Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, Germanic Languages and Literatures

This paper examines the theoretical difficulties related to the study of Gretel Karplus Adorno, wife of Theodor Adorno. In 1937, Karplus turned away from a successful career as an independent businesswoman to become Adorno's wife, unofficial secretary, and life-long promoter. This decision challenges contemporary assumptions that women in Karplus' situation were either stifled during their lives or intentionally overlooked posthumously. In contrast, this paper analyzes Karplus's 1930-40 correspondence with Walter Benjamin to suggest that she saw her marriage and submission to her husband's ambition as an opportunity to achieve her own life goals, not an obstacle to those goals. Karplus found financial success and social disappointment in her Berlin career. She developed close relationships with Adorno and Benjamin out of a desire for their intellectual companionship. For this reason, she was eager to support their work, even at the cost of her manufacturing career. This paper concludes that a biography of Karplus must not only accept her decision to leave her career, despite its apparent complicity with a patriarchal bias towards men and husbands. Such a biography must also challenge ideas of success defined by the bourgeois notion of an individual genius who produces products (e.g. books) in isolation.

Committee: John Davidson (Committee Member); Paul Reitter (Advisor) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Germanic Literature; History

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2019, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

This thesis, written in English, is a comparative analysis of Walter Benjamin's and Annie Ernaux's readings of 'A la recherche du temps perdu' by Marcel Proust. While Benjamin emphasizes Proust's storytelling capabilities and commends Proust for his descriptions of involuntary memory, Ernaux works more critically to reimagine a writing process removed of spontaneous experience. To develop this point, we apply Benjamin's definitions of `storyteller' and `experience'; to Ernaux's Les Annees (2008), an autobiography written almost entirely without the first-person singular pronoun. Using Benjamin's terminology, we question the relationship between writing and collectivity, not only asking `how is Les Annees a collective autobiography,' but also `how can one write collectively?' We conclude by unraveling the mechanics of the `collective image' at work in Les Annees: Ernaux's collective image does not speak for all people, nor does it claim to be an objective rendition of the past; rather, writing such an image is an ethical exercise, a social engagement with one's community and one's selves.

Committee: Audrey Wasser Dr. (Advisor); Elisabeth Hodges Dr. (Committee Member); Jonathan Strauss Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Literature; Modern Language; Modern Literature; Technology

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2019, German

This thesis highlights the ways in which Bertolt Brecht's concept of epic theatre pertains to video games, more particularly, visual novels. Digital drama and romance genres (aka “dating simulators”) are known for their “realism” for their ability to make the player feel as if they are interacting with real people. Yet, the deceptiveness is their apparent inability to replicate fully the kinds of social interactions a person can have. The plot structure oftentimes is also rather simplistic: the goal of these games is that the player gets the girl of their dreams, despite any hardships. The horror game Doki Doki Literature Club (2017) by game developer Dan Salvato challenges these genre shortcomings and aspire to make productive, I will argue, a Brechtian notion of epic theatre. Salvato had a love-hate relationship with visual novels. To him, visual novels were nothing more than “cute girls doing cute things” where any tragic backstory or character arc is just another objective the player must overcome to make the girl of their dreams fall in love with them. Like Brecht, Salvato wants to destroy the illusions created by visual novels and shock people into reflecting about such illusions. He created Doki Doki Literature Club, a horror game disguised as a dating simulator, which takes a critical look at issues such a mental health that visual novels often gloss over and treat as plot points in the story.

Committee: Edgar Landgraf Ph.D. (Advisor); Kristie Foell Ph.D. (Committee Member); Clayton Rosati Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Germanic Literature; Mass Communications; Mass Media

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2013, Theatre Arts

This thesis takes a close look at the process of adapting Molieres Tartuffe for the high school stage. The decisions regarding the use of rhyme verses prose, artistic liberties, casting considerations, and cuts are discussed in great detail. The paper also examines the history of Tartuffe translations and adaptations since it was first performed in 1664. Noted Moliere translators including Richard Wilbur, Donald Frame, Morris Bishop, and John Wood are discussed along with an examination of their methodologies. Modern translators of Tartuffe are also examined including Ranjit Bolt, Christopher Hampton and Prudence Steiner along with the choices they made when adapting Moliere for a modern audience.

Committee: James Slowiak (Advisor); Durand Pope (Committee Member); Maria Adamowicz-Hariasz (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Theater; Theater History; Theater Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

This dissertation redefines lyric narrative—forms of narration that fuse the associative resonance of lyric with the linear progression of narrative—as both an aesthetic mode and a strategy for responding ethically to the political challenges of the period of late modernism. Underscoring the vital role of lyric narrative as a late-modernist technique, I focus on its use during the period 1925-1945 by British writer Virginia Woolf, American expatriate poet H.D., French filmmaker Germaine Dulac, and German critic Walter Benjamin. Locating themselves as outsiders free to move across generic and national boundaries, each insisted on the importance of a dialectical vision: that is, holding in a productive tension the timeless vision of the lyric mode and the dynamic energy of narrative progression. Further, I argue that a transdisciplinary, feminist impulse informed this experimentation, leading these authors to incorporate innovations in fiction, music, cinema, and psychoanalysis. Consequently, I combine a narratological and historicist approach to reveal parallel evolutions of lyric narrative across disciplines—fiction, criticism, and film. Through an interpretive lens that uses rhetorical theory to attend to the ethical dimensions of their aesthetics, I show how Woolf's, H.D.'s, Dulac's, and Benjamin's lyric narratives create unique relationships with their audiences. Unlike previous lyric narratives, these works invite audiences to inhabit multiple standpoints, critically examine their world, and collaborate in producing the work of art. Hence, contrary to readings of high modernist experimentation as disengaged l'art pour l'art, I show that avant-garde lyric narrative in the late 1920s—particularly the technique of fugue writing—served these authors as a means of disrupting conventional, heterosexual, patriarchal, and militarist social and political narratives. During the crises of the 1930s and the Second World War, Woolf, H.D., Dulac, and Benjamin turn to the lyr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sebastian Knowles (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2011, German

This study examines Steve Reich's reflections on his early works in the context of Walter Benjamin's thesis in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility.” While Reich's thoughts as expressed in interviews and selected writings show a similar attitude to Benjamin's toward changes in human perception, Benjamin's notion of auratic demise in the age of technical reproducibility is challenged by Reich's understanding of the role of technology in music and the effects of gradual musical processes. Reich's assertions regarding the aesthetic autonomy of his compositional process are reminiscent of Romantic ideals of art, particularly those embodied by the “poeticized” as defined by Benjamin in “Two Poems by Friedrich Holderlin.” However, the means by which Reich claims to have reintroduced artistic autonomy are those that Benjamin attributes to aura's deterioration, such as impersonality and gradual presentation of the artistic subject. This study determines that, while Reich uses mechanical process to accommodate the change in human perception as Benjamin anticipates, aura is not eliminated as proposed in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility.” Although the “here and now” of the original is destroyed, aura survives through the authority and transcendent nature of musical process, and singularity is achieved by the unique reception of individual audience members with each hearing. Reich's work may not politicize aesthetics as Benjamin predicts, but through the authority of autonomous musical process and the decentralization of interpretation, the fascist aestheticization of politics may still be averted in the age of technical reproducibility.

Committee: Edgar Landgraf Dr. (Advisor); Geoffrey Howes Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Germanic Literature