Mit dem Begriff des Plagiats findet Wilhelm Raabe in “Gutmanns Reisen” eine Chiffre für seine Praxis unhintergehbarer Intertextualität. Angesichts einer durch starke Vorgänger und eine stetig anwachsende ‘Literaturgeschichte’ fraglich gewordenen Kategorie des Neuen behauptet Raabe eine paradoxe Autorschaft originärer Sekundarität, die darin best…[Read more]

Raabe schreibt eine Prosa, die er an der Verdichtung der Versdichtung bemisst und die sich die Umwendung zum Modell nimmt. Ein Text, der diesen Umstand im Zeichen der Korrektur ‘dürftiger Prose’ inszeniert und den ich daher eine Programmschrift der Prosa nenne, liegt mit “Deutscher Mondschein” vor. Auf der Textbühne der Satire werden nicht nur d…[Read more]

Abstracts for the Two-Panel Series “More Is More: Rules and Riddles of Nineteenth-Century Vielschreiberei.” MLA Annual Convention, Washington, D.C., January 6–9, 2022.

In this short essay I discuss two new translations of Helmuth Plessner’s work, “Political Anthropology,” translated by Nils F. Schott (Northwestern University Press, 2018), and “Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology,” translated by Millay Hyatt (Fordham University Press, 2019).

This is the syllabus for an introductory course on Marx and critical theory that I taught at Binghamton University in the spring semester, 2020. It revises and expands an earlier iteration of the course that I had taught in spring, 2018, also at Binghamton University.

Christa Winsloe’s Mädchen in Uniform texts offer a means to examine the role of education in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German society while also exemplifying the genre of boarding school literature. This article provides an overview of educational debates in Prussia and the German Empire in the second half of the nineteenth ce…[Read more]

A syllabus for an undergraduate course, taught in English, on the visual culture (primarily film, photography, and aesthetic theory) of the Weimar Republic. The course is housed in German Studies and crosslisted with Art History, Cinema, and other departments.

The book examines little known and forgotten writings by Magnus Hirschfeld, the influential sexologist who is best known today for his homosexual activism, transgender work and founding of the world’s first Institute of Sexual Science in 1919. Arguing that negative experiences, as much as affirmative subculture formation, shaped a collective sense…[Read more]

A review of Robert Leucht’s “Dynamiken politischer Imagination. Die deutschsprachige Utopie von Stifter bis Döblin in ihren internationalen Kontexten, 1848–1930” (2016) and Ulrich Bach’s “Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire” (2016)

A review of Andreas Huyssen’s “Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film” (2015)

A review of Andreas Huyssen’s “Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film” (2015)

In foregrounding the epochal figures of Albrecht von Wallenstein and the Emperor Ferdinand, Alfred Döblin’s historical novel Wallenstein (1920) would seem to confound the genre’s habitual focus on average, typical figures. The catastrophic power struggle that results from the irreconcilability of the protagonists of Wallenstein is a far cry from…[Read more]