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Department of Germanic Languages
University of North Carolina
438 Dey Hall, CB# 3160
Chapel Hill NC 27599
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Siegfried Mews has published widely in the
area of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German (and
comparative) literature. His own publications, which
have been
complemented by a considerable array of editorial
and professional activities, range, in roughly chronological
order, from Heinrich von Kleist, Heine, Keller, Meyer,
Dahn, Zuckmayer, Brecht, Böll, Grass, Walser,
Maron to Peter Schneider. In his writings he has dealt
with general topics such as Naturalism, exile and
postwar literature, the reception of foreign letters
in Germany, the
Amerikabild of various writers,
and the campus novel as well as specific author- or
text-oriented studies.
Among his abiding interests are Bertolt Brecht -
A Bertolt Brecht Reference Companion (Ed.)
appeared in 1997 - and Günter Grass; during the
last
decade or so
he has tended to write and lecture
on the problems arising from the intersection of literature
and politics - a problem that has gained new poignancy
as a result of the developments in postwall Germany
and Europe. Questions such as how the Berlin Wall was
and is represented in literary texts, how the function
of postwar (East and West) German letters is being
redefined in the post-Wende era, and how nationalist
sentiments are being conveyed through the medium of
literature are indicative of an approach that seeks
to take into account the changes that have been wrought
as a consequence of the fall of the Berlin Wall. |
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