This dissertation analyzes filmic environments within Weimar cinema and argues for a concept of Heimat in which the landscapes of modernity are embedded into the environments of home. Mountain films such as Der heilige Berg enact a visual mechanization of the Alpine landscape; industrial films such as Sprengbagger 1010 constellate pastoral and modernized scenes in a similar fashion to contemporary Heimat club journals; and urban films such as Menschen am Sonntag reveal the ways in which the city figures as Heimat within Weimar film. Further, film journals display contradictory discourses surrounding Heimat before the standardization of idyllic rural scenes in the postwar Heimatfilm genre. These filmic environments interact with the real-world environment in complex and multi-directional ways. They participate in the development of new ways of seeing, marketing, and using the environment and function as nodes within sociopolitical debates regarding human communities and physical landscapes. These findings complicate arguments made by environmental historians who have claimed that the German notion of Heimat, encompassing both natural and cultural elements, might offer a useful alternative to the essentialism of the American wilderness ideal. In fact, the image of Heimat as a rural nature-culture hybrid, at least within film, only became dominant in the Nazi era. Within Weimar cinema, the term Heimat represents the focal point of a much more diverse and open discussion of environmental values. / Germanic Languages and Literatures

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acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

I use Heidegger's critique of Rilke's solution to the technological objectification of nature to help determine whether Heidegger's own view of nature hinders his attempt to overcome subject-object dualism. For both Heidegger and Rilke, in order to change our relationship to natural entities we must do more than redefine our conception of nature. The subject-object dynamic must be transformed by reconfiguring the relation between entities, humans, and being Heidegger follows a list of key words through Rilke's poetry: 'relation,' 'venture,' 'departure,' 'open,' 'life,' 'earth,' 'nature,' and 'angel.' I use these same words to explicate Heidegger's own understanding of the relation between humans and entities during his turn away from the anthropocentrism of Being and Time. I primarily focus on the role given to natural entities in the new configuration of being set forth in the Beitrage zur Philosophie, the major, but unpublished, project of this transitional period I argue that Heidegger's understanding of nature, earth, and technology in the Beitrage prevents him from decentering the human subject as the privileged site of being. Heidegger attempts to decenter Dasein by critiquing the effectiveness of human action, but he does not allow for the possibility that natural entities can exert an ontological or ethical pull on us. Heidegger maintains an ontological division between nature and humans, which results in an unbridgeable gap between subject and object, and in an essentially Dasein-centered world In the concluding chapter I sketch out a way in which Heidegger's desire for a non-Dasein-centered understanding of being can be reconciled with his sometimes justified fears of naturalism, by reevaluating his understanding of history (Geschichte). History is not to be understood as a 'sending of Being' (Geschick) whose recipient is Da-sein, but as a 'gathering layering' (Ge-schichte ). This understanding of history makes room for a natural dimension to Being, and no longer requires that the historical be defined in opposition to the natural / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

This study seeks to accomplish two goals. First, it will reestablish Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) as America's first important interpreter of Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832), Germany's best-known lyric poet. The study includes full transcription and complete annotation of Fuller's Reading Journal O manuscript detailing the experimental series of Conversations on Goethe that Fuller conducted in the spring or summer of 1839. The manuscript suggests that Fuller was an expert on all of Goethe's works, not just on his literary oeuvre. The experimental series of Conversations on Goethe was a prototype for the Boston Conversations for Women, those watershed events in the history of the American women's movement that Fuller envisioned and then carried out between the fall of 1839, and the winter of 1844. Second, this study will examine Fuller's debt to German sensibility as she found it in Goethe and other German writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Fuller learned Innerlichkeit, inwardness, and Gelassenheit, or serenity, from her long study of German letters. Her incorporation of German sensibility was useful to her in two ways. First, German sensibility was important to Fuller's unique pedagogical philosophy. By encouraging her students to practice German sensibility, Fuller taught them how to educate themselves through their own initiatives. Second, German sensibility facilitated Fuller's critical stance, thereby aiding in the development of her feminism. Fuller's discussion of Iphigenia, the heroine of Goethe's classical play called Iphigenia at Tauris, displays the extent of her reliance on German sensibility in creating her most insightful feminist writings. Fuller wrote about Goethe's Iphigenia in the July 1841 issue of the transcendentalist journal called the Dial. Her remarks a there prove that her feminism was fully developed two years before she wrote "The Great Lawsuit: Man vs. Men, Woman vs. Women," the essay she expanded and later published as Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

As one of the most significant postmodern writers in contemporary Germany, Libuse Monikova critically explores the political divisions of Europe from different perspectives, using an interdisciplinary approach to educate her reader. All her works relate either directly or indirectly to her native Czecho-Slovakia. This dissertation focuses on four of Monikova's works, Prager Fenster, "Tetom and Tuba," Pavane fur eine verstorbene Infantin, and Der Taumel, and examines her understanding of the densely layered concept of Heimat. Monikova depicts her Heimat construct through the metaphor of disability and disease as a landscape of German and Soviet occupations and as a territory of historically and politically rooted power struggles. Her analysis of the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from the former Czecho-Slovakia as well as her portrayal of Czech complicity in the totalitarian regime redefines concepts of victimization and resistance, and reveals the unstable discursive nature of subordination and domination. Monikova's concept of Heimat cannot be fully understood without the inclusion of minority and gender discourses as well as art as cultural space. This study underscores Monikova's analysis of the situation of women and minorities in her country of origin. Monikova makes transparent the kind of masculine superiority that is comfortably ensconced not only in Czecho-Slovak society, but also in western epistemologies. Her dynamic, witty, and politically alert female figures are independent intellectuals with vitriolic humor who offer a fresh alternative to ideological and dogmatic idealism that prevails in many feminist texts of the 1970s. Furthermore, I attempt to show how Monikova, an author who emphasizes a decentralized perspective of writing through otherness and displacement, portrays minorities living in her Heimat. Methodologically, I include theories of Czech, Slovak, German, and US cultural critics in my study. Consequently, I seek to not only [re]discover Monikova as a writer and political activist in the Czech Republic where her texts began to be published only recently, but also to engage her critics in a constructive inter-cultural dialogue.

<p> Science fiction critics have dueled over definitions of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century science fiction, often classifying early science fiction as mere prototype. Chapter One of this thesis examines the myriad definitions of the term &ldquo;science fiction&rdquo; allowing a distinguishable set of literary characteristics for science fiction, fantasy, and science fantasy. Early science fiction authors such as Johannes Kepler, Francis Godwin, Savinien Cyrano De Bergerac, Margaret Cavendish, and Jonathan Swift refashioned the familiar fantasy genre with scientific ideas, establishing a science fantasy genre to frame dangerous and rebellious ideas in a conventional and innocuous structure, the fiction novel. Chapter Two analyzes the science fiction elements present in early science fantasy of Kepler, Godwin, De Bergerac, Cavendish, and Swift as well as the scientific, religious, and political ramifications of science fantasy in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Chapter Three briefly highlights elements of early science fantasy that influenced twentieth- and twenty-first century science fiction. Early science fantasy not only influenced generations of science fiction writers and scientists, but it also was one of the main forces that legitimized the sciences.</p>

Contrary to many theorists, I consider a narrative form appropriate for feminist texts. Many feminists demanded an anti-narrative form. Cixous' and Irigaray's plea for such a style based on female jouissance seems dangerous because it reinforces patriarchal stereotypes of women as irrational, biologically determined creatures. In contrast, Kristeva's anti-narrative semiotic as both bisexual jouissance and revolutionary practice seems "ideal" in connection with a certain content (such as the deconstruction of the opposition masculine/feminine). However, being difficult and elitist, anti-narrative writing has limited impact. Most people remain exposed exclusively to patriarchally influenced texts. For these reasons, I suggest a multiplicity of forms, especially since a narrative style need not be authoritative or closed. This suggestion limits the importance of form but not of language. Language should be both nonsexist and unconventional; for example, it should avoid traditional metaphors analogizing women with nature, emotion etc.