This dissertation explores critiques of mass education alongside the rise of the research university as they appear in the early writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin. More specifically, it traces the development of a theory of (un)learning that inserts distance into the pedagogical relation to produce a discretized educational...
This thesis investigates Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s undermining of soteriological poetics in his comedy Der Schwierige (“The Difficult Man”), with a focus on the complex interplay between meta-language (e.g., stage directions) and dramatic dialogue, normative and contingent speech (i.e., ‘ironic speech’). By challenging what I term the “soteriological agenda” of comedy...
This dissertation examines how nineteenth century German literature constructed and experimented with an entangled concept of “the environment” based not in (Romantic) philosophical and literary conceptions of nature, but in the theory and science of color perception. As the visual point of interaction between an observer and their surrounding world,...
Concentrating on the work of Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada, my dissertation explores the complicated role played by plants in post-war and contemporary German-language literature. Reflecting on and engaging with the intricate dynamics of vegetative life without the prejudice that it simply stands for an inferior form of life to...
This dissertation studies the sense most neglected in literary studies, philosophy, and the history of the senses: olfaction. It argues that modernity has been marked by a tendency towards deodorization that attempts to establish a monosensorial and odorless civilization shaped by ocularcentrism. Against this tendency, the authors studied here (Friedrich...
This dissertation aims to redefine the concept of pain as it appears in literary studies and demonstrate how the new definition garners insight into the interwovenness of literature and physiology in the mid-eighteenth century. It challenges the claim that pain is opposed to language by adopting a new materialist concept...
This dissertation examines the language of force in Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (MoE) as a site of literary self-reflection. It investigates how the text employs a constellation of “force” terms – including not only the words Kraft, Energie, and Leistung, but also images of physical and chemical forces...