Dr Kirstin Gwyer

German translation, German literature from the eighteenth century to the present, with a special interest in modernist and contemporary writing. Prescribed authors offered include Thomas Mann, Kafka and Bachmann.

Kirstin Gwyer’s research interests are in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, with a particular focus on modern Jewish and Holocaust literature, twentieth- and twenty-first-century aftermath writing, comparative literature, literary theory and postmodernism, and intersections between literature and science. She is currently writing a book on Kafka’s intertextual afterlife in works by authors and thinkers responding to human limit experiences: genocide, (post)colonialism, racism, terrorism, environmental collapse.

Monograph

• * Encrypting the Past: The German-Jewish Holocaust Novel of the First Generation (Oxford: OUP, September 2014)

• Lynn Wolff, Monatshefte 109 (2017), 326-29

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/662728/summary

• Joachim Whaley, Journal of European Studies 45 (2015), 268-69

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0047244115595745h

Articles and book chapters

• * ‘In the Shadow of No Memories? The Role of Dementia in Contemporary Aftermath Writing’, in The Politics of Dementia: Forgetting and Remembering the Violent Past in Literature, Film and Graphic Narratives, ed. by Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff, Nina Schmidt, and Sue Vice (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022), 17-37 doi.org/10.1515/9783110713626
• * ‘Kafka and his Recursors: The Process of Post-Holocaust Authors’, in From the Enlightenment to Modernism: Three Centuries of German Literature – Essays for Ritchie Robertson, ed. by Carolin Duttlinger, Kevin Hilliard, and Charlie Louth (Cambridge: Legenda, 2021), 262-78 doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2dzzr3s.21
• * ‘Planetarity in the Global? Modern Jewish Literature in English’, in Disseminating Jewish Literatures: Knowledge, Research, Curricula, ed. by Ruth Fine, Natasha Gordinsky, Kader Konuk, Claudia Olk, Galili Shahar, and Susanne Zepp (Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2020), 115-25 doi.org/10.1515/9783110619003
• ‘Gynter Grass bald anders: Taking the Self out of Autobiography in Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel’, Oxford German Studies 48.3 (2019), 328-45 doi.org/10.1080/17513472.2019.1664160
• ‘H. G. Adler’s “Grenzgängertum”: Trans-Border Travel between Enlightenment Epistemology and Modernist Representation’, in A Modernist in Exile: The International Reception of H. G. Adler, ed. by Lynn L. Wolff (Oxford: Legenda, 2019), 62-78 doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv16km16j.11
• * ‘“You think your writing belongs to you?”: Intertextuality in Contemporary Jewish Post-Holocaust Literature’, Humanities 7.1 (2018), 20 (1-18) doi.org/10.3390/h7010020
• ‘Beyond Lateness? “Postmemory” and the Late(st) German-Language Family Novel’, in Figuring Lateness: Lateness, Belatedness and Late Style in Modern German Culture, ed. by Karen Leeder (= New German Critique 125 (2015)), 137-53 doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-2889308
• ‘“Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte(n)”: Memory and Intertextuality in H. G. Adler and W. G. Sebald’, in Memory, Witnessing, Poetics: H. G. Adler and W. G. Sebald, ed. by Helen Finch and Lynn L. Wolff (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014), 112-36