Last year’s edition of Adventures in Research featured the three special volumes of leading journals in German studies guest edited by UW faculty. This time, we invite you to check out the exciting articles published by our faculty in 2023-4 beyond those volumes. They make important discoveries in studies of Early Modern Yiddish, Enlightenment Aesthetics, Environmental Humanities, and Twenty-first Century Film.
Richard Block, “King David or Queen Esther or Jesus or Peter: Transphobic Terror in Jane Campion’s Power of the Dog”, New Centennial Review 23.2 (2023): 29-51.
The film Power of the Dog provides fodder for legislators and jurors as they seek to roll back the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, and most directly, trans people. While a summary of the film’s plot might seem to indicate that only a certain type of homosexual is repudiated—the repressed kind whose torture does not end with himself—closer consideration of the film’s liberating moments make of the homosexual or sexual other an uncontainable threat whose guises become indecipherable. The film’s taking-out of its anti-hero Phil masks its real agenda: the construction of a trans-hero who is actually a serial killer in the making.
Jason Groves, (with Philippe Hamman and Christopher Schliephake), “Crossing Disciplines and the Role of Knowledge Circulation for the Emergence of New Interdisciplinary Fields.” Routledge Handbook of Academic Knowledge Circulation. Routledge, 2023. 344-354.
This essay looks at the role of knowledge circulation for the emergence of new interdisciplinary fields. Taking the new field of Environmental Humanities as our test case, we first trace its institutional and international development. Secondly, we analyze the media, channels and areas involved in the diffusion of central ideas connected to the field. In this context, new platforms of scholarly exchange have developed, such as journals, institutions, websites, etc. As we show, interdisciplinarity and interculturality become increasingly important as the world faces unprecedented challenges, like climate change, demanding new synthetic outlooks, analytical tools and competences from researchers that enhance reflexivity.
Annegret Oehme, “The Writing Werewolf: Rabbinic Identity and Linguistic Understanding in the Old Yiddish Mayse-bukh (Book of Stories, 1602).” In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (July 2024): https://ingeveb.org/articles/the-writing-werewolf-rabbinic-identity-and-linguistic-understanding.
This article explores how an early modern Yiddish short story tells the tale of a rabbi turned by a magic ring into a werewolf. The text uses a rabbi’s isolation between Jewish and Christian communities as a metaphor for Jewish identity in the diaspora. Unlike typical werewolf tales with happy endings, this rabbi remains an outsider, highlighting Jewish cultural and linguistic integration struggles.
Annegret Oehme, “Lucifer’s Shadow: Race in Old Yiddish Adventure Novels.” Speculum (99.2), 2024: 358-380.
This article examines Johann Christoph Wagenseil's Belehrung, a text aimed at converting Jewish communities by erasing Yiddish and integrating them into German society. Rather than fostering understanding, Belehrung undermined Yiddish, casting a lasting negative perception of the language. Yet, it became an essential resource for learning Yiddish, highlighting how religious intolerance shaped Yiddish’s minority status in Germany.
Annegret Oehme, “Yiddish, Power, and Compassion: Emotive Language in Wagenseil’s Belehrung (1699).” In Premodern Germanic Philology, edited by Tina Boyer and Heiko Wiggers, 91-109. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2024.
This article explores Elia Levita’s Bovo d’Antona, highlighting how it constructs notions of Blackness through a proto-racist lens that aligns the Jewish hero with the Christian-White ideal. Rooted in medieval Christian stereotypes, the text presents simplified antagonists, making Otherness accessible to its audience. By navigating these racial themes, Bovo d’Antona illustrates how a marginalized culture engages with and seeks empowerment within dominant racial discourses.
Ellwood Wiggins, “The Tragic Idealism of Double Consciousness: W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk and Friedrich Schiller's Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” Monatshefte 115/3 (2023): 344-64.
This essay attends to resonances between W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Friedrich Schiller’s Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795). First, it shows that Du Bois’s influential concept of double consciousness shares important structural similarities with Schiller’s dichotomy of the naive and sentimental. These parallels then help reveal an organizing principle of The Souls of Black Folk: the volume has a rainbow architecture, with seven arcs of correspondence between its fourteen essays. The symmetric structure of Du Bois’s book offers a taxonomy of Schiller’s unusual generic categories, which in turn provide a commentary on the tragical logic of idealism in American race relations.
Ellwood Wiggins, “The Moral Aesthetic of the Scream: Sophocles’ Philoctetes and the Hidden Structure of Lessing’s Laokoon” Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch L LI (2024): 51-74.
G.E. Lessing’s influential Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) is usually read solely as a contribution to aesthetic, semiotic, or antiquarian debates. This essay traces the appearances of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (409 BCE) in the text, and claims that the performance of this tragedy reveals an organizing dramatic structure to the text as a whole and a hidden but central moral commitment. The stakes of this argument are not limited to the limits of poetry and art, but rather speak to the most basic responsibilities of human interaction.
Stay tuned for the next thrilling episode of…
…Adventures in Research!