German Studies
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Klaus Weissenberger

Professor

Weissenberger

Email: klausw@rice.edu Phone: x3215 Office: Rayzor Hall 335

Education

  • PhD, University of Southern California, 1967
  • MA, University of Hamburg, Germany, 1965

Areas of Interest

  • nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and Austrian literature
  • poetry from Goethe to the present
  • non-fictional prose from antiquity to the present
  • exile literature

Personal Statement

For Klaus Weissenberger literature is based on the transcendence of the language of communication to that of self-referentiality by way of aesthetics. In poetry, this dramatic process manifests itself in the integration of the visual, acoustic and semantic dimensions into an aesthetic whole based on their reciprocal functionality. Professor Weissenberger has demonstrated this with regard to the poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Else Lasker-Schüler, Franz Werfel and Paul Celan. In a similar way, non-fictional prose thematizes the tension between the discourse subject and object, thus allowing insight into the creative process itself. Professor Weissenberger’s numerous articles on the diary, travel journal, autobiography, biography, essay and aphorism demonstrate the literary quality of these genres, which thus far has been overlooked by most scholars.

At present, Professor Weissenberger is investigating the function of non-fictional prose genres in exile literature, which forced the authors to reevaluate their raison d’être and express their existential challenge in a specific aesthetics. Since the majority of German and Austrian authors had gone into exile, this investigation is aiming at providing a representative cross section of the various literary manifestations of this human catastrophe. In addition, it serves the purpose of recognizing the literary stature of many authors, whose names and works have fallen into oblivion as a result of their exile—most notably in the case of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth.

Selected Publications

  • Prosakunst ohne Erzählen: Die Gattungen der nicht-fiktionalen Kunstprosa (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985).
  • Die deutsche Lyrik von 1945 bis 1975: Zwischen Botschaft und Spiel (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1981).
  • Zwischen Stein und Stern: Mystische Formgebung in der Dichtung von Else Lasker-Schüler, Nelly Sachs und Paul Celan (Bern: Francke, 1976).
  • Die Elegie bei Paul Celan (Bern: Francke, 1969).
  • Formen der Elegie von Goethe bis Celan (Bern, Francke, 1969).
  • “Arthur Koestlers nicht-fiktionale Kunstprosa—im Spannungsfeld von Überlebensstrategie, Identitätsfindung und Erkenntnisgewinnung,” in Robert Weigel (ed.), Arthur Koestler: Ein heller Geist in dunkler Zeit (forthcoming in 2008).
  • “Xenophons ‘Anabasis’—als Modell der Überlebensstrategie im Exil bei Csokor, Borchardt und Celan,” in Ilona Slawinski (ed.), Der Mnemosyne Träume (Tübingen: Francke, 2007),
  • “Rituals of Activism in Expressionist Poetry,” in Neil H. Donahue (ed.), A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 185-228.
  • “Prosa,” in Gert Ueding (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. VII (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005), 321-48.
  • “Franz Werfels Prosa—ihre Entwicklung vom sozialkritischen Pathos zum gemeinschaftsbildenden Ethos,” in Helga Schreckenberger (ed.), Alchemie des Exils: Exil als schöpferischer Impuls (Vienna: Edition Praesens, 2005), 191-215.
  • “Kunstprosa der Moderne, 18. bis 20. Jd.,” in Gert Ueding (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. IV (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), 1506-31.