct phenomenon of disability that straddles the divide between fiction and autobiography. Utilizing critical disability studies as well as traditional literary studies as frameworks, I analyze how the author and the figure in autofiction create a literary identity that resonates back to the experience of the author with emphasis on disability. I examine the German narrative Psychocalypse oder das Warten auf Fu and the American narrative Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System. Often metaphorized in fiction, disability becomes a source of epistemology in autofiction as the authors represent themselves rather than being represented by others and as others.
Open Access
Franz Rosenzweig's Hegel and the State: Biography, History and Tragedy
(University of Oregon, 2014-09-29) Simon, Josiah; Librett, Jeffrey S.
Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) is known today as one of the most influential German Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century. His most celebrated work, The Star of Redemption, has earned him a reputation as a challenging religious thinker with increasing relevance for contemporary religious, philosophical and historical debates. However, this legacy has largely ignored his first published book, Hegel and the State (1920). My dissertation is the first English-language monograph to fully explore Rosenzweig's intellectual biography of Hegel, making a contribution to contemporary Hegel and Rosenzweig scholarship alike. I offer an analysis that draws on the formal characteristics of the work--such as the epigraph, the narrative and biographical structure, as well as the historical presuppositions of the foreword and the conclusion--to show how Rosenzweig's interpretation of Hegel's key texts, culminating in the Philosophy of Right, is informed by his own biographical development and the influence of thinkers such as Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Meinecke. By recasting his critique of Hegel's political thinking into biographical and historical terms, I ultimately argue that Rosenzweig's narrative in Hegel and the State is a tragic foil for his own development as a German historian. In Rosenzweig's interpretation, the relationship between the individual and the state championed by Hegel ends in the tragic separation of the individual from the reconciliatory promise of Idealist thought. By unearthing Rosenzweig's latent theory of tragedy in Hegel and the State--evidenced most clearly in how he situates the figures of Friedrich Hölderlin and Napoleon--I argue that the historical and philosophical crisis that marked the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly Rosenzweig's own biographical crisis, shapes his work as the author of Hegel and the State. In addition to providing a critical commentary on the cultural, philosophical and literary history of the German nation, as well as providing the first English translation of many passages from Hegel and the State, my dissertation lays the necessary groundwork for a reinterpretation of Rosenzweig's critique of German Idealism in The Star of Redemption.
Open Access
Grillparzer, The Enlightener: Displaced Paternity in GrillParzer's Works
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Chapman, Stephanie; Librett, Jeffrey S.
DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Stephanie Fritsch Chapman Doctor of Philosophy German and Scandinavian June 2017 Title: Grillparzer, the Enlightener: Displaced Paternity in Grillparzer’s Works It is my intention to bring to light nuances of Grillparzer’s work that reflect the ambivalent conflation of formal and stylistic elements of the Enlightenment and the Baroque, which, in turn, foreshadow the continual displacement of both paternity and the patriarchy in the decades following the French Revolution. I define “ambivalent conflation” as follows: a fluctuating, sometimes contradictory approach toward a set of concepts that are brought, simultaneously, into unity and opposition with one another. This is symptomatic—at least in part—of Grillparzer's attempts to reconcile elements of the Baroque dramas after which he fashioned much of his work with his own idealism of Enlightenment ideologies, and, particularly, with Lessing's humanism and his position regarding religious tolerance. The subtle variations on the theme of paternal displacement manifest themselves in the following ways: 1) fathers who serve as such either through namesake, mentorship, or ideological and intellectual inspiration; 2) father figures who exist as such through extended family relationships, such as the figure of the father-in-law; and 3) father figure representations that exist in dream symbolism. In many of Grillparzer’s lyrical works as well as in his novellas and dramas, these forms of paternal displacement mirror conflicts and issues in Grillparzer’s own life, including his emotionally symbiotic relationship with his mother, his obsessional personality traits, and his prescient reflections on topics that would become central to modern psychoanalysis.
Open Access
Hearing with the Body: Poetics of Musical Meaning in Novalis, Ritter, Hoffmann and Schumann
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Smith, Alexis; Librett, Jeffrey S.
The question of whether or not music can be considered a universal language, or even a language at all, has been asked for centuries—and indeed, it is still being addressed in the 21st century. I return to this question because of the way the German Romantics answered it. Music becomes embodied in not only human language in Novalis’ concept of Poesie in “Die Lehrlinge zu Sais” (1802), but also nature and the human body in Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s scientific speculations in Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers (1810). Seen as the manifestation of the world soul, this embodiment was an attempt to come closer to naming the unnamable, and, I argue, became the perfect platform for E.T.A. Hoffmann to develop his pseudonym and literary character Johannes Kreisler and the mysterious power of music he experiences in the collection of musical critiques and essays, Kreisleriana (1810-1814), and the novel, Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr (1819/1821). Finally, I argue that Hoffmann’s musical literary style can be heard and ‘felt’ in Robert Schumann’s piano cycle, Kreisleriana, Op. 16 (1838), as other scholars have also analyzed, but that there is also a ‘mixing of discourses’ involved, including Schumann’s own words about the suite. Music is not a universal language—at least, not as understood by the mind and described through words. These writers and composer grapple with the observation that music has a powerful influence over the body—can music then be seen as a ‘language’ received and understood by the body? If so, can an interdisciplinary approach to music and language through science lead to better understanding, as was already exemplified by the collaboration among the German Romantics? This dissertation includes previously published material, which has been substantially revised and updated.
Open Access
Herr Mikrokosmus: Faust as Astrologer
(University of Oregon, 2010-06) Liggett, Catherine, 1984-
Although the earliest depictions of Faustus portray him as an astrologer, very few publications to date have touched on the role of astrology in the life of this infamous character. Parallel to the decline in astrological sciences beginning in the seventeenth century, post-Scientific Revolution depictions of Faust have deemphasized astrology as a primary pursuit of the figure. I examine the status of astrology in four versions of the Faust(us) myth: The anonymous Historia von D. Johann Fausten and its English translation/adaptation as The English Faust Book, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, and Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus. I argue that the decline in the status of astrology corresponds to historically weakening belief in the analogy of microcosm and macrocosm as epistemologically relevant and analyze the implication of the Faust figure in genuinely modem quandaries of skepticism and aesthetic representation.
Open Access
Intertextualiat als kulturelles Gedachtnis - Exemplifiziert anhand ausgewahlter Stellen der Kapitel "Zerfall der Werte" aus Hermann Brochs "Die Schlafwandler"
(University of Oregon, 2011-06) Ackermann, Clemens, 1985-
My thesis focuses on the question of how intertextuality can operate as a form of cultural memory. Drawing on the cultural-semiological model of intertextuality developed by Renate Lachmann, my analysis of Hermann Broch's novel Die Schlafwandler examines how the incorporation of intertexts enriches and changes the interpretation of a manifest text. I am focusing in particular on Broch's references to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Immanuel Kant in the chapters "Zerfall der Werte" to exemplify how intertextuality operates in this novel. The focus on two specific sources of intertextual references allows me a thorough analysis of the new interpretive dimensions that are created through intertextuality and at the same time the delineation of new perspectives for the further study of intertextuality in relation to Broch's work.
Open Access
The Laws of Terrorism: Representations of Terrorism in German Literature and Film
(University of Oregon, 2013-10-03) Chen, Yannleon; Anderson, Susan
Representations of the reasons and actions of terrorists have appeared in German literature tracing back to the age of Sturm und Drang of the 18th century, most notably in Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas and Friedrich Schiller's Die Räuber, and more recently since the radical actions of the Red Army Faction during the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as in Uli Edel's film, The Baader Meinhof Complex. By referring to Walter Benjamin's system of natural law and positive law, which provides definitions of differing codes of ethics with relation to state laws and personal ethics, one should be able to understand that Michael Kohlhaas, Karl Moor, and the members of the RAF are indeed represented as terrorists. However, their actions and motives are not without an internal ethics, which conflicts with that of their respective state-sanctioned authorities. This thesis reveals the similarities and differences in motives, methods, and use of violence in Schiller, Kleist, and representations of the RAF and explores how the turn to terrorism can arise from a logical realization that ideologies of state law do not align with the personal sense of justice and law of the individual.
Open Access
Matters of Recognition in Contemporary German Literature
(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23) Lechner, Judith; Anderson, Susan
This dissertation deals with current political immigration debates, the conversations about the philosophical concept of recognition, and intercultural encounters in contemporary German literature. By reading contemporary literature in connection with philosophical, psychological, and theoretical works, new problem areas of the liberal promise of recognition become visible. Tied to assumptions of cultural essentialism, language use, and prejudice, one of the main findings of this work is how the recognition process is closely tied to narrative. Particularly within developmental psychology it is often argued that we learn and come to terms with ourselves through narrative. The chosen literary encounters written by Alev Tekinay, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Maxim Biller, Rafael Seligmann, and Finn-Ole Heinrich magnify this particular human experience on an aesthetic level and dismantle “mechanisms of recognition,” particularly three aspects illustrating the recognition process: the role of the narrator and his or her description of the characters, the construction of family bonds within the texts, and the linguistic and cultural practice of naming with all of its connotations. Within the chosen texts there is no unified depiction of the recognition process, but rather the texts elucidate a multidimensionality of this concept, tying it closely to the political, social, and aesthetic sphere. In this context the analysis brings to light that the notion of “authenticity” crucially informs recognition as well as the circumstances of a power imbalance that dominates the process. My analysis shows that contrary to popular assumptions in philosophical and political debates, the concept of recognition turns out to be rather limiting instead of liberating.
Open Access
Mediations from Under the Cloak: Christianity, Trauma, and Reconciliation in Brennu-Njáls Saga
(University of Oregon, 2020-12-08) Young, Jeremiah; Gurley, Gantt
This thesis explores the representation and testimony of trauma in the medieval Brennu-Njáls saga. Beginning with an outline of contemporary trauma studies, this thesis examines the repercussions narratives of social trauma. The chapters 100-105, the burning of Njal and Flosi’s dream show the repercussions of the conversion as affecting not only the characters in the saga, but also landscapes, supernatural events and even the text itself. Njál’s saga proves to be a exemplar of medieval trauma narrative as it displays the trauma of the characters in the tenth century, and provides a metatextual testimony of saga compiler’s own trauma stemming from the loss of the Icelandic common wealth in the thirteenth century. Njál’s saga exposes the violence of the tenth century and shows that even in the twenty-first century the reader must deal with the traumas long past.
Open Access
Michael Kohlhaas and the Limits of Kantian Reason, Morality, and Law
(University of Oregon, 2014-09-29) Mitzen, Lindsey; Klebes, Martin
Kleist's work is often read within the context of his Kant Crisis. My thesis will follow in that tradition and give a close reading of Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas within the context of Kantian morality in Kritik der praktischen Vernunft and Kantian legal theory in Metaphysik der Sitten. Kleist doubted that humans could really understand the world and use reason to find truth, as he indicated in one of his letters that he gave up on finding a "Schatz der Wahrheiten" or an ability to find truth in the world. Michael Kohlhaas is a novella by Kleist that deals with the question of justice in the positive law and forming moral decisions. Since Kant addressed morality within the context of Kantian practical principles or maxims in his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft and his philosophy of law inMetaphysik der Sitten, these two texts are particularly helpful in gaining further insight into Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas.
Open Access
Mythos als Zivilisationskritik: Die Pragmatisierung einer erweiterten negativen Dialektik in Werken Heiner Müllers
(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Zimmermann, Nora; Boos, Sonja
This thesis analyzes three works of the GDR dramatist Heiner Müller: his early prose poem Orpheus gepflügt, his learning play Mauser, and his late piece Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten. It demonstrates how Müller, throughout different career stages, pragmatizes myth to further critical thinking. Ancient Greek myths and Christian symbolism play a crucial role in Müller’s strategy of calling into question the very systems that lay claim to an absolute truth. Müller both alludes to and openly employs myths to identify their inherent dialectical tension operative in everyday life as well as in secular explanatory models used to legitimize political agendas. He expands Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics through an emphasis on the mythical pole of the dialectical dyad “myth and enlightenment.” By drawing attention to myths inherent in civilization, Müller opens up space for the imagination and the potential of the irrational to initiate change.
Open Access
Novalis, Nietzsche, and the Rhetoric of Enchantment
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18) Mottram, Robert; Calhoon, Kenneth S.
This work reopens the question of Nietzsche’s relationship to Early German Romanticism through critical readings of moments of enchantment in the writings of Novalis. It unveils the seemingly conciliatory gestures of enchantment as moments of discord between subject and figure, self and world. These readings attend to the tropes, ironic registers, and performative dimensions of texts that occlude rather than facilitate a strict demarcation between Novalis and Nietzsche. That the thinkers in question are shown to anticipate their critical reception is consonant with the present work, which, in foregrounding both the entanglement between self and language and the materiality of reading, attunes itself to enchantment as the manifestation of compulsion, imposition, and ecstasy. The principle of continuity that allows Nietzsche and Novalis to be read and to read each other is asceticism. Its secret ally, following Nietzsche, is the absolute will to truth. In its function of assigning an aim to the aimless, asceticism provides for both truth and its incessant undermining, for form as well as flight. It engenders a mode of expression that is only as true as it is provisional. Through a reading of Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian as the collision of epistemological anxiety and its anthropological stopgap, this work advocates an operation of double-reading that views the conceptual sphere itself as palliative and the nonconceptual as the possibility of an ascetic flight from ossification. In setting such double-reading into motion, this work traces the subterranean relations between Novalis and Nietzsche that allow the proto-Modernism of the former to interrogate the residual Romanticism of the latter. An erudite study that combines problems of representation with discussions of the theater, painting, and music, this dissertation seeks to reenchant questions of interpretation and reading that constantly threaten to petrify into all-too-self-evident truths.
Open Access
Once Upon an Ecocritical Analysis: The Nature-Culture of German Fairy Tales and Its Implications
(University of Oregon, 2014-09-29) Adler, Katherine; Ostmeier, Dorothee
This thesis analyzes the relationship between German fairy tales and Ecocriticism by examining the similarities and differences in depictions of nature in the tales published by the Brothers Grimm in 1857 and tales written by political activists during Germany's Weimar Republic. "Frau Holle" and "Die drei Schlangenblätter" by the Brothers Grimm present nature as a means to support their bourgeois utopian ideals. On the other hand, the Weimar writers Carl Ewald and Edwin Hörnle's tales "Ein Märchen von Gott und den Königen" and "Der kleine König und die Sonne" (respectively) employ the traditional form of the fairy tale to espouse free-thinking and criticize the weaknesses of the Grimms' utopian ideal. My ecocritical analysis is based on a synthesis of environmental sciences and sociocultural influences.
Open Access
Queer Kinships and Curious Creatures: Animal Poetics in Literary Modernism
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Hoffmann, Eva; Klebes, Martin
My dissertation brings together prose texts and poetry by four writers and poets, who published in German language at the beginning of the twentieth century: Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), Franz Kafka (1883-1924), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), and Georg Trakl (1887-1914). All four of these writers are concerned with the inadequacy of language and cognition, the so called Sprachkrise at the turn-of-the-century. In their texts, they challenge the ability of language to function as a means of communication, and as a way to express emotions or relate more deeply to the world. While it is widely recognized that this “crisis of identity” in modernist literature has been a crisis of language all along, I argue in my dissertation that the question of language is ultimately also a question of “the animal.” Other scholars have argued for animals’ poetic agency (e.g. Aaron M. Moe; Susan McHugh), or for the conceptual link between the “crisis of language” and the threat to human exceptionalism in the intellectual milieu of the early twentieth century (Kári Driscoll). My dissertation is the first study that explores the interconnection between Sprachkrise, animality, and the phenomenological philosophy of embodiment. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of phenomenology, I illustrate how Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Rilke and Trakl invoke the body as intertwined with animals in complex ways, and employ these animal figures to reconceptualize notions of language and specifically the metaphor. The authors, I argue, engage in a zoopoetic writing, as other forms of life participate as both symbolic and material bodies in the signifying processes. Moreover, I illustrate how their zoopoetic approach involve forms of intimacy and envision figures that fall outside heteronormative sexualities and ontologies, making the case for a queer zoopoetics in Modernist German literature.
Open Access
The Representation of Terrorism as Defective Communication in Volker Schlöndorff’s Die Stille nach dem Schuss, Gregor Schnitzler’s Was tun wenn’s brennt, Leander Scholz’s Rosenfest and Ulrike Edschmid’s Frau mit Waffe: Zwei Geschichten aus terroristischen Zeiten
(University of Oregon, 2011-12) Dillon, Sandra I.
The attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, prompted scholars in a variety of fields, such as history, philosophy and literature, to re-examine the topic of terrorism, including the emergence of terrorism in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. The challenges that arise when dealing with the topic of terrorism derive in part from a lack of consensus on a definition for terrorists and terrorist attacks. One element that I found in my research is that there is a connection between terrorism and communication. This dissertation examines that connection in Volker Schlöndorff's filmDie Stille nach dem Schuss Gregor Schnitzler's film Was tun wenn's brennt Leander Scholz's novel Rosenfestand Ulrike Edschmid's biographical narrativesFrau mit Waffe: Zwei Geschichten aus terroristischen Zeitenin the context of Speech Act Theory. The films and texts show how West German terrorism is represented as a form of communication, through which fictional terrorists are trying to accomplish the impossible statement "I hereby persuade you." The act of persuasion has an element of freedom, because one can either be persuaded or not. However, the terrorists represented in the works mentioned above want to eliminate the element of choice and force the interlocutor to be persuaded. In order to achieve this they introduce violence, which in turn causes them to be labeled as terrorists. The more they try to use violence to achieve their goals, the more they cement their condemnation as terrorists. This dissertation frames its investigation within ideas about performative speech acts, concepts of power, violence, identity and discussions about "terrorist" narratives in German literature and film.
Open Access
Self-Discovery, Divisions and Boundaries in Uwe Timm's Heißer Sommer
(University of Oregon, 2010-06) Jorgenson, Amanda Mary, 1984-
Set in the turbulence of 1968, Uwe Timm's novel, Heißer Sommer, focuses on two themes: self-discovery and the exploration of boundaries. The protagonist in Timm's novel is Ullrich, a university student who embodies the unrest of his time. Timm intertwines Ullrich's inner private sphere with the outer political sphere, which allows him to understand himself through the frame of his political activism. Moreover, Ullrich is used as an instrument by Timm to critique and shed an ironical light on the glamorization of the West German student movement. Timm illuminates several political (as well as personal) contradictions and criticisms through his protagonist's exposure to the revolutionary movement.
Open Access
Sense and Creative Labor in Rainer Maria Rilke's Prose Works
(University of Oregon, 2014-09-29) Reynolds, Nicholas; Librett, Jeffrey S.
Although Rainer Maria Rilke is one of the most widely-read poets in the world and there are mountains of secondary literature on his poetry, his prose works are not given nearly so much attention. The present study is a reading of several of those works, with particular attention given to the role that the senses and creative labor play there. I begin with his "Ur-geräusch" essay (1919), in which Rilke reveals a fascination with the phonograph and a certain jealousy of its abilities. The phonograph provides a model for creative labor, as well as clues about Rilke's thinking on the relationship between this process of creation and the senses. There is an original synesthetic moment when, as a child in his science classroom, Rilke sees the phonograph translating the vibrations received by the horn and carving them into the wax and in turn hears his and the voices of his classmates played back through that horn. This moment in which the senses are blurred together perplexes him and he is left to make sense of this experience for years afterward. With the Geschichten vom lieben Gott (1900), the question turns to the relationship between creative labor and creation as such. The primordiality that was revealed in the sound produced by the phonograph is the subconscious for Rilke, which is our connection to the divine. Although we have been severed from that divine source, we are able to produce it through certain circumstances, viz. through our intersubjective interactions, especially storytelling. We also cultivate it through labor, if we are able to do it: we are stuck in the "Seventh Day," unable to work for the most part, which is the particular plight of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). He undergoes the necessary transformation to do labor, a certain deconstruction of the self, but is unable to complete the circuit by expressing this change through his works. Auguste Rodin (1903), Rilke's monograph on the sculptor, shows us the ideal artist: able to dig up the tremendous energies of the subconscious and to channel them into great works.