Research Statement
I am a Germanist with a background in English, American Studies, Journalism, and Political Science. My research is fueled by an interest in how symbolic orders act to create and sustain a continuous proliferation of meanings, thus suspending or subverting hierarchical models of interpretation and undermining attempts at finite readings and understandings. My analysis of texts, and of works of art in general, are informed by hermeneutic approaches (emphasizing close readings, grounded rhetoric, etymology, and phonetics), as well as by so- called “post hermeneutic strategies” which allow me to investigate the historical, material, and medial circumstances under which reading and writing becomes possible in the first place. Within this framework, my work has its locus mainly in 19th and 20th century literary and critical prose.
My dissertation, entitled Nebeneinander, Miteinander, Querfeldein: Johann Peter Hebel—Walter Benjamin—W.G. Sebald, identifies a nexus that connects the work of these three authors beyond a mere history of transmission and reception. I maintain that Hebel, Benjamin, and Sebald explore the accessibility to a certain salvific potential through language, in language, and of language. This potential would allow for a deferral, or even a suspension, of death, destruction, and oblivion. In the first chapter of the thesis, I argue that Hebel destabilizes notions of the familiar and seemingly simple perception of nature by breaking them up into incommensurable complexities. Hebel’s particular use of language allows him to reveal the absolute excess of creation in something as familiar and ordinary as a cherry tree and thereby challenges the eschatological dogma of his time and of his church. (Or in other words, German Kirschbaum becomes Hebel’s Kirchbau, and the High Alemannic Chriesbaum turns out to be the better Christbaum.) Walter Benjamin calls Hebel’s specific mobilization of language “double talk”, which Benjamin defines as being incapable of speaking of the great and the small in any other way than simultaneously. To grasp the full impact of Hebel’s voice, Benjamin turns to a visual register, since he perceives the most saturated passages of Hebel’s prose as images. While Benjamin finds those images to be deeply connected to death, W.G. Sebald (who was introduced to Hebel through Benjamin’s word) takes up the “supersaturation” of Hebel’s prose in service of moments of image- like stasis in his own writing. In these literary oases situated in time, a multitude of voices allow the living and the dead to co-reside--neben- und miteinander.
This thesis constitutes the first thematic and critical in-depth exploration of the nexus of Hebel’s, Benjamin’s, and Sebald’s work. It makes new critical readings available to the audiences of such seminal texts as The Storyteller (by Walter Benjamin), and it uncovers a governing poetological principle of Sebald’s prose. Most importantly, though, this project demonstrates that critical close readings of Hebel’s oeuvre are not only productive and necessary to activate its intellectual potential, but also essential to filling the gap constituted by a lack of research on Hebel’s impact on the canon of German thought and literature (cf. Goethe, Jean Paul, Kafka, Brecht, Bloch, Heidegger, etc.).
My article “[D]ie größte Weisheit verrathet sich…”- Johann Peter Hebels Anleitungen zum Selbermerken, which focuses on the strategies Hebel employs when he tries to communicate nature’s excess of life, is currently under review for publication in Monatshefte. By the end of this academic year, the preparation of the book manuscript will be completed. An essay related to the dissertation, in which I analyze Sebald’s revision of Hebel’s Unverhofftes Wiedersehen in the first narration of Die Ausgevanderten, is currently under preparation.
My next project, which relates to conference papers I presented at the NeMLA and at Columbia University’s The Future of Philology conference, examines Sigmund Freud’s writings in light of his manuscripts, with special emphasis on Der Wunderblock as well as on a number of his private correspondences in which he reflects upon the quality of his hand, his implement and his stationary. It is in the attempt to analyze writing as the “here and now” of literary, critical, or creative production, that all inherent resistances to writing (resistances which act on disparate ontological levels) must be overcome in order for a text to emerge. Freud—who not only calls writing his “actual” (eigentliche) work but who also frequently obsesses over the tools and circumstances of his trade—depends on this overcoming of resistance without having a reliable method of achieving such mastery at his disposal. As a consequence, I argue, Freud places himself (and his entire theory) in a very precarious scene of auto-referentiality. In his writings, Freud translates human memory (and, effectively, the human mind as whole) into nothing else but a scene of writing. The Wunderblock, as a writing subject, a writing machine, and as a writing surrogate, captures the interdependence of writing [Schreiben], as well as its descriptive potential [Beschreibbarkeit], and uncovers an unstable heterogeneous ensemble that begins to “problematize” and reflect upon itself. In that very reflection, a material unconscious introduces itself, in retrospect, in the genesis of psychoanalysis as its author.
My dissertation, entitled Nebeneinander, Miteinander, Querfeldein: Johann Peter Hebel—Walter Benjamin—W.G. Sebald, identifies a nexus that connects the work of these three authors beyond a mere history of transmission and reception. I maintain that Hebel, Benjamin, and Sebald explore the accessibility to a certain salvific potential through language, in language, and of language. This potential would allow for a deferral, or even a suspension, of death, destruction, and oblivion. In the first chapter of the thesis, I argue that Hebel destabilizes notions of the familiar and seemingly simple perception of nature by breaking them up into incommensurable complexities. Hebel’s particular use of language allows him to reveal the absolute excess of creation in something as familiar and ordinary as a cherry tree and thereby challenges the eschatological dogma of his time and of his church. (Or in other words, German Kirschbaum becomes Hebel’s Kirchbau, and the High Alemannic Chriesbaum turns out to be the better Christbaum.) Walter Benjamin calls Hebel’s specific mobilization of language “double talk”, which Benjamin defines as being incapable of speaking of the great and the small in any other way than simultaneously. To grasp the full impact of Hebel’s voice, Benjamin turns to a visual register, since he perceives the most saturated passages of Hebel’s prose as images. While Benjamin finds those images to be deeply connected to death, W.G. Sebald (who was introduced to Hebel through Benjamin’s word) takes up the “supersaturation” of Hebel’s prose in service of moments of image- like stasis in his own writing. In these literary oases situated in time, a multitude of voices allow the living and the dead to co-reside--neben- und miteinander.
This thesis constitutes the first thematic and critical in-depth exploration of the nexus of Hebel’s, Benjamin’s, and Sebald’s work. It makes new critical readings available to the audiences of such seminal texts as The Storyteller (by Walter Benjamin), and it uncovers a governing poetological principle of Sebald’s prose. Most importantly, though, this project demonstrates that critical close readings of Hebel’s oeuvre are not only productive and necessary to activate its intellectual potential, but also essential to filling the gap constituted by a lack of research on Hebel’s impact on the canon of German thought and literature (cf. Goethe, Jean Paul, Kafka, Brecht, Bloch, Heidegger, etc.).
My article “[D]ie größte Weisheit verrathet sich…”- Johann Peter Hebels Anleitungen zum Selbermerken, which focuses on the strategies Hebel employs when he tries to communicate nature’s excess of life, is currently under review for publication in Monatshefte. By the end of this academic year, the preparation of the book manuscript will be completed. An essay related to the dissertation, in which I analyze Sebald’s revision of Hebel’s Unverhofftes Wiedersehen in the first narration of Die Ausgevanderten, is currently under preparation.
My next project, which relates to conference papers I presented at the NeMLA and at Columbia University’s The Future of Philology conference, examines Sigmund Freud’s writings in light of his manuscripts, with special emphasis on Der Wunderblock as well as on a number of his private correspondences in which he reflects upon the quality of his hand, his implement and his stationary. It is in the attempt to analyze writing as the “here and now” of literary, critical, or creative production, that all inherent resistances to writing (resistances which act on disparate ontological levels) must be overcome in order for a text to emerge. Freud—who not only calls writing his “actual” (eigentliche) work but who also frequently obsesses over the tools and circumstances of his trade—depends on this overcoming of resistance without having a reliable method of achieving such mastery at his disposal. As a consequence, I argue, Freud places himself (and his entire theory) in a very precarious scene of auto-referentiality. In his writings, Freud translates human memory (and, effectively, the human mind as whole) into nothing else but a scene of writing. The Wunderblock, as a writing subject, a writing machine, and as a writing surrogate, captures the interdependence of writing [Schreiben], as well as its descriptive potential [Beschreibbarkeit], and uncovers an unstable heterogeneous ensemble that begins to “problematize” and reflect upon itself. In that very reflection, a material unconscious introduces itself, in retrospect, in the genesis of psychoanalysis as its author.