Faculty Research

The German department's faculty participates in comprehensive research into both German and their secondary fields of study.
Birgit Tautz

Birgit Tautz

Translating the World: Toward a New History of German Literature around 1800

In Translating the World, Birgit Tautz provides a new narrative of German literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Departing from dominant modes of thought regarding the nexus of literary and national imagination, she examines this intersection through the lens of Germany’s emerging global networks and how they were rendered in two very different German cities: Hamburg and Weimar.

Translating the World

About the Book

German literary history has tended to employ a conceptual framework that emphasizes the nation or idealized citizenry; yet the experiences of readers in eighteenth-century German cities existed within the context of their local environments, in which daily life occurred and writers such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe worked. Hamburg, a flourishing literary city in the late eighteenth century, was eventually relegated to the margins of German historiography, while Weimar, then a small town with an insular worldview, would become mythologized for not only its literary history but its centrality in national German culture. By interrogating the histories of and texts associated with these cities, Tautz shows how literary styles and genres are born of local, rather than national, interaction with the world. Her examination of how texts intersect and interact reveals how they shape and transform the urban cultural landscape as they are translated and move throughout the world.

A fresh, elegant exploration of literary translation, discursive shifts, and global cultural changes, Translating the World is an exciting new story of eighteenth-century German culture and its relationship to expanding global networks that will especially interest scholars of comparative literature, German studies, and literary history.

 Jill Suzanne Smith

Jill Suzanne Smith

Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890-1933

During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution.

About the Book

In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the “New Morality” articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the “New Woman.”

Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women's financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith’s work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.

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Jens Elias Klenner

Jens Elias Klenner

Writing the Mountains: The Alpine Form in German Fiction

In Writing the Mountains, Jens Klenner reconsiders the role of mountains in German-language fiction from 1800 to the present and argues that in a range of texts, from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” (1819) to Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten (1995) and beyond, the mountains serve as dynamic spaces of material change that generate aesthetic and narrative innovation.

Writing the Mountains book cover

About the Book

In contrast to dominant critical approaches to the Alpine landscape in literature, in which mountain ranges often features as passive settings, or which traces the influence of geographical and geological sciences in literary productions, Writing the Mountains argues for the dynamic role in literature of presumably rigid mineral structures.

In German-language fiction after 1800, the counter-intuitive topology of rocky mountain ranges and unfathomable subterranean depths of the Alpine imaginary functions as a space of exception which appears to reconfirm and radically challenge the foundations of Enlightenment thought. Writing the Mountains reads the mountain range as a rigid yet permeable liminal space. Within this zone, semiotic orders are unsettled, as is the division between organic and inorganic, between the human and its other. The mountainous environment resists representation and fits neither into ideas of description, narration, and composition, nor into those of scale, space, and selfhood. With this, Writing the Mountains contends that mountains as imposing, obdurate masses powerfully challenge older understandings of narration, description, and representation and force writers to grapple with how to write the mountains anew.