DEPARTMENT OF GERMAN

Congratulations to Professor Erica Weitzman on winning a prestigious Fellowship Award at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin!  She will be working on her project titled Bluster: Bourgeois Anxiety and Expository Style in Mid- to Late Nineteenth-century Germany.

"My project investigates a strangely dominant, yet largely unexamined tone in mid- to late nineteenth-century German literature: a paradoxical combination of bombast, avuncularity, belligerence, and petulance that I, taking a cue from an early book review by Friedrich Nietzsche, designate with the name “bluster.” Through readings of particular works of popular philosophy and the both stylistic and thematic debates that they provoked (as well as some fictional examples), I explore the implications of this tone as simultaneously a form of self-legitimation and a response to a legitimation crisis: the expression of masculine bourgeois fragility in the age of the bourgeoisie’s supposed triumph."