The development of an undergraduate honors seminar on the question, What is memory?

Martha Rust, an associate professor of English with a specialty in medieval literature and a background in nursing, and Suzanne England, a professor of social work with an interest in gerontology, develop a course on memory as a source "from which we draw both in acting as morally astute agents in the present and in envisioning new possibilities for the future." In approaching the subject, the course addresses such subsidiary questions and issues as, Where does memory exist in the brain, and what are its connections with sensory organs? Why do our memories change, and how accurate are they? What is the connection between memory and the self-and with language and story-telling? Can a preoccupation with memories forestall beneficial growth and change? and What events are best forgotten and how do we go about forgetting them? The course is divided into six units, the first three on memory in its "untrained and personal states" and the last three on the "training of memory, its uses and abuses." The first unit approaches childhood memories through readings in Augustine's Confessions, Eric Kandel's In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, and Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The second unit, on the idea of memory, draws on David Bloch, Aristotle on Memory and Recollection; Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory; Sigmund Freud, "Screen Memories"; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Plato, Theaetetus; William Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey"; and W.G. Sebald, Vertigo. In the third section, on the science of memory, the class reads more from Kandel's book, studies Jamie Ward's The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience, and views Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon. The fourth unit, on memory in art, draws on additional chapters from Augustine, Borges's "Funes the Memorious," Thomas Bradwardine's "On Acquiring a Trained Memory," and A. R. Luria's The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory. The fifth section, on cultural memory, includes Italo Calvino's "World Memory," Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the final unit, on forgetting, the class utilizes Janna Quitney Anderson, "Does Google Make Us Stupid?"; Alice Munro, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain"; and Sarah Polley's film version of Munro's story. Professors Rust and England draw on the materials in the course bibliography to grow intellectually in such areas as cultural memory studies and the practice of memory in a variety of time periods; in addition, Professor England benefits from Professor Rust's nursing background and knowledge of cognitive neuroscience and Professor Rust benefits from Professor England's scholarly expertise. The course includes a website and an electronic discussion board to foster intellectual community.

Endowment for publication subventions and an award program in musicology as well as fund-raising costs.

The American Musicological Society seeks an NEH challenge grant of $240,000, which with a 4:1 match will yield $1,200,000. These funds will endow four publication-related initiatives of the Society. The bulk of the funds ($900,000) will create a new subvention supporting the publication of first books by young scholars, whose work often represents the cutting edge of scholarly research, but whose careers are often at their most fragile or challenging point. The remainder will go primarily to existing publication subvention programs, supporting musicological books more generally ($125,000) as well as a monograph series sponsored by the Society ($100,000). These subventions aim to optimize the quality of the best scholarly books on music while keeping their prices affordable. Finally, we propose a new award for books on music in American culture ($50,000), a vital area of musical research that appeals to the broadest literary and musical public.

To develop two language-and-culture courses, offering an integrated approach to art, civilization, literature, history and philosophy. The goal is a comprehensive and intensive view of each culture, for which language study will be demonstrated to be integral to the understanding of another culture. A major portion of course time will be dedicated to intensive language training. The two courses offered will be "The Golden Age of Greece" and "Germany from the Age of Goethe to the Collapse of the Weimar Republic." Students, faculty and outside consultant will participate in evaluation.

Study will trace Goethe's influence on Russian literature from the earliest beginnings of that influence to the present. The first volume of this work carrying the investigation to the middle of the 19th century appeared with the University of Pennsylvania Press in its Haney Foundation Series (1968;pp.304). This second volume deals with the Liberal Democrats, the Radical Democrats and the Slavophiles. It also has material on Turgeniev, Tolstoy, Dostoevski and on the Soviets. It investigates the "movements" at the turn of the 20th century and its pre-Soviet decades, and brings the material up to the present.

A book-length study of German intellectual influences in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.

W.E.B. Du Bois stands as one of the most important American intellectuals of the 20th century, yet his literary frame of reference, his modes of sociological and historical analysis, and his principles of political activism are not limited to English-speaking traditions, but are founded in significant part on ideas of German thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries. These paradigms provided him an intellectual vantage point outside of American conventions of racial bias, and afforded him the critical distance to think in an original, methodical, and farsighted way about concrete steps toward social change. My book project is a detailed and innovative study of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), using interconnecting readings of selected chapters to bring forth Du Bois’s conceptual and intertextual dialogue with Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Wagner, and Hegel. Without this dimension, our understanding of Du Bois’s social thought and literary practice remains incomplete.

No project description available

Starting from the hypothesis that invention and imagination play a greater role than historical and cultural cohesiveness in Europe’s self-definition, my book project has two aims. 1) To analyze the ambivalent uses of "fictionality" in the building of the concept of Europe in various areas of the humanities, both as a positive founding myth and as a fantasy generating skepticism. 2) To examine the neglected role of literature in the production of Europeanness as a cultural construction. How does literature shape an author's European consciousness as content and form? How do European or Europeanized writers depict Europe? In what ways do they enrich and problematize theories of cultural identity, contributing to the larger debate on Europe?

"Necessary Luxuries" argues that the trajectory of literary production and consumption in Germany between 1770 and 1815 can only be adequately understood against the backdrop of an emerging consumer culture and the debates about luxury that accompanied its rise. My project demonstrates that authors of imaginative fiction were deeply concerned with their status as luxury producers, and it shows how the strategies they developed to justify their activities emerged in dialogue with more general discussions regarding the legitimacy of new forms of discretionary consumption. I address broad eighteenth-century debates about the dangers of excessive reading and the legitimacy of luxury editions as well as elucidating the degree to which concerns about luxury shape the structural and rhetorical features of specific literary works. I hope to shed light on current debates about the value of literature by returning to a moment when such questions were being posed with particular urgency.

No project description available

No project description available

Drawing on recent initiatives in comparative literature, "Transnational Tolstoy" aims to relate this major novelist in important new ways to fiction from Western Europe and around the world. Emphasis falls on Tolstoy's work with greatest international relevance, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and the posthumous Hadji Murad. Despite Russian nationalism or Soviet cultural policy, these books engage in illuminating cross-border dialogues with writers from Goethe and Stendhal to Mahfouz and Rushdie. In eleven case studies of a larger process, the book seeks to enlarge appreciation of Tolstoy's role and significance as a novelist and to promote transnational approaches to writers of his stature. Topics include anti-Western stereotyping, the psychology of vengeance, critiques of Bonapartism, global consciousness in literature, and the transformations of fictional realism. Since drafts of most chapters already exist, the fellowship year will be devoted to producing a polished, readable whole.

No project description available

No project description available

No project description available

To write a book on Hermann Hesse's fiction as product of his confessional imagination. Critics frequently note that his works, like those of Goethe, are fragments of a larger confession, but none have used this as an approach to his major fiction, although Hesse insisted that his novels were autobiographical, and that his leading characters were symbolic "incarnations" of his own self. Book will delineate the confessional content and form of his major novels, and to point furthermore to some basic similarities of theme and outlook between Hesse and some of the English romantics—Blake, Wordsworth and Keats.

To study the relationship between poetry and criticism. Emphasis will be on the reciprocity between poems and underlying theories of art. A wide variety of poetry and historic periods will be considered. Authors who will be read include: Dante, Johnson, Goethe, Coleridge, Arnold, Valery and Eliot.

No project description available

No project description available

Since the early 1960s, historians of German-American relations have repeatedly suggested that an edition of George Ticknor's German travel diaries would contribute significantly to a better understanding of both German and American history in the first half of the nineteenth century. Ticknor's descriptions of German society and culture and of Saxony's royal court in Dresden in particular are unique in their density and quality. The publication of selected parts of Ticknor's diaries provides a rare perspective of an informed outsider on German history. For German historians, such a text (which is virtually unknown to German historians of that time period because of the inacessibility of these diaries) has the potential to destroy long held convictions about early-nineteenth-century life in Germany. At the same time, this text also gives us some astonishing insights into the self-definition of Americans such as Ticknor during the 1820s and 1830s and the creation of an American identity.

No project description available

No project description available

No project description available

Using three case studies -- the Walt Whitman Archive; an edition of James Joyce's Ulysses; and an edition of J.W. Goethe's Faust -- the proposed project will experiment with methods of advanced TEI markup, create methods for detailed scholarly queries currently unavailable, and develop user interfaces to best display the variants exposed through diachronic markup. The German partner, the University of Frankfurt, is requesting 139,634€ from DFG.

The project is situated in the Digital Humanities area of literary criticism and textual scholarship, in particular the analysis of literary works in diachronic depth, that is: under perspectives of the genesis of their texts. Here, only the digital medium allows substantial future research and education in literary studies. In this context, the project addresses three major desiderata: 1. testing, improving, and making usable diachronic markup, that is the digital representation of document sources (based on TEI), 2. tools to operate on this data under the light of research requirements, and 3. means to publish and visualize the results of these operations. The project promises to develop and publish such tools and to provide best practices for a wide range of use cases. It does so by bringing together three leading projects in digital literary studies, covering different eras of German, US, and British literature: J.W. Goethe, Walt Whitman, and James Joyce.

Four fellowships per year for three years.

The National Humanities Center requests support for fellowships for advanced study in the humanities.

To prepare a translation, with introduction and commentary, of the Memoirs of Gotz von Berlichingen, a 16th century "robber baron." Known chiefly through Goethe's dramatic romanticization of him, the Baron's eighty years of acutely self-conscious recollections (1481-1561) span the transitional period from late medieval to early modern times and contain many detailed accounts of legal, political and military maneuvers. The translation will form part of the material for an interdisciplinary seminar in the spring of 1980.