A portrait of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1837). I wrote the following in the Fall of 2014 for a course at Brigham Young University on Deutsche Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts. Introduction The specter of anti-Semitism in German history looms large in today’s post-Holocaust world. The great past works of German literature, ranging from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan der Weise … Read more
The title page of the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon. Last summer there was a bit of an online tussle between Philip Jenkins, a professor of history at Baylor University, and a number of Mormon commenters (including William Hamblin, a retired professor of history at Brigham Young University) on the topic of what … Read more
Goethe in the Roman Campagna (1787) by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. [This paper was written for the seminar on Goethe that I’m taking this semester.] Introduction and Summary Few of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poems have received such sparse and often perfunctory commentary as his 1813 ballad “Der Totentanz.” Most scholars offering critical notations in collections … Read more
Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) [This paper was written for one of my classes on Fin de siècle Viennese literature.] Introduction Readers of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1901 novella Lieutenant Gustl may, upon first encountering the text, feel somewhat overwhelmed by a seemingly chaotic literary structure filled with run-on and disjointed sentences, frequent breaks, and short focus. Notwithstanding this seemingly … Read more