European Cultures and Languages
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On Just the Other Side of Intimacy: Pierre Alferi’s La Protection Des Animaux
Nottingham French Studies, 2011, 50:3, 128-138.
London can take it: remembering the air war. Reliving the Bliz. Iconic Images of the bombed cities during WWII and their instrumentalization for current conflicts in Britain and Germany, Paper presented at Constructions of Conflict: Transmitting Memories and the Past in European Historiography, Literature and Media, MEICAM, University of Swansea, 10-12 September (2007).
Remembrance of the bombings of European cities in WW II is often evoked through iconic images, be it Picasso’s famous... more
Remembrance of the bombings of European cities in WW II is often evoked through iconic images, be it Picasso’s famous painting Guernica (1937) or photographs such as St Paul’s Cathedral surrounded by flames and the view from the Dresdner town-hall over the ruins of the destroyed city. These images have proved influential in providing powerful and accessible interpretations of the events they came to depict as pars pro toto. Memorial culture’s current emphasize on visualization means that the public will regularly encounter these photographs not only in photo books, but also in exhibitions and museums, films and documentaries.
This talk does not only ask how these iconic images interpret the aerial warfare and invite people to remember it, comparing the British long standing myth which surrounds the Blitz with the recent German memory boom regarding the allied bombings of German cities. The second half of the talk will focus on the fact that the various perceptions of the events, which have entered the realm of cultural memory, act as a recallable foil for responses to current threats such as the London terrorist bombings in 7/7 2005. The ‘Blitz spirit’, which was evoked soon after the attacks, resulted in a very different attitude compared to the reactions to 9/11.
In Germany a very different conflict is addressed through the remembrance of the allied war bombings. By establishing the experience of the destroyed cities in public discourse a reunified Germany was able to integrate an important part of East German memorial culture. After the war West Germany had taken on the responsibility for the Nazi State by proclaiming to be its legal successor whereas East Germany had based its collective identity on anti-fascist victimhood. A reunified collective identity could rather be fashioned on the inclusive and engaging notion of victimhood than on the perpetrator model.
Download (.doc) Moja sestra: Marie NDiaye and the Transmission of Horrific Kinship
Published in Transmissions: Essays in French Thought, Literature and Cinema, edited by Isabelle McNeill and Bradley Stephens (Oxford/Bern: Peter Lang, 2006)
Radically Fantastical: The Politics of the Truth-Event in the 'Metic' Novels of Mohammed Dib and Marie NDiaye
Published in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, September 2010, 14:4
Critique de la Subjectivité dans la Poésie d’Anne-James Chaton
Colloque International sur la Poésie de la France et du Monde Francophone depuis 1980, 4-6 Septembre 2003, University College, Dublin. Publié par Anne-James Chaton sur son site.
Claire Denis's Flickering Spaces of Hospitality
Published in Watch this Space: Space and Contemporary Women, Film and Visual Arts, special issue of L'Esprit Créateur (51:1), edited by M-C Barnet and S. Jordan, 2011
Spectres of Substance: François Ozon and the Aesthetics of Embodied Haunting
Published in Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Literature, Theory, Film and Photography (eds. K. Griffiths and D. Evans, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009)
Haitian Bride of Frankenstein: Disintegrating Beauty, Monstrousness and "Race" in Jacques Stephen Alexis's "Chronique d'un Faux-Amour"
Published in The Beautiful and the Monstrous (eds. A. Damlé and A. L'Hostis, Bern: Peter Lang, forthcoming 2010)
Das Museum als Vermittlungsinstanz von Migrationserfahrungen. In: German as a Foreign Language 3 (2008), pp. 43-58.
Migranten sind Menschen, die über die Grenze kommen oder gehen. Migration bedeutet sowohl Aus- als auch Zuwanderung,... more
Migranten sind Menschen, die über die Grenze kommen oder gehen. Migration bedeutet sowohl Aus- als auch Zuwanderung, Zwang und Not auf der einen, Chance und
Abenteuerlust auf der anderen Seite. Dementsprechend kann sich ein Migrationsmuseum auf die Geschichte der Zuwanderung oder der Auswanderung konzentrieren, es kann aber auch verschiedene Migrationsbewegungen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart unter einem Dach vereinen und dabei Parallelen oder Unterschiede hervorheben. Die Frage, der in diesem Beitrag nachgegangen wird, ist, welche Migrationsbewegungen in Deutschland in den letzten Jahren vor allem erinnert wurden und in welcher Form sie in verschiedenen Ausstellungs- und Museumsprojekten inszeniert wurden.
Die Novelle als literarisches Kuriositätenkabinett: Gottfried Kellers ‘Die drei gerechten Kammacher’. In: Oxford German Studies 38/2 (2009), pp.159-174.
Das Attribut 'kurios' bezeichnete ursprünglich eine wissbegierige Geisteshaltung, bevor es auf den Gegenstand selbst... more Das Attribut 'kurios' bezeichnete ursprünglich eine wissbegierige Geisteshaltung, bevor es auf den Gegenstand selbst übertragen wurde, auf den sich die Neugier richtete. Leicht wird vergessen, dass ein Gegenstand erst durch die Perspektive des Betrachters zur Kuriosität wird, ebenso wie durch den Kontext, in den er gestellt wird. Ein solcher Kontext ist die Sammlung oder das Kabinett, aber auch, nachdem die Kuriositäten im Laufe des achtzehnten und neunzehnten Jahrhunderts zunehmend marginalisiert wurden und man das Interesse daran als dilettantisch oder kindlich-naiv abgetan hat, die Literatur und besonders die Novelle. Vorangetrieben durch die Dissoziation von Kuriosität und Einbildungskraft und durch die Vorstellung, dass einzig eine gelehrte und methodische Form der Neugier den wissenschaftlichen Fortschritt voranbringt, finden die Kuriositäten 'Zuflucht' in der Poesie. Sie überleben in den Texten von E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jean Paul, Clemens Brentano, Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe, Adalbert Stifter, aber auch Walter Benjamin oder W. G. Sebald. Das Fortleben der Kuriositäten in Gottfried Kellers Die drei gerechten Kammacher (1854) und dessen Signifikanz stehen im Mittelpunkt der nachfolgenden Überlegungen.
(Editor and introduction): Memory Traces: 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity. Oxford: Peter Lang 2005. Published in the series of the research group Cultural History and Literary Imaginaton (University of Cambridge).
This essay collection examines the dynamics of memory organization and the way it varies among different media and... more
This essay collection examines the dynamics of memory organization and the way it varies among different media and modes of discourse in post-unification Germany. German unification has put the post-war period into a historical perspective. Such a rupture raises questions concerning the appropriate commemoration, preservation and reinterpretation of the past. The processes of reorientation after unification influenced the self-perception of literary authors as well as the social role, position and status of German literature. They also affected the way writers viewed the competition in which they found themselves pitted against visual and electronic media as rival windows on the past. In the context of several debates on German literature during the 1990s the discussion revolved not only around the adequate aesthetic representation of the historical and cultural heritage but even more so around the role of literature itself in that process.
The contributions look at different discourses that were and still are concerned with reinterpreting and creating new collective symbols and narrative patterns in relation to Germany's past. The volume focuses on the effects of the characteristic discourses of the press, literature and its different genres, film, the internet and memorials on the depiction and performance of memories.
Leichen im Keller. Zu Fragen des Gender in Angstinszenierungen der Schauer- und Kriminalliteratur, 1790–1830. St. Ingbert: Röhrig 2000 (Mannheimer Studien zur Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft. Ed. by Jochen Hörisch and Reiner Wild, vol. 22).
In this project I adopted an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach for the analysis of literature of the late... more
In this project I adopted an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach for the analysis of literature of the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, posing questions from a socio- and psychohistorical perspective with a particular emphasis on gender studies.
My PhD research was motivated by the observation that women authored the majority of the gothic novels written in England during that period, and formed the main audience for these novels. This prompted a search for the lost history of the German Schauerroman, with a focus on those that were written by women. Most of the texts that I discovered and analysed were previously unknown. I showed that the Schauerroman written by female authors functions both as a parallel, and a counter discourse to the sentimental family novel: The Schauerroman’s literary staging of fear paints the family as the place of danger and horror, with the mother-daughter-relationship (as opposed to the father-son-relationship in the drama of Sturm and Drang) at the heart of it. Therefore these novels document an experience of difference which subverts the contemporary familial ideology. The conflict between ‘revealing’ and ‘covering’ fosters a narrative strategy which is compared to techniques used by male authors writing about the uncanny. Whereas the contemporary ideal of womanhood shows a picture of the harmonic, whole and pure ‘schöne Seele’ (beautiful soul), female authors in their texts draw the timorous and also the ‘terrifying woman’, without being able to separate them clearly and project them as ‘the Other’. Neither the eighteenth century treatises on the sublime, nor Freud’s influential theories about fear and anxiety address ‘the woman’ as a topic. In Freud’s case this is particularly poignant since he sees socialisation in the family as a major source of neurotic fear. His focus on the father-son-relationship and his exclusion of the female that points to the ‘woman as a riddle’ (Freud), both suggest that he is subject to his own theories of repression expounded in his essay about The Uncanny (1919).
It is not only ‘the woman’, however, who plays the role of ‘the Other’ in the world of the male, bourgeois subject. Studying the literary history of Germany and England makes it obvious that each culture identifies the uncanny, which is pushed to the margin of the respective culture, as pertaining to the other nation. Whereas England sees German literature as the initial and formative influence on the development of the Gothic Novel from Ann Radcliffe’s terror to M.G. Lewis’ horror, Germany considers the Schauerroman to be genuinely English. The result is that this highly influential genre, which had its impact on German authors including Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, Ludwig Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Droste-Hülshoff and many others, has been excluded from German literary history. It was one aim of this study to regain these texts for the collective memory and for research in German literature.
'L'Acquisition de la Compétence Socio-Pragmatique en Langue Étrangère'
'L'Acquisition de la Compétence Socio-Pragmatique en Langue Étrangère', Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée, 2002, VII-2, 129-143 (co-authored with Jean-Marc Dewaele).