Navigating the Nineteenth Century: A Critical Bibliography

Summary

Virtually all professors and graduate students of German in the United States today are aware that the gradual shift in emphasis from a focus on German literature and linguistics in their departments to a broader-based engagement with German Studies (and all the subdisciplines this term comprehends) has brought about major changes in curricular offerings and reading lists. Departments of German Studies offer a wide variety of courses on such topics as film, politics, German multiculturalism, and social histories of women and minorities, with correspondingly less emphasis on traditional works of German literature. Less well known and documented, but evident to anyone who discusses the issue of master and doctoral level general examinations with German Studies graduate students across the country, is the circumstance that these students are still expected to have a firm grasp of literary periods. To cite one personal example: in 2002 I was in contact with a former student who had graduated with a bachelor's degree in German from my university. She was preparing for an examination in nineteenth-century German literature, the last step in her quest for a master's degree at a different institution. She complained about the paucity of recent works treating German literature in a broad, comprehensive manner. She was particularly concerned that she had not attained a sufficient grasp of the various movements and periods that are used, then as now, to critically and chronologically organize the works composed during these roughly seventy years.