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SUMMARY:Crossing the Atlantic (Again): The transformation of the tragic mu
 latta from kitsch to literature in nineteenth-century German writing - Chr
 istopher M. Geissler (Jesus College/MML (German &amp\; Dutch))
DTSTART:20101011T160000Z
DTEND:20101011T173000Z
UID:TALK25814@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Daniel Jonah Wolpert
DESCRIPTION:Mixed-race figures in German writing concerned with the Americ
 as occupy a liminal status. Between two races\, they are difficult to cate
 gorise via typical paradigms that structure race relations\, and their pri
 mary function is often enacted in their being literally removed from the c
 ontext of the story. This profound sense of disjuncture is especially prom
 inent in Theodor Storm’s Jenseits des Meeres and Berthold Auerbach’s D
 as Landhaus am Rhein\, given the repetition in each of the journey from th
 e Americas to enlightened Europe.  This paper will illuminate Storm’s an
 d Auerbach’s exploitation of the anxiety of racial mixture and un-identi
 fiability by reading these works along with earlier populist texts by Frie
 drich Strubberg and Friedrich Gerstäcker. Their novellas illustrate the t
 ransfer of racial anxiety from the American context to the German text mor
 e directly. This anxiety becomes a more ghostly echo in the work of Storm 
 and Auerbach. This paper will explore the notion of transfer — from a (p
 ost)colonial multiracial context to Germany — via an exposition of the d
 evelopment of a theme from the low-brow to the high-brow. 
LOCATION:Grad Seminar Rm\, 3rd Fl. Raised Faculty Bldg.\, Sidgwick Site
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