20th century

Bronwen Tate is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Her dissertation "Putting it All in, Leaving it All Out: Questions of Scale in Post-1945 American Poetry" uses scale as a lens to reevaluate 20th century poetic theories and practices. At a theoretical level, this project contrasts the opposing compositional impulses and reading experiences of a poetry of essence and a poetry of duration.  Her work brings into dialogue writers as aesthetically divergent as Allen Ginsberg and Lorine Niedecker or Frank Stanford and James Merrill, as well as shedding new light on the feminist book-length poems of Lyn Hejinian and Bernadette Mayer and the gesture of poetic reticence in Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Creeley. Bronwen has taught courses in literature, creative writing, and English composition at Stanford University, Brown University, Borough of Manhattan Community College and other institutions. She is a 2011-2013 DARE (Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence) Fellow. 

Dissertation: Late Twentieth-Century French and Italian Essayistic Fiction.

Principal advisors: Jeffrey Schnapp, Laura Wittman. Committee members: Robert Harrison, Joshua Landy, Thomas Harrison (UCLA)

My dissertation analyzes the various strands of essayism in French and Italian fiction from the 1960s to present. Beginning with Montaigne, I define the essay’s main features and survey important theories of the essay into the twentieth century. I then offer an expansive genealogy of European essayistic fiction from the early twentieth century to present. I claim that early essayistic fiction, exemplified by writers such as Valéry, Proust, Musil, and Pirandello, fell dormant until the late 1960s when writers rediscovered that the essay’s tentative nature and its rhetorical structures (digression, dialogism, contingency, hypothetical language) could be enlisted to reorient the novel from a realist trajectory to a more open-ended, speculative, and metaphysical one. These writers include Michel Tournier, Yannick Haenel, Muriel Barbery, Italo Calvino, Claudio Magris, and other contemporary French and Francophone novelists.

Virginia Ramos is a poet and doctoral student in the Comparative Literature department at Stanford University, California, US. She was born in Madrid, Spain, and currently resides in the United States, where she attended college at San Francisco State University and graduated with a B.A. in French and a M.A. in interdisciplinary Humanities with a focus in World Literature. She is currently working on a dissertation on the relationship between space and narrative in 20th and 21st century with a particular emphasis on modernist and contemporary texts. Her interests center on 20th century poetics, poetry, lyrical novel, and multi-genre texts.She works in Spanish, English, French and German Literatures, primarily. She is interested in poetics of liminality and comparative readings that allow for the 'multiplication' of language, the question of “form as content”, “space as content” and the relationship with historical and societal swifts through the creation of novel narrative and poetry with an attention to physical space, often urban. Her work aims to contrast and theorize current and future trends of transnational thought globally. 

Stacy Hartman did her undergraduate work at UC Santa Cruz, where she studied modern German literature and feminist theory. In 2005 she was the recipient of a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship and spent the 2005-2006 academic year living in in the northern German city of Lübeck, teaching in a local high school and learning to love marzipan. In 2008, she completed her M.A. in German Studies with Distinction at the University of Manchester, where she studied (among other things) Turkish-German literature and literature of dictatorship, and wrote her M.A. thesis, entitled "At a Crossroads between Paris and Moscow: Latin America, Sinn und Form, and the Socialist Republic of Letters 1949-1981."

Stacy's dissertation, as yet untitled, looks at the cognitive principles of mind reading and mind blindness in relationship to empathy in 20th century literature. Her other current research interests include the broader use of cognitive science in literary study (especially cognitive metaphor theory), the literature of exile and dictatorship, and gender and sexuality in literature and film. She also has an ongoing interest in the construction of ideology and ethics in children's literature and popular culture.

Publications

"‘A Romance with One’s Own Fantasy’: The Nostalgia of Exile in Anna Seghers’s Mexico." Edinburgh German Yearbook, Volume 3: Contested Legacies: Constructions of Cultural Heritage in the GDR. Ed. Matthew Philpotts and Sabine Rolle. New York: Camden House, 2009.

Recent Presentations

"'False Leads and Cold Cases': The Insolubility of History in Michael Chabon's The Final Solution," Vanderbilt University, German Studies Graduate Student Conference, March 2012.

"White Ribbons and Purifying Punishments: The Metaphoric Construction of Morality in Das weiße Band," Stanford University, German Studies Colloquium, March 2012.

Teaching Experience

Pre-Stanford

English as a foreign language. Germany, Ecuador, and the United States.

At Stanford:

German 1-3. German language first year courses, taught in German. Responsibilities included helping intermediate and novice speakers advance to the intermediate-mid level in German; use of the textbook Deutsch: Na Klar!; use of multimedia, including films, online videos, computerized oral and written exams. Concentration on oral proficiency. 2011-2012.

German 21. Reading short stories, and review of German structure. Discussions in German, short compositions, videos.

Professional Activities

2010-2012 Co-founder and Student Coordinator of the German Studies Forum, Stanford University

2011-2013 Student Coordinator, Assessing Graduate Education Project, Stanford University

• Responsible for implementing the "DLCL Graduate Student Survey," which looked at best practices across the six DLCL departments, and then writing the report for the survey. This led to vigorous and productive debate.

2012 Steering committee member, DLCL Graduate Student Conference: Urban / Jungles, Stanford University

2012-2013 Student Coordinator, Teagle Project: Faculty and Graduate Student Collaboration, Stanford University

2012-2013 Intern, Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education, Stanford University

• Helped launch the VPGE's Facebook page and contributed to their evolving social media projects and policies
• Organized a series of talks from people in alternative academic careers around the university

2012-2013 Student representative, Graduate Academic Committee, Stanford University

Book Reviews

Jaimey Fischer and Barbara Mennel, ed.: Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture." The Modern Language Review, Volume 107, Number 1, 1 January 2012, pp. 324-326.

David Clarke and Renate Rechtien, ed.: The Politics of Place in Postwar German: Essays in Literary Criticism." The Modern Language Review, Volume 106, Number 2, 1 April 2011, pp. 605-606.

Axel Goodbody, Pól Ó Dochartaigh, and Dennis Tate, ed.: Dislocation and Reorientation: Exile, Division andthe End of Communism in German Culture and Politics. In Honour of Ian Wallace." The Modern Language Review, Volume 105, Number 3, 1 July 2010, pp. 923-925.

Katharina Gestenberger: Writing the New Berlin: The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature." The Modern Language Review, Volume 105, Number 2, 1 April 2010, pp. 608-609.

I began my doctoral studies at Stanford in 2007.  Before that, I studied Central European literature and culture as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where I was also an enthusiastic (if not totally justifiable) member of the Women in Philosophy group.  I then received my M.A. from San Francisco State University with a thesis on history and autofiction in three novels of the mid-1990s. 

My work at Stanford focuses on the development of essayistic novels in Latin America and in German (not "in Germany," as many are Austrian or diasporic), in the context of their very different national/cultural traditions of philosophy and essayism.  I am particularly interested in the relationship between authorship and fictional characters, and the tensions between commitment to authorship and commitment to fiction.  Although my focus is on the modernist and early postmodern era, from roughly 1910 to 1965, these issues become increasingly salient as the 20th century draws to a close.  I am also interested in the essay as form in world literature, and in methodological questions of how to approach and discuss nonfiction genres.

I entered Stanford's Comparative Literature program in 2005, after completing an A.B. at Brown University, summa cum laude, double concentration in Comparative Literature and Italian Studies (2004).  I also studied at the Universitá di Bologna, dipartimento di Italianistica from 2002-2003. My research interests compass late 19th, 20th and 21st century U.S. and Latin American literature and culture; transnational literary studies (especially hemispheric American contexts); comparative poetics and the history of poetry in English, Spanish and Italian; modernism and the avant-garde in Europe and the Americas; approaches to the environmental humanities; postmodernism and inter-ethnic literature and cinema in the U.S. "new west."

I am presently completing my dissertation, "Fluent Mundo: Inter-American Poetry, 1939-1973," a study of poetry and the culture of inter-Americanism from the beginning of World War II to the peak of the Latin American literary "boom."

Publications:

Entries for “Sound Poetry,” “Glossolalia,” "Hypogram," "Clavis" and “Matrix,” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edn. (Princeton University Press, forthcoming, 2012).

Book review of Jeffrey Yang’s An Aquarium, Mantis 8 (Summer, 2009): 245-247.

“Reconsidering the ‘Spiritual Economy’: Saint-John Perse, His Translators, and the Limits of Internationalism,” Telos 137 (Spring, 2007): 139-161.

Recent Teaching

COMPLIT 134, "The Poetry of History in the Americas," Spring, 2010 (Instructor)

DLCL 189, "Honors Thesis Writing Workshop," Fall, 2008 and 2009 (TA)

ITALLANG 1 and 2, "First Year Italian," Winter-Spring, 2007 (Instructor)

COMPLIT 121, "Poems, Poetry, Worlds," Fall, 2007 (TA)

COMPLIT 123, "History of Childrens Literature," Spring, 2006 (TA)

Professional Activities:

Assistant Editor, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th Edn (forthcoming, 2012)

Co-founder (with Roland Greene and Nicholas Jenkins) and coordinator, Stanford Workshop in Poetics, 2006-2010

Producer, Entitled Opinions, a weekly radio talk show and podcast hosted by Robert Harrison on KZSU 90.1FM, Stanford University, 2007-2009

Managing Editor, Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism and Translation, Stanford University, 2006-2008. 

Selected Conference Presentations:

"Unscored Librettos of Some Bearded Castro," Trans-American Studies Workshop, Stanford University, April 7, 2011 (scheduled)

"Periodization in the Poetry of the Americas," Institutions of Periodization, American Comparative Literature Association, Vancouver, March 31-April 3, 2011 (scheduled)

"Postwar Poetry and the Ruins of Inter-Americanism: Bishop, Neruda, Olson, Ginsberg," Northwestern University, February 8, 2011

"Fluent Mundo: Notes Toward an Inter-American Stevens," Wallace Stevens Society, American Literature Association, San Francisco, May 25, 2010

“‘The Continent from Pole to Pole’: Poetry and the Infrastructure of  Wartime Pan-Americanism”: Poetry of the Americas Colloquium, Princeton University, April 17, 2010

“The Renga and the Hoax: Poetry under the Cosmopolitan Mandate,” World Literature: Poetics/Performance/Publics, ACLA, New Orleans, April 1-4, 2010

“Elizabeth Bishop, *with Apologies to Pablo Neruda,” Cultural Synchronization and Disjuncture Workshop, Stanford University, February 5, 2010

"Sound Poetry as Genre," Melopoeisis: New Soundings in Music and Poetry (seminar panel), ACLA, Harvard University, March 26-29, 2009

“Hugo Ball’s Lautgedichte and International Language Systems,” Hermes Seminar, London, June 2008

“These Vast Imagination's Shrank: Vico's Giants and the Dimensions of the Human,” Stanford Aesthetics Workshop, May 2007

Selected Awards and Fellowships:

Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center, 2011

Graduate Research Opportunity Grant for work at Fundación Pablo Neruda, Santiago de Chile, 2009

Ric Weiland Graduate Fellowship for outstanding third-year doctoral candidates, 2008-2010