Artikelaktionen

Sie sind hier: FRIAS School of Language & … Fellows Prof. Sally Thomason

Prof. Sally Thomason

Allgemeine Linguistik
University of Michigan
März 09

Vergangene FRIAS-Aufenthalte

  • März 09

 

CV


Since 1991, Chair (catedra) for German Philology (Literature) at the University of Barcelona. Taught classes in Newer German Literature, with a focus on the turns of century: 18th-19th and 19th-20th. Teaching and research visits at the Universities of Santiago de Compostela, Sevilla, Trier, Vienna, Freiburg, Würzburg, Zürich, Roma III, Wisconsin, Buenos Aires, including collaboration with comparative research projects (Freiburg, Vienna, Zürich, Buenos Aires). Research and publications have focussed primarily on German-Spanish literary connections during the turns of the centuries, responses to and comparative analyses of German and Spanish literature; currently focussing literature as a means of working through the past and remembrance culture in the twentieth century.
Publications on the reception of German-language literature in Spain; regular journalistic reviews on new translations. Translations and editions of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Bonaventura, Goethe, Jean Améry.
Organizer and Director of the new Master studies program “Construcció i representació d’identitats culturals” (Construction and representation of cultural identities) and the corresponding doctoral program, which has been certified as an Excellence Program by the Spanish Ministry of Education.
Founding member (1980) and from 1984-1992 President of the Catalan German Studies Association (Associació de Germanistes de Catalunya) and its journal “Forum”; founding President of the Spanish Goethe Society (Sociedad Goethe en España) (since 2001). Since 2000, member of the International Academic Advisory Board of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache.
 

Selected Publications

Monographs

  • La recepción de Ibsen y Hauptmann en el modernismo catalán. Barcelona, 1990.
  • La Novela Ideal: literatura popular libertaria. Barcelona, 1980.
  • (with Jordi Jané und Loreto Vilar, Hrgs.): Erzählen müssen, um zu überwinden. Literatura y supervivencia. Barcelona 2009. Darin: Der literarische Diskurs des Holocaust.
  • (with Karl Wagner, Hrsg.): Transkulturelle Beziehungen. Spanien und Österreich im 20 Jh. Amsterdam  New York 2004. Darin: 'Bethsaïda, la piscine des cinq galeries': Literarische Tradition und Schweigen im Werk von Jorge Semprún und Jean Améry.

Editions and Translations

  • Goethe: Obra narrativa. (Edition, introduction and commentary to:  Los sufrimientos del joven Werther, Años de aprendizaje de Wilhelm Meister, Conversaciones de emigrantes alemanes, Afinidades electivas, Años itinerantes de Wilhelm Meister; also translations of Die Leiden des jungen Werther and Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten). Madrid – Córdoba 2006.
  • Jean Améry: Años de andanzas nada magistrales. Introduction, commentary, and translation (translation together with E. Aznar). Valencia, 2007.

Book Chapters, Articles

  • 'Selbstanzeige - Fehlanzeige'. Moderne, Vergangenheitsbewältigung und Ichkonstruktion bei Jean Améry. In: Literarische Moderne (Hg. Sabina Becker und Helmut Kiesel) Tübingen 2007.
  • La Novela Ideal - Anarchistische Volksliteratur (1925-1938) in: Erinnern und Erzählen. Der spanische Bürgerkrieg in der deutschen und spanischen Literatur und in den Bildmedien. (Bannasch Hg., Tübingen, 2005)
  • Goethe in Spanien- In: Ihr mögt mich benutzen. Goethe: usos y abusos (Marisa Siguan und Jordi Jané Hrsg.) Barcelona, 2004
  • Wenn es Calderón nicht gegeben hätte, die Deutschen hätten ihn erfunden: Deutsche Romantik und spanisches Barock, in:  Jahrbuch der Jean Paul Gesellschaft, 2007.

 

FRIAS Research Project

Retelling to survive: on the boundaries of expressibility
One part of twentieth century literature is directly related to experiences and suffering in historical traumata (war, exile, prison, concentration camps) and deals with these in different ways: The relationship between literature and life is examined; the writing of literature is utilized as a survival tool, endorsed as eyewitness testimony for the future, and used as a didactic tool to prevent history from repeating itself. Thus, writing finds itself in a complicated dynamic of remembering and forgetting; the agony of remembering is an integral part of the writing process. Literature itself thereby explores the possibilities of retelling and the representability of horror and reflects on the boundaries of expressibility,  looking for new possibilities. Writing thereby also contains an important component of identity construction: By writing, the individual tries to cope with his/her own biography, and in the collective sense writing plays a role in the construction of a collective memory and historical forms of representation. The aim of my project is to explore this set of problems by individually examining case studies with a focus on German-language and Spanish authors of the twentieth century (presumably holocaust, war, and civil war literature).