Jane O. NewmanProfessor, Comparative Literature |
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Research Interests |
Comparative Renaissance and Baroque Studies; Walter Benjamin and the Baroque; History and Theories of Comparative Literature; Cultural Studies and Criticism; History and Theories of Rhetoric | |
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Research Abstract |
Jane Newman's interests are in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, French, German, Italian and neo-Latin literature; history of the discipline of Comparative Literature; theories and methods of Comparative Literature; new historicism and cultural materialism; Cold War Renaissance and Baroque Studies. She was a Guggenheim Fellow, 1998-99, and a Humboldt Fellow, 1991-92 and 2004. She is the author of Pastoral Conventions (1990) and The Intervention of Philology (2000), and is currently completing Benjamin's Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque. She is the author of essays on Theocritus, Virgil, Luther, Shakespeare, Opitz, and Lohenstein; the history of printing; race in/and the Renaissance; race and Renaissance legal theory; drama and the history of the stage; early modern science; Simone de Beauvoir and Descartes; Cold War Renaissance Studies; and Erich Auerbach and Edward Said. Newman's additional interests include: Gender, Politics, and Performance in Classical Greek Tragedy; The Latent Pasts of Antiquity in the Early Modern and Post-Modern; From Manuscript to Hyper-Text: A Comparative History of Text Production; Historiography of Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. "After completing a book on the intervention of Renaissance philological practice in the construction of early modern gender identity, I turned to the investigation of the phenomenon of Renaissance Studies itself as a historical product, as well as to the study of the Baroque, to which the Renaissance was inextricably linked as a period and style in discussions beginning already in the nineteenth century. In the course of my research, I have become particularly interested in the role that the work on the earlier periods of a number of German scholars, among them Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Erwin Panofsky, Paul Oskar Kristeller, played in the formation of U.S. Renaissance Studies after WWII and up through the Cold War. It is in the context of these men's scholarship during the early twentieth century in Germany that I place my investigation of Walter Benjamin's book on the German Baroque 'mourning play' (Trauerspiel). Of central concern in this set of projects are the academic practices of canon formation, the rise and fall of theoretical fashions and orthodoxies, and the impact on interpretation of the highly charged ideological criticism that emanated from this period, which was the one that immediately preceded the onset of our own postmodern moment. It seems apt that our own highly politicized post-1989 academy would interrogate its post-1945 heritage, and rethink itself and its role in a postmodern and post-Cold War world in dialogue with the highly charged political times out of which it grew." |
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| Publications |
Books: Pastoral Conventions: Poetry, Language and Thought in Seventeenth-Century Nuremberg. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. The Intervention of Philology: Gender, Learning, and Power in Lohenstein's Roman Plays. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. “Benjamin's Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque” – In progress. “Recentering Europe: Genealogies and Counter-Genealogies of Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, 1860-1989.” – In progress. Selected Articles: "The Word Made Print. Luther's 1522 New Testament in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Representations 11 (Summer, 1985). "Textuality versus Performativity in Neo-Latin Drama: Johannes Reuchlin's Henno." Theatre Journal. 38: 3 (October, 1986) "'Academic Tootsie': Women's Voices, Gender, and Textual Ventriloquism in the German Language Academies." The Eighteenth Century. Theory and Interpretation. 35: 3 (1994). "'And let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness': Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece." Shakespeare Quarterly. 45: 3 (Fall, 1994) "Disorientations: Same-Sex Seduction and Women's Power in Daniel Casper von Lohenstein's Ibrahim Sultan (1673)." Colloquia Germanica. 28: 3-4 (1995) "Almost White, but not Quite: 'Race', Gender, and the Disarticulation of the Imperial Subject in Lohenstein's Cleopatra (1680)." Studies in Early Modern France/EMF Monographs. 3 (1997) "Citational Science: Textuality and the Authority of the 'Scientific Fact' in Early Modern Central Europe (Lohenstein's Cleopatra, 1680)." The Construction of Textual Authority in German Literature of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods. James Poag and Claire Baldwin, Eds. (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001): 211-38. "'Race', Religion, and the Law: Rhetorics of Sameness and Difference in the Work of Hugo Grotius." Rhetoric and Law in the Early Modern Period. Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson, Eds. (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001): 285-317. "Philologie, der Kalte Krieg und das ‘Nachbarock’.” Barock: Neue Sichtweisen einer Epoche. Peter J. Burgard, Ed. (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2001): 323-42. "The Present and our Past: Simone de Beauvoir, Descartes, and Presentism in the Historiography of Feminism." Women's Studies on its Own. Robyn Wiegman, Ed. (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002): 141-73. “Aus dem (Jerusalemer) Archiv: Fritz Strich to Judah Magnes on Walter Benjamin, 26 March, 1928.” In: Trajekte. Zeitschrift des Zentrums für Literaturforschung Berlin 13. Septermber, 2006. 4-7. “’The present confusion concerning the Renaissance’: Burckhardtian Legacies in the Cold War United States.” In: Other Renaissances. Brenda Deen Schildgen, Gang Zhou, and Sander Gilman, Eds. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2006. 243-68. "Nicht am ‘falschem Ort’: Saids Auerbach und die ‘neue’ Komparatistik.” In: Erich Auerbach: Geschichte und Aktualität eines europäischen Philologen. Karlheinz Barck and Martin Treml, Eds. Berlin: Kadmos Kulturverlag, 2006. 341-56 “Baroque Legacies: National Socialism’s Benjamin.” In: Nazi Germany and the Humanities. Anson Rabinbach and Wolfgang Bialas, Eds. Oxford: Oneworld Press. 2007. 238-66. “’Hamlet ist auch Saturnkind’: Citationality, Lutheranism, and German Identity in Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels.” Benjamin Studien 1 (2008). 171-88. “Enchantment in Times of War: Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, and the Secularization Thesis.” In: Representations 105 (2009). 133-67. “Periodization, Modernity, Nation: Benjamin between Renaissance and Baroque.” Journal of the Northern Renaissance 1: 1 (2009). 27-41. “The Afterlives of the Greeks, or: What is the Canon of World Literature?” in: MLA Volume on Approaches to World Literature. New York: MLA. David Damrosch, Ed. (forthcoming, 2009, 17 pp.). “Luther’s Birthday: Aby Warburg, Albrecht Dürer, and Early Modern Media in the Age of Modern War.” (forthcoming, 2009, Daphnis. Zeitschrift für Mittlere Deutsche Literatur. Special Issue on “Consuming News. Newspapers and Print Culture in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800).” Gerhild Scholz Williams and William Layher, Eds.) (37 pp.) |
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| Grant | 2004 Alexander von Humboldt Three-Month Fellowship, Berlin, Germany 2004 UCI Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Fostering of Undergraduate Research 2002-2003 UCI International Center for Writing and Translation, “Endangered Languages and the Preservation of Biocultural Diversity” 2000-2001 Nichols Fellow in Humanities and the Public Sphere, UC Irvine 1998-99 Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Research Fellowship 1995 Research Fellow at the UC Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, CA in Residence Group: "Toward Common Frames: Feminist Epistemologies and Methodologies," Fall, 1995. 1994 UCI School of Humanities/Humanities Associates Annual Teaching Award 1991-92 Alexander von Humboldt Year-Long Research Grant, Tübingen, Germany | |
| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=2772 | |
| Last updated | 02/15/2009 | |