Description
- Abstract:
- Inspired by a desire to foreground under-researched women Romantics of the German tradition, I perform careful close readings of a constellation of authors (Bettine von Arnim, Karoline von Günderrode, J. W. von Goethe, and Friedrich Hölderlin), with an eye to moments in which genre and the constructions of subjecthood and difference intertwine. I argue that a re-conceptualization of genre theory from the critical time period of the nineteenth century would resonate across contemporary aesthetics. Bodily lived experience, when acknowledged as critically determining the relationship between aesthetic subject and recipient that genre itself fosters, could inspire a transnational, feminist ethics of representation and aesthetic criticism. German genre theory of the nineteenth century largely constructed a symmetric relationship between author and audience that resounds in contemporary Western aesthetics. Neglected in this perceived symmetry are the lived experiences of bodies marked as different, whether they are the writing subject or those rendered the object of representation. This neglect has two profound consequences: one, German authors of the time assessed literatures newly circulated through colonialism and imperialism based upon their ability to affect a German readership taken to be universal. Secondly, this assumption of a symmetric relationship between writing subject and audience, reinforced by genres and the associations they carry, also perpetuated German authors’ assumption of the ability to represent the differentiated other. This dynamic, I conclude, renders genres racializing and gendering. My analysis builds a critical conversation among feminist theorists from various humanities and social sciences disciplines (Toni Morrison, Luce Irigaray, Saba Mahmood, and Lata Mani). Contemporary poets such as Danez Smith, whose work directly involves the racialized body in its negotiations of genre for self-expression, are also central to my conceptual formulations. In assembling such a theoretical canon, I am able to disrupt normative constructions of gender, race, nationalism, self-expression, and agency. I demonstrate, ultimately, that feminist German Studies scholarship is not only capacious enough for, but requires the integration of interdisciplinary, intersectional perspectives.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2018
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Citation
Galasso, Stephanie,
"Genre and National Identity in German Romanticism"
(2018).
German Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/ebvb-g549
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German Studies Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the German Studies department....