Kenneth S. Calhoon, Ph.D.

Professor of Comparative Literature

Director of Undergraduate Studies, Comparative Literature

Professor of German

Profile

Education

• Ph.D. (German) University of California, Irvine, 1984
• M.A. (German) University of California, Irvine, 1981
• B.A. (German) University of Louisville, 1979

Publications

Dissertation

• "Romantic Distance: The Poetics of Estrangement and Self-Discovery in Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen" (William J. Lillyman, director)

Books

• Fatherland: Novalis,Freud and the Discipline of Romance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992.
• BOOKS (EDITED)
• Peripheral Visions: The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001.
• Co-edited with Karla Schultz. The Idea of the Forest:German and American Perspectives on the Culture and Politicsof Trees. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Articles

• 26. “Der virtuelle Bogen: Abgrund und Brücke in Friedrich Schillers Elegie Der Spaziergang,” to be published in Landschaftsgänge—Bewusstseinslandschaften: Zur Kulturgeschichte und Poetik des Spaziergangs, ed. Axel Gellhaus and Helmut Schneider ( Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, forthcoming).
• 25. “Charming the Carnivore: Bruce Chatwin’s Australian Odyssey” in Bianca Theisen and John Zilcosky, ed., Writing Travel . (Under consideration, University of Toronto Press).
• 24. “F. W. Murnau, C. D. Friedrich and the Conceit of the Absent Spectator,” Modern Language Notes 120 (2005): 633-53.
• 23. “Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest.” New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery and Judith Ryan ( Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005), 636-40.
• 22. "Eduard Mörike, Gedichte." New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery and Judith Ryan ( Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005), 614-20.
• 21. “Lautverschiebung: Music and Materiality in Ernst Jandl’s Laut und Luise,” in Axel Dunker, ed., Literatur ohne Kompromisse: ein buch für jörg drews ( Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2003), 365-75.
• 20. “The Moon, the Mail, and the Province of German Literature,” in Jürgen Fohrmann and Helmut Schneider, ed., 1848 und das Versprechen der Moderne (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), 129-46.
• 19. “ Reading and the Art of Leisure in Mörike’s ‘Wald-Idylle,’” Modern Language Notes 116 (2001): 536-550.
• 18. “The Gothic Imaginary: Goethe in Strasbourg,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für deutsche Literaturgeschichte und Geisteswissenschaft (2001): 5-14.
• 17. “Leinwand: Zur Physiognomie des Raumes in F. W. Murnaus Nosferatu,” in Sigrid Lange, ed., Raumästhetik in der Moderne ( Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2001), 289-97.
• 16. Introduction to Peripheral Visions: The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema [see above under “books (edited)”], 9-19.
• 15. “ Horror vacui,” in Peripheral Visions: The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema [see above under “books (edited)”], 145-70.
• 14. “The Eye of the Panther: Rilke and the Machine of Cinema,” Comparative Literature 52 (2000): 143-56.
• 13. “Blind Gestures: Chaplin, Diderot, Lessing,” Modern Language Notes 115 (2000): 381-402.
• 12. “Alchemies of Distraction in James’s Portrait of a Lady and Fontane’s Effi Briest,” arcadia 34 (1999): 89-112.
• 11. “Personal Effects: Rilke, Barthes, and the Matter of Photography,” Modern Language Notes 113 (1998): 612-634.
• 10. “Emil Jannings, Falstaff, and the Spectacle of the Body Natural,” Modern Language Quarterly 58 (1997): 83-109.
• 9. “Ausgerechnet Oregon!: Cross-Cultural Meditations.” Epilogue to The Idea of the Forest [see above under “books (edited)”], 211-221.
• 8. “The Detective and the Witch: Local Knowledge and the Aesthetic Pre-History of Detection,” Comparative Literature 47 (1995): 307-329.
• 7. “The Stones Speak! Novalis and the Romantic Archaeology of the Psyche,” in Reading after Foucault: Institutions, Disciplines, and Technologies of Self in Germany, 1750-1820, ed. Robert S. Leventhal (Detroit: Wayne State, 1994), 211-232. [Reprinted from Fatherland.]
• 6. “The Education of the Human Race: Lessing, Freud and the Savage Mind,” The German Quarterly 64 (1991): 178-89.
• 5. “Sacrifice and the Semiotics of Power in Der zerbrochene Krug,” Comparative Literature 41 (1989): 230-51.
• 4. “Dreams, History and the Romantic Fragment in Arno Schmidt’s Aus dem Leben eines Fauns,” Bargfelder Bote: Materialien zum Werk Arno Schmidts 115 (June 1987): 5-9.
• 3. “The Urn and the Lamp: Disinterest and the Aesthetic Object in Mörike and Keats,” Studies in Romanticism 26 (1987): 3-25.
• 2. “The Bible as Fable: History and Form in Lessing and Novalis,” The Lessing Yearbook 16 (1984): 55-78.
• 1. “Language and Romantic Irony in Novalis' Die Lehrlinge zu Sais,” The Germanic Review 56 (1981): 51-61.

Online Publications

• Reading and the Art of Leisure in Mörike's "Wald-Idylle"
• Blind Gestures: Chaplin, Diderot, Lessing
• Personal Effects: Rilke, Barthes, and the Matter of Photography
• The Eye of the Panther: Rilke and the Machine of Cinema
• Emil Jannings, Falstaff, and the Spectacle of the Body Natural
• Sacrifice and the Semiotics of Power in Der zerbrochene Krug
• F.W. Murnau, C.D. Friedrich, and the Conceit of the Absent Spectator

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Recent Courses

GER 407 Seminar: Poetic Justice (Fall 2006)

• This course will focus on a small selection of German prose texts in which questions of justice are addressed: Johannes von Tepl, Der Ackermann und der Tod, Heinrich von Kleist, Der Findling, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Die Judenbuche and Franz Kafka, In der Strafkolonie. The emphasis will be on close, careful readings of these works. Requirements: regular, prepared attendance; two five-page papers. Readings, discussion and written assignments in German.

COLT 407 Literary Landscape (Spring 2006)

• The word “paradise” comes from an ancient Persian word meaning “garden” or “orchard.” Taking the intersection of these concepts as a starting point, this course will examine “literary landscape” in two, equally important senses: (1) the literary (verbal) portrayal of a natural setting or view; (2) the painterly representation of landscapes invested with—and ultimately divested of—mythological, allegorical, moral, emblematic or narrative meaning. We will focus on parallel and often reciprocally defining developments in literature and painting, our aim being that of both better understanding these particular artistic forms and grasping (to flirt with a contradiction) the “nature of the aesthetic.” The eventual emergence of nature as a value unto itself will provide a historical coordinate for such topics as the following: transformations in garden architecture; perspective and the history of topographical painting; the appearance of the word “landscape” and its cognates (e.g. “horizon”); the Enlightenment and the primacy of vision; art and the “control of nature”; Romanticism and the invention of the “pure prospect.” In addition to considering the history of landscape painting generally, we will pay particular attention to Claude (Lorrain), Jacob Ruisdael, Thomas Constable, J. W. M. Turner, and Caspar David Friedrich. We will also view Peter Greenaway’s 1982 Film The Draughtsman’s Contract.

GER 625 Translations/Transformations (Winter 2007)

• The translation of Shakespeare into German, beginning with Wieland’s eight-volume prose translation (1762-66) and achieving a pinnacle with A. W. Schlegel’s verse rendering (edited by Tieck, 1825-33), was crucial to the emergence of the literary-national identity of the German-speaking peoples. Focusing on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and criticism, this seminar will entertain the notion that the history of German literature is tantamount to the history of the German reception of Shakespeare. We will consider critical works by J. E. Schlegel, Lessing, Herder, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, and Ludwig Tieck, literary works by Lessing, Wieland, Goethe and Kleist. Students will be asked to have read a selection of Shakespeare’s plays in advance of the course. A trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland may be included.

HUM 103 Venice and Dresden: Tales of Two Cities

• Venice and Dresden—two cities that fascinate in part because of their respective association with slow decline and outright devastation—will provide us with a loose construction for considering social, artistic and intellectual developments that help define “the Modern.” A careful reading of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice will frame a discussion of middle-class liberation within the context of commercial adventurism and urban organization. We will examine transformations in painting, from the almost photographic precision of Canaletto and Bellotto (the latter a Venetian who served as court painter in Dresden for twenty years) to the Romanticism of J.W.M. Turner (not to mention Lord Byron). After a discussion of Don Giovanni in the context of the French Revolution (Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, was from Venice), we will look at Richard Wagner, musical director in Dresden up to the revolution of 1848 (in response to which Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto). Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice will exemplify for us the modern habit of associating beauty with disease. We will conclude with Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, set partly in Dresden during the catastrophic bombing of February 13 th, 1945.

COLT 607 Picture Theory (Fall 2005)

• What is a picture? This question is posed by Lacan as part of a discussion that presses issues of pictorial representation through an understanding of natural mimicry and links imitation to a fascination prone to “capturing” the viewer in the field of vision. The assertion that we are photo-graphed, i.e., determined by a gaze that is “outside,” has broad implications for an essentially Western mode of painting whose defining aim was long that of disentangling the spectator from the spectacle. Artist and spectator alike are instituted as external bystanders in a process of sublimation whose gain is the erasure of (social) origin. Barthes’ discussion of the manner in which the photographer’s finger, in tripping the shutter, restores to the image the contingency of its creation is suggestive for a tradition in which the sketch would gradually emerge as a form that revels in process and approximation. Like the fingerprint proper, the residual trace of the artist’s hand outlines an evidentiary lineage connecting Barthes’ punctum to Auerbach’s “Scar of Odysseus”—wounds whose discovery exposes a basic kinship between mimesis and camouflage, between representation and disguise.
  
  Individual meetings will be organized around specific forms and techniques employed in the interest of effacement (of the artist, the process, the apparatus, the social field): linear perspective, anamorphosis, trompe l’oeil, the mask, self-portraiture, realism (surrealism), mise-en-scène, the shot/reverse shot in cinema, etc. Particular presentations on Chaplin and Hitchcock are foreseen. Other topics include the sister arts controversy and the rise of modern theater. More or less recent theoretical treatments of the visual and pictorial will be routed back through the work of earlier scholars whose role in developing the comparative study of representations was key.

COLT 614 Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature (Fall 2006)

• Intended as a reconsideration of the place of comparative literature within a global, pluralistic curriculum, this seminar will take its cue from the geographical and cartographic metaphors that pervade critical vocabularies. Critical-theoretical discussions will be mapped onto a selection of narratives originally used as a freshman introduction to the field. There, careful readings of key passages from Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno provided a repertoire of figural coordinates for understanding how literary adventures help structure the experience of the world. Additional readings included Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Christoph Ransmayr’s The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, and Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight. In tandem with these and other literary texts, we will consider the critical work of Erich Auerbach, Homi Bhabha, Re Chow, S. Freud, Georg Lukács, J. Hillis Miller and Franco Moretti.

COLT 102 Introduction to Comparative Literature II (Winter 2007)

• With an emphasis on the social components of literature and its institutions, this course will orbit loosely around the words ghetto and bourgeois, the histories of which point to the role of the enclave in the formation of communities. Their potential for ambiguity—the fact that these words can carry both positive and negative connotations—make them useful indicators of the complexity that defines the ever shifting boundary between “inside” and “outside.” This boundary will prove important for us, for it is here that the kindred processes of assimilation and differentiation take shape. An introductory analysis of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed,” which recounts a black man’s attempt to move his family onto “a street of bitter white,” will serve to introduce the concept of the vernacular as it relates to distinctions of race and class. This will in turn help lay the groundwork for a sustained investigation of the common tongue and its role in linking the boundary between inside and out to that between “high” and “low.” Following a brief discussion of Aristotle’s association of comedy with the lower classes, we will move through a series of moments in which the “low” is sometimes stigmatized, sometimes mined as a source of creative vitality (the latter of which can itself be a stigma). These include: Dante’s choice of vernacular Italian for his Divine Comedy; Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into vernacular German; the ghetto in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; the aristocracy’s ridicule of the ascendant merchant class in Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentleman; class and sexuality in Strindberg’s Miss Julie; the materiality of language in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis; wealth and assimilation in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; the “pain that words contain” in Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight.” Certain films may also be considered, including Mike Figgis’ 1999 production of the Strindberg play. A look at Charlie Chaplin should give a sense of how the attempt to “break into” society’s mainstream can degenerate into a comedic variation on the intrusion for which Brooks’ Rudolph Reed pays a heavy toll.

Items of Interest

In June of 2005 I spoke at the conference Landschaftsgänge - Bewusstseinslandschaften: Zur Kulturgeschichte und Poetik des Spaziergangs, held on the Museuminsel Hombroich, near Düsseldorf/Neuss. The "island," part of which is the former site of a Pershing missile installation, is now a partially restored wetland in which an assembly of architecturally innovative pavilions, chapels, exhibition and meeting halls, dormitories, and other facilities incorporate what remains of the missile silos and bunkers. It is adjacent to the museum-island proper, formerly an eighteenth-century English garden that now, somewhat more natural in its aspect, includes exhibition and meeting pavilions. The following urls link to the conference program and to the museum-island respectively:

• http://www.germlit.rwth-aachen.de/181.html
• http://www.photo-document.com/hombroich/index.htm

My interest in the above has led to a more general interest in the concept of reconstruction as it pervades the ethos and aesthetics of modern Germany. Implied are not merely the attempts to restore such devastated urban jewels as Dresden and Würzburg to their former glory but also other, more experimental approaches to urban development in response to both the devastation of World War Two and, for example, industrial decline. A prime example is the project surrounding the Inner Harbor at Duisburg, a depressed industrial city at the confluence of the Ruhr and the Rhein. Said to be the world's largest inner harbor, Duisburg has been at the center of a project for refurbishing a once prosperous urban landscape that fell into a state of decay after the boom of the sixties. The following websites give a good account of the architectural innovations surrounding Duisburg and of the Garden of Memories, a large park (part of the harbor restoration) organized around rubble and building fragments, and which includes Yitzhak Rabin Square.

• http://www.innenhafen-duisburg.de
• http://www.innenhafenbilder.de
• http://www.stiftung-dkm.de/d/0000/daten_tour/ih01.htm

This interest in the ethos of reconstruction also informs a course I routinely teach in the Humanities Program entitled " Venice and Dresden: Tales of Two Cities." Venice and Dresden are treated as the dual centers in an elliptical curriculum, much of which deals with urban structure and architecture. An important point of tangency between these two cities is the work of Bernardo Bellotto, the Venice-born nephew of Canaletto who was appointed court painter at Dresden. His large-format view paintings represent the best architectural record of the city (known as " Florence on the Elbe") that was incinerated by Allied bombs in 1945. The following websites present different aspects of the ongoing efforts in reconstructing (and re-conceptualizing) Dresden, including the plans for rebuilding the Neumarkt (among them a project by Daniel Libeskind) and, in particular, the restoration of the Baroque house at 29 Rampische Strasse.

• http://www.rampische29.de
• http://www.neumarkt-dresden.de/Kuehne-projekt.htm
• http://www.friendsofdresden.org/neumkt2.htm
• http://www.neumarkt-dresden.de/Neustaedter-Markt/neustaedter-markt.html
• http://www.virtual-dresden.de/deutsch/index_ger.html

These are some of the things I'm interested in. Also, I like trains.