Teaching German Literature of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

David Kim Announcement
Subject Fields
German History / Studies, Humanities, Languages, Literature, Modern European History / Studies

Call for Essay Proposals

We invite proposals for a volume in the MLA series Options for Teaching, entitled Teaching German Literature of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries and edited by David D. Kim and B. Venkat Mani.

The volume seeks to collect critical perspectives, methodological designs, pedagogical strategies, and, above all, political and aesthetic impulses that inform instructors’ decisions to include twentieth- and twenty-first-century German authors and their writings, both in the original language and in translation, with a view to various educational contexts.

The purpose of this volume is threefold: first, to provide original essays (5,000 words in length, including endnotes) on historical perspectives, overviews of urgent issues, and useful resources for classroom methodology, curricular or programmatic development, course planning, and administrative organization; second, to think of specific thematic, interdisciplinary, conceptual, or geopolitical approaches to teaching literature today; and finally, and most importantly, to be prospective instead of merely providing fellow educators with a retrospective on teaching specific classics or lesser known and less commonly taught texts. Therefore, we invite not just practitioners of German studies but also scholars from affiliated fields in the humanities and social sciences who teach German-language texts in translation. In times when institutional support for foreign languages, in general, and for German programs, in particular, is continuously shrinking, we ask all contributors to elaborate on the significance of German studies for the liberal arts in the United States and the world.

We invite contributors to consider several different valences of the qualifier German through their work: linguistic, cultural, geographical, and ethnic. The following questions are central to our conceptualization of the volume:

  • Does the term German serve as a shorthand term to designate literary production in Austria, Switzerland, Luxemburg, as well as the various political regimes of Germany during the twentieth century, ranging from imperial power (Kaiserreich) to the short-lived Weimar Republic, from the Third Reich to two German states and culminating in a reunified Republic?

  • Given the changing demographics of German-speaking nations, especially since the Second World War, how has the term German undergone transformation when presented with hyphenation (e.g., Afro-GermanAsian-German,Greek-GermanRussian-GermanTurkish-German)? How does one teach German-Jewish relations in the past and today?

  • How have these newer writings by German authors of non-German or mixed heritage reoriented the literary canon?

  • How do political upheavals, tumultuous world historical events, and moments of economic and cultural crises affect instructors’ understanding of the periodicity of German literature, as well as the placement of authors and works on syllabi?

  • How do bi- and multilingual authors and writings feature at different levels of the curriculum?

  • How do translations and theories of translation become explicit parts of an innovative, forward-thinking pedagogy?

  • How do changing reading habits due to electronic media and digital reading devices influence the selection of texts for teaching or their accessibility in the classroom?

In addition to investigating the transformative nature of “text,” be it verbal or visual, authorial or receptive, in an increasingly digitized culture, the essays will underline the relevance of teaching German literature in the twenty-first century—that is, in the age of rising populism; the reemergence of border discourses; the resurgence of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia; and the increasingly disillusioning debates on climate change, war, and forced displacement. The urgency to address questions of race, ethnicity, gender fluidity, sexual orientation and class, religion, and environmental justice will be apparent in this volume.

Possible areas of focus include:

  • Aesthetics and politics of migrants and refugees

  • Cities, spaces, and literature

  • Colonialism, empire, and nation-building

  • Gender and sexuality in literature and other disciplines

  • Genres (lyric, drama, prose, graphic novels) and genre fictions

  • German diasporas and diasporas in the German-speaking nations

  • Literature and acquisition of German as a foreign or heritage language

  • Literature and other media (music, film, visual arts)

  • Literature in translation; translational concepts and contexts

  • Migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and exiles

  • Modernism and cosmopolitanism

  • Mono-, bi-, and multilingualism

  • National and world literatures

  • Nobel Prize winners and the politics of Nobel Prizes

  • Politics and poetics of environmentalism

  • Print and digital cultures and reading practices

  • Race, ethnicity, and minorities

  • Sample syllabi, lesson plans, assignments, learning goals and outcomes, curricular alignments, and cross-disciplinary collaborations

  • Teaching contexts of German literature: North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, etc.

If you plan to contribute to this volume, please submit a 150-word bio (with information about institutional affiliation, up to five recent publications, and areas of research and teaching interests) and a 500-word abstract by 15 June 2019. The documents should be e-mailed as one attachment in .doc(x) format with the file name “LASTNAMEMLATeachingProposal” to David D. Kim (dkim@humnet.ucla.edu) and B. Venkat Mani (bvmani@wisc.edu) with the subject line “MLA: Teaching German Literature.”