Research and Scholarship (Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures)
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Item Lang's Fury Continues to Resonate in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement(Odradek Edizioni, 2020) Porter, Cynthia D.America’s history is rife with racial tension. Continued discussions about rights, opportunities, and civil liberties across racial lines have been captured in cultural objects since imagery of slave ships, auctions, and plantation life were produced and circulated in the early-seventeenth century. In addition to drawings that were primarily used for newspaper advertisements and announcements, documentation of the earliest photographs of slaves, daguerreotypes from 1850, resurfaced in the attic of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology in 1976. Images like these contribute to the racial tapestry that has been woven over the course of generations. As visual mediums evolved, the cinema also captured representations of social struggle on the topic of race since the early-twentieth century. One such film was released in 1936 by a film director who had recently emigrated from Germany. That director was Fritz Lang and the film was titled Fury. In this article, I discuss the impact of framing shots and the editing of footage in the creation of a narrative by filmmakers, as we see in Fury, in addition to more contemporary concerns pertaining to the potential fabrication of footage through editing and modifying the content of filmed media. One of the many accomplishments of Fury is the way it frames the medium of the moving image as the closest we can get to reliably capturing events. This, however, comes with the caveat of the medium’s easy manipulability. Today, in the context of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement, we continue to see how filmic evidence is often received by their consumers with distrust.Item Narrative as Social Action: Making Rhetorical Narrative Theory Accountable to Context(Duke University Press, 2022-09) Byram, Katra A.The current reckoning with systemic bias and discrimination calls for centering historical and social context in narrative theory, as in other domains of academic and public life. This article undertakes that centering in rhetorical narrative theory. Informed by genre theory, it argues for theorizing narrative occasion by focusing on two dimensions: 1) the social positions it entails and 2) the conceptual frameworks it engages. Readings of two German-language texts, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774/1787) and Babak Ghassim and Usama Elyas’s “Behind Us, My Country” (2015), establish continua for mapping these social positions and conceptual frameworks and for evaluating their thematic salience in the narrative. Crucially, these methods are applied not only to text-internal figures like narrators and characters, but also to the real-world parties to narrative: authors and actual readers. In addition to providing a framework for describing narrative occasion, this socially attuned analysis highlights problems with rhetorical narrative theory’s treatment of audience, particularly its idealization of the authorial audience. The article thus points the way toward dismantling the universal thinking embedded in other narratological categories and suggests that rhetorical and cognitive narrative theories could be combined to understand how cognitive frameworks shape narrative occasion.Item Fairy Tales in the Modern(ist) World: Gerhart Hauptmann’s Bahnwärter Thiel and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Das Gemeindekind(American Association of Teachers of German, 2013) Byram, Katra A., 1975-Despite the dark impulses that drive many fairy tales, popular nineteenth-century collections were animated by modern optimism. This article contends that two 1887 novellas, Gerhart Hauptmann’s Bahnwärter Thiel and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Das Gemeindekind, demonstrate what happened to this optimism and the fairy tale that embodied it at the inception of twentieth-century modernity. It shows how they use fairy-tale frameworks to express a proto-Naturalist worldview and draws out the affinities that make this improbable combination fruitful: foremost, a common concern with poverty and its consequences. Both novellas reject the fairy tale’s miraculous resolution of these problems and, with it, the modern optimism it expresses. At the same time, each demonstrates the continuities underlying the shift to modernism. While Hauptmann’s story retains the fairy tale’s dream of domestic sanctuary and its belief in overwhelming supernatural powers, Ebner-Eschenbach’s preserves a remnant of humanist hope.Item The Challenge of Mütterliteratur: Gender, Generation, and the Genres of German Cultural Memory(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018-02) Byram, Katra A., 1975-Current models of German postwar memory culture often contrast an accusatory second-generation Väterliteratur with a more self-reflexive third-generation family writing. This article demonstrates that reading second-generation books about mothers in the context of historical cultural memory undermines this distinction. Ingeborg Drewitz’s Gestern war heute (1978), Barbara Bronnen’s Die Tochter (1982), and Helga Novak’s Die Eisheiligen (1979) share key features with the post-Wende “new family novel” typified in recent scholarship. These similarities suggest that changing enactments of gender and cultural memory have allowed previously feminized experiences and memory practices to evolve into the basis for a national memory culture.Item But We Are Living in a Material (and Virtual) World: How Tiny-House Blogs Are Transforming the Bildungsroman(Wayne State University Press, 2017) Byram, Katra A., 1975-