This dissertation examines scenes of reading – a literary motif where one or more figures are portrayed in the act of reading – in German literature from the High Middle Ages to today. Against the pressure to interpret such scenes as depictions of historic or exemplary reading practices, I analyze them as imaginative theorizations of reading, as nexuses of imagery, form, and content that reflect on, explicate, and influence the role of reading in a textual culture. As an integral part of a text’s poetical structure, these scenes render the reading process visible, exposing it to critique and reflection. In my analysis of several texts, including a medieval Arthurian romance, a late medieval devotional text, a nineteenth-century novella, and a contemporary narrative of migration, I demonstrate how the matrix of people, practices, and technologies that constitute reading scenes have affected and continue to affect popular as well as academic discourses on this fundamental cultural practice. By elucidating the theoretical and meaning-making capacities of scenes of reading, my project offers a unique approach to the study of reading: it incorporates the diversity of historic reading practices with the symbolic potency of reading’s representation to explicate reading’s poetological role in literature.

For years, scholars of medieval German have grappled with how to analyze formal characteristics of the lyric and epic poetry while taking into consideration performance, musicality, mouvance, linguistic variation, and aggressive editing practices. The scholarship has justifiably resorted to restricted explorations of specific texts or poets, or heavily criticized region-specific descriptions with several caveats. The many challenges this multifaceted poetry presents has also obscured one of its most central features—–the medieval voice. With the little evidence we have often being ambiguous or contradictory, how are we to understand the role of the medieval voice in the German corpus as a whole? This project seeks to shed light on this forgotten aspect by taking advantage of computational methods to demonstrate

relative formal and thematic relationships based on sound and voice. In doing so, it presents several new prosodic analytical methods.

The first chapter of this project underlines the importance of sound and voice to medieval performance and composition. It additionally justifies the syllable as the foundation of the novel formal methods presented in the following chapters. Chapter two presents a new

syllabification algorithm that combines two linguistic principles: the Sonority Sequencing Principle and the Legality Principle. This algorithm is then customized and computationally implemented to perform accurately on medieval German across dialects and editing practices. Chapter three employs this syllabification algorithm to characterize different phonological soundscapes in reference to theme and voice using a modest corpus of only medieval German lyric poetry. While chapter three intends to quantify the vocal affect of a soundscape, chapter four aims to account for the sequencing of these soundscapes within the larger text and corpus. Chapter three therefore lays the foundation for a structural model of medieval German form. Finally, chapter five reduces the corpus once again to a very small subset of medieval German Vierheber (epic poetry with four stresses per line). It presents a supervised machine learning model to predict scansion for these texts according to the theory proposed by Andreas Heusler, and draws conclusions from how different poets took advantage of the freedom this structure allowed.

In each chapter, I present the aggregate statistics to confirm and supplement our knowledge of the medieval German corpus as a whole. Yet more importantly, I return to individual texts in order to demonstrate how these newly discovered formal soundscapes manifest and function within a smaller narrative. This combination of “distant reading” and “close reading” supports my overarching argument that medieval German form and content were demonstrably and quantifiably highly intertwined. In many cases markedly different formal, phonologically-influenced structures were implemented to trigger connections to related texts and formats. This project thus creates a new understanding of intertextual relations in medieval German literature.

“Going wireless” involves not only the elimination of wires but also the production of electromagnetic waves, a realization that had far-reaching implications for the cultural logics of German modernity. As a media archaeology of wirelessness, this dissertation situates the “discovery” of electromagnetic radiation and the “invention” of wireless transmission in a richer field of scientific, experimental, and aesthetic relations during the early and pre-history of national broadcasting. Before wireless transmission came to be synonymous with the mass distribution medium of radio or even the long-distance communication medium of wireless telegraphy, it was at the center of speculation about a variety of possible wireless futures. Understanding the rhetoric of the new media of radio and wireless telegraphy in the first chapter opens onto questions of continuity and change in the longue durée of the second chapter. The insights gained from this comparison of pre-modern cultural techniques and modern electronic technologies are crucial for understanding the “discovery” of electromagnetic radiation and the “invention” of wireless telegraphy examined in the third and fourth chapters with a focus on the immediate pre-history of national broadcasting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The significance of this pre-historical period and the contingency of national broadcasting in the mid-twentieth century arguably only became apparent with the revival of wireless transmission at the turn of the twenty-first century, as the fifth chapter makes evident. As a contribution to the early and pre-history of national broadcasting, this dissertation suggests a new way of thinking about the order of wirelessness, from “wireless” as synonymous with the communication medium of telegraphy or the distribution medium of radio, to “wireless” as electromagnetic radiation and a medium of experimentation.

Despite the renaissance of interest in medieval mystical texts over the past three decades, an investigation of literary form and genre classifications has not yet occurred at great length. Shorter articles concerning genre and gender (e.g. Veerle Fraeter’s many articles on the subject come to mind) have often taken a contrary approach to Derrida’s lecture “The Law of Genre”, seeking to establish female-authored literature as comparable to that of men, and arguing for an even-handed application of theoretical analysis and treatment of women’s literature. Although beguine literature and other writings by women have often been classified by adjectives such as “emotional”, or in different terms than more scholastic writings, I argue that beguine mystical works be approached on par with that of other contemporaneous mystical writers (e.g. Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and a corpus of texts going back to St. Bernard of Clairvaux). Highlighting the works of three key beguine mystics—Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Agnes Blannbekin—my focus is that of (1) form and (2) the intrinsic relationship between form and content in order to depict the highly “individualistic” nature of each text, as well as the strong didactic reasoning at the heart of literary form selection and creation.

Each main chapter of my dissertation focuses on a different mystic, ordered chronologically, to provide the space to discuss the construction and organization of the texts written by Hadewijch, Mechthild and Agnes individually. Although textual form is the primary object of investigation, the body chapters also highlight the main themes within their writings, provide close readings of significant or exemplary chapters, and demonstrate the ways in which these themes and excerpts intersect. The underlying aspect behind the investigation of form and content outlined above is the interest in the connection between method and meaning, text creation and readership.

Although the discussion of each mystic’s work is outlined in Chapters Three through Five, Chapter One and Two provide a theoretical and historical background to the discussion of the beguine mystical texts. The initial discussion focuses on Derrida, gender and genre, and the counterarguments posited by feminist and gender scholars of the beguines. My aim is to explicate how a focus on genre and gender has shifted from the textual evidence and led scholars away from a philological-oriented close readings, which would connect form, structure and content. The second line of inquiry in the first chapter is the question of text classification and the rediscovery of the medieval mystical texts. The nineteenth-century focus on taxonomical categorization altered the ways in which these texts have been considered, analyzed and approached, as well as the opinion on the content relayed through the choice of genre. When scholars label these mystical texts “visionary literature”, “mystical treatises” or even show the relationship to hagiography, these structural categories deny acknowledgement of all present text forms and their variations. The result is the inclination to “fit” the beguine mystical texts into an overarching genre type (such as “visionary literature”), which may or may not represent the function of the genre within the text as part of a larger dogmatic program or system. For example, Hadewijch of Brabant wrote four groupings of works, organized by genre, that depict not only her visionary experiences, but also explanations of spirituality and imitatio Christi (the imitation of Christ) within the larger discourse of salvation, suffering and a desired perfect union with divinity. Despite the fact that these writings are grouped together as a single corpus, many scholars focus on one genre group, prompting questions regarding the ways in which an individual or separate generic reading of these genres has upon a broader understanding of that genre’s function within the scope of Hadewijch’s entire corpus.

I argue that the question of genre is not one that can be answered with single generic categories and that the variations present in these mystic texts exists to promote and support didactic motivations running like an undercurrent beneath all of the mystics’ writings. In the end, the emphasis on genre categorization is not the method that should be implemented in the close readings of Hadewijch’s, Mechthild’s and Agnes’ works. I posit that the motivation behind the composition of the beguine mystical texts is the unifying factor that allows the reader and scholar to approach these works as a tradition. We find variation in the methodology and form used to convey their messages to the reader, from courtly lyric forms depicting the conflicting emotions of the mystical spiritual process to mnemonic landscapes organizing and mentally revisiting visionary experiences. My hope with this study is to place these beguine mystical texts within the same niveau as other religio-philosophical writings of the late Middle Ages and base my claim upon the premise that these female authors mastered the predominant didactic forms that prevailed in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries and, through their own innovation, carried new literary forms into the fold of didactic literature.

Scholarship in the field of Medieval Studies on the topic of translation between Latin and the vernacular languages has, in general, been plagued by certain overarching narratives and biases. More specifically, at a macro level, translation in the Middle Ages has often been viewed in terms of a cultural struggle between Latin and vernacular literary cultures and thus reifies existing assumptions about the nature of the relationship between Latin and the vernacular languages as one that is fundamentally antagonistic and competitive. The overreliance on such narratives, in turn, has lead to an overemphasis on the role of rhetoric in structuring specific translations (to the exclusion of other areas of Medieval academic thought) and further fails to adequately account for medieval texts that present themselves as translations of a particular source text but that nevertheless do not pursue faithfulness to the same degree as modern translations.Rather than offering an overarching theory about the nature of translation in the Middle Ages, the present study seeks to reexamine and ultimately deconstruct the existing scholarly narratives on the topic of medieval translation and ultimately does so via the expansion of the discussion from simply “translation” to the somewhat broader semantic field of “retextualization,” which allows for the incorporation of works that are difficult to encompass within the traditional paradigm. By exploring three specific moments of medieval retextualization—Notker’s 10th-11th century Old High German translation of traditional Latin school texts (including of the Latin translation of Boethius and Aristotle), the macaronic Latin-Middle High German compositions within the 13th century Carmina Burana, and finally, the 13th century Latin and 14th century Middle High German translations of Mechthild’s originally Low German Fliessendes Licht der Gottheit—the current study applies a discourse-analytic approach that examines the specific texts both in close dialogue with each other as well as in terms of the larger cultural and literary discourses with which each retextualization engages.

Articulating an original reading strategy that builds on both American feminist affect theory and anthropological models of historical consciousness, this dissertation advances a new theoretical account of the role played by the sensory or bodily awareness of history in Polish and East German literature. Its argument consists of, on the one hand, an account historical experience in the state-socialist period in People’s Poland and in the German Democratic Republic that focuses on specific, qualitative experiences of historical time and that places them in their cultural contexts and historical genealogies. These qualitative temporalities appear as concrete amalgamations of emotion and time. The three such amalgamations on which this dissertation focuses are: Stalinist cheerfulness and its “elastic” sense of history; the empty lateness of pre-Solidarność Poland in the 1970s, and the atmospheric depression hanging over Berlin directly before the Mauerfall. On the other hand, this argument presents a theoretical account of historical consciousness as such, which uses the example of socialist historical consciousness to argue that the categories of feeling, affect, and emotion are, in fact, central to how history is experienced throughout Modernity. This is, again, a wholly original argument that builds on literary, historical, anthropological, and cultural-studies theory to advance a new understanding of historical time, outside of chronology, simultaneity, and forms of linear ordering. These readings of the Polish and East German literature are, at once, an attempt to deprovincialize the socialist novel by elucidating its universal claims about the relationship of historical knowledge to historical experience.

Despite the centrality of medieval courtly love lyric, or Minnesang, to the canon of German literature, its interpretation has been shaped in large degree by what is not known about it—that is, the lack of information about its authors. This has led on the one hand to functional approaches that treat the authors as a class subject to sociological analysis, and on the other to approaches that emphasize the fictionality of Minnesang as a form of role-playing in which genre conventions supersede individual contributions. I argue that the men who composed and performed these songs at court were, in fact, using them to create and curate individual profiles for themselves. The project of these poets is to persuade the audience of their own ethical insight and aesthetic skill. Each, in his own way, seeks to portray himself as the master of all possibilities offered by courtly song.

In chapter one, using the manuscript versions of a song by Heinrich von Morungen, I develop a new concept of authorship for the unstable medium of medieval lyric. Drawing on the insights of Material Philology, I show that Morungen anticipated and made use of this instability (or mouvance), imbuing his songs with the imprint of his authorship in a way that allows for the vagaries of oral and even written transmission. In chapter two, I explore the tension between a stable author figure and an unstable medium. Modern editorial practices have oversimplified the transmission of the lyric of Reinmar der Alte in the service of an exaggerated image of him as the virtuoso of joy in suffering unrequited love. Through a close reading of four versions of one of Reinmar’s songs, I argue that the author emerges as the master of the sum of a flexible array of aesthetic and ethical possibilities. In chapter three, I use the conceptual framework developed in these close readings to sketch a broader picture of one poet as an author. Through a survey of Heinrich von Veldeke’s songs, I show that juxtaposing contrasting perspectives throws into relief the implied author as a clerically educated figure who has mastered varied domains of intellectual and aesthetic knowledge and skill. By means of a comparison with the Latin poetry of Peter of Blois, I sharpen the contours of Veldeke’s mode of clerical authorship. The form of authorship that I identify in this dissertation—the author as master of possibilities—is specific to Minnesang, but suggests that there are types of authorship particular to other genres and other moments in time that remain to be defined.

My dissertation examines the work of two major poets who wrote in the second half of the twentieth century, Yves Bonnefoy of France and the Syrian-born Adonis (born Ali Ahmed Saïd). In conducting close readings of key moments from their respective poetry, I illustrate how both of these writers, in their own unique ways, construct poetry as a form of spiritual practice, i.e., as a way of transforming both the poet’s and the implied reader’s ontological, perceptual, and creative relationships with their internal and external worlds.

This work is divided into four chapters, plus an introduction. In the substantial introduction, I invoke writers from various traditions (Buddhism, Vedanta, Christian mysticism, modern nonduality) to explore the notion of spiritual experience as a whole, in particular as it relates to conceptual language, and invoke the writing of Pierre Hadot to propose poetry as a possible means of spiritual practice.

My first and second chapters focus on the work of Yves Bonnefoy. In the first chapter, I trace, in very broad strokes, a spiritual arc across Bonnefoy’s first three collections of poetry, from his Surrealist beginnings to his figurations (and idealization) of death in the 1953 collection Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve, and on to his own “Dark Night of the Soul” as it is poetically expressed in Hier régnant désert. In this chapter, I also examine his views on language and his notion of “poetic presence,” considering it in relation to Heidegger’s own views on “presence” and “Being.” In my second chapter, I provide an in-depth and sustained reading of Bonnefoy’s subsequent collection, Pierre écrite, demonstrating how it represents the turning point of Bonnefoy’s poetry and the inauguration of a certain apophatic spiritual practice through lengthy intratextual work on the concept.

In the second half of the dissertation, I turn to the work of Adonis. In the third chapter, I examine some of Adonis’ most important critical writings as a backdrop to his poetry and as a means of introducing several key themes, including that of creativity/innovation, which I link explicitly to the spiritual process of this poetry. This examination entails a critique of Adonis’ often reductionist critical writings, as well as an examination of the spiritually expansive role Sufism plays for Adonis. I also begin my analysis of Adonis’ 1961 collection Songs of Mihyar the Damascene as an intratextual spiritual practice that is intended to enact certain transformations in the implied reader. Here, the more didactic aspect of Adonis’ poetry as spiritual practice is contrasted with the more subjective spiritual practice of Bonnefoy’s poetry. In the fourth and final chapter of this dissertation, I shift my focus of attention from the intratextual to the intertextual and continue my analysis of Adonis’ poetry, focusing on a single poem from this collection to demonstrate how Adonis uses intertextual mechanisms to operate a Nietzschean revaluation on certain key Islamic concepts, thereby opening up a new field for spirituality. I show the ways in which Adonis, through subtle and sustained work on key terms and concepts, attempts to bring about a certain spiritual revolution in his poetry.

In this dissertation, I investigate literary, philosophical, and religious texts from the German tradition which use the figure of the desert to reflect on the conditions of their own possibility, and on larger questions of textual production, memory, and forgetting. I examine these works in four case studies that span the medieval period and the modern era: 1.) The anonymous 14th century mystical song Granum sinapis and several sermons by Meister Eckhart; 2.) Hölderlin's late hymn Der Einzige and novel Hyperion; 3.) Stifter's short story Der Hagestolz; and 4.) Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra. I pay particular attention to the ways in which the images of the desert in these texts function as figures [figurae] whose material and figural properties are deployed to interrogate language and memory, and to guide the reader into a landscape of experiential or speculative possibility. After sketching the rhetorical and semiotic relationship between the figure of the desert, memory, and writing in Western literary, cultural, and intellectual discourses, I investigate how the texts in my case studies reshape and redeploy this inherited tradition for their own purposes. Despite their significant differences, all of these texts engage in what I call "desert writing." This "arid" poetics reflects upon its own unstable, "sand-like" qualities through the explicit and implicit use of the desert figure, and through the metonyms of sand, dust, and ash to produce cognitive and experiential landscapes of possibility that push the limits of language and thought. Often represented as "deserts" themselves, these landscapes simultaneously produce hermeneutic meaning and non-hermeneutic effects of perception and sensation. In its unique ability to contain a non-binary "both/and" logic, to simultaneously evoke fullness and emptiness, positivity and negativity, literalness and figurality, the desert is one of the most productive figures for generating new forms of poetry, thought, and experience. This dissertation contributes to established criticism on the desert's poetological and speculative dimensions by synthesizing existing research and forming a new textual constellation that uncovers unacknowledged correspondences between medieval and modern texts.

My dissertation focuses on astrological discourses in early twentieth-century Germany. In four chapters, I examine films, literary texts, and selected academic and intellectual prose that engage astrology and its symbolism as a response to the experience of modernity in Germany. Often this response is couched within the context of a return to early modern German culture, the historical period when astrology last had popular validity. Proceeding from the understanding of astrology as a multiplicity of practices with their own histories, my dissertation analyzes the specific forms of astrological discourse that are taken up in early twentieth-century German culture. In my first chapter I examine the revival of astrology in Germany from the perspective of Oscar A. H. Schmitz (1873-1931), who galvanized a community of astrologers to use the term Erfahrungswissenschaft to promote astrology diagnostically, as an art of discursive subject formation. In my second chapter, I discuss how Paul Wegener's Golem film cycle both responds to and intensifies the astrological and the occult revivals. As the revivals gain momentum, Wegener explicitly depicts seventeenth-century astrological and occult practices with the intention of generating a "purely filmic" experience. I provide new insight into Wegener's last Golem film through the film architect Hans Poelzig's personal investment in both baroque architecture and contemporary astrology. My third chapter explores Aby M. Warburg's lifelong preoccupation with the investigation of astrological symbolism in art. This pursuit led him to create an institution that has played a pivotal role in the material conditions of possibility for people to study the history of astrology, even today. In my fourth chapter, I investigate the many references to astrological phenomena in Walter Benjamin's intellectual work. I read his work on mimesis and experience alongside his practice of graphology in order to situate him in the debates brought up in the first chapter on the idea of astrology as an Erfahrungswissenschaft. My dissertation reveals how aspects of astrological discourse--specifically its approaches to issues of legibility and interpretation--constructively informed and shaped the middle brow (Schmitz) and the high brow (Warburg), the cinematic (Wegener) and the literary (Schmitz), the institutional (Warburg) and the philosophical (Benjamin) realms of early twentieth-century German culture.