Books by Alison Lewis
Other Encounters: European Writers and Gender in Transnational Context
The nationalist projects of the long nineteenth century in Europe sought to define and contain th... more The nationalist projects of the long nineteenth century in Europe sought to define and contain the national self by positing concepts of national character and incommensurable national difference. Scholarship on European nationalisms has shown that national identity is inherently gendered, as can be seen from the gendered division of the public and private spheres, the exclusion of women from nation-building projects, the gendered politics of culture and from gendered allegories of the nation itself. At the same time many 19th century European writers (both male and female) sought to destabilize the intrinsic gendering of their own cultural and political nationalisms. Moreover, the nineteenth century was witness to new and different transnational encounters thanks to factors such as urbanization, mass migration, imperialism, industrialization and the advent of leisure travel. This collection of essays, spanning the long nineteenth century from the revolutionary late-eighteenth century to the pre-WWI period in the twentieth century, explores the varied ways in which the transnational encounter contributed to or contested the gendered paradigm of nineteenth-century nationalisms. A number of essays look to debates and learned discussions that dwell on gender in a transnational context. When regarding gender roles in other nations, writers and philosophers used national differences in gender roles to achieve greater clarity in defining their own national virtues and traits. Other contributors to this volume focus on accounts of actual encounters in the form of travel writing, penned by both women and men. Travel writing thus provides opportunities to enact, critique and even transcend the gendered context of one’s own national setting.
Articles & Chapters by Alison Lewis
Lessons Learned: Teaching European Studies in full Eurovision
Chris Hay and Jess Carniel (eds). Eurovision and Australia: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Down Under, 2019
Papers by Alison Lewis
Otago German studies, 2005
In the early nineteen-nineties women's studies programmes in Australian universities found themse... more In the early nineteen-nineties women's studies programmes in Australian universities found themselves under threat from a new interdisciplinary field that in the United States had been challenging women's studies' exclusive hold on questions of sex and gender since the late eighties. This field was gender studies. Existing women's studies programmes in Australia that had been established a decade earlier -either as crossdisciplinary programmes run in collaboration with the traditional departments of English, History and Politics or as autonomous centres in Arts faculties -came under increasing pressure to reinvent themselves as gender studies. In the many newly formed humanities schools that were established in the nineteen-nineties under the Dawkins higher education reforms, when the technical institutes and teaching colleges (the so-called colleges of advanced education) across the country were awarded the status of universities, similar battles were waged. Here too, feminist scholars and teachers in the disciplines of literary studies, cultural studies, history, politics and sociology were expanding the parameters of their women's studies programmes. The curious thing was that teachers in the fields of women's studies often found themselves under institutional pressure to move beyond the paradigm of gender studies as well -even before gender studies had become institutionalised. What feminists in these newer universities were being exhorted to conceptualise was a postfeminist and post-gender model of the curriculum, a model in which gender equality could be more or less assumed or taken for granted. The rationale for this was, ostensibly, that humanities majors within the Bachelor of Arts degree already sufficiently addressed gender concerns across the curriculum. At the time there was a trend in many Australian universities towards offering area studies majors such as Asian Studies and European Studies. Gender studies, it was thought in some places, did not sit well within geographically defined majors. Many managers or heads of programmes questioned whether arts or humanities
Six weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 on the twin towers of the World Trade ... more Six weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel published an article with the caption: 'Are the towers still standing?' (Schnibben 2001, p. 223). The towers which journalist Cordt Schnibben had in mind were not those of the World Trade Centre but another set of pillars of stability and certainty that had been toppled a decade earlier. He was referring to Germany's writers and intellectuals. It had not taken long for the events of September 11 to be turned into an occasion for expressing disappointment with the nation's intellectuals. Schnibben's point is simple enough: the terrorist attacks, as worrying as they were, had alerted Germans to a perennial blight on the post-war intellectual landscape: the failure of the country's writers and social commentators, intellectuals and philosophers. What was particularly disturbing was that the country's intellectual classes appeared to have no answers as to why the attacks had occurred. Germany's intellectuals had not only failed to foresee the disaster that struck on September 11, they had been unable to offer an explanation for the attacks or to provide an analysis of the causes. To reinforce the point that this was a collective failure, Schnibben singles out public figures by name: 'We have read Günter Grass in the FAZ, Peter Schneider in the Woche, Botho Strauß in the Spiegel, Diedrich Diederichsen in der taz, Alexander Kluge in the SZ (Süddeutsche) and were amazed that they were as clueless as we were' (p. 223). As the 'advisors of the powerful' and advocates for all manner of things, for 'Ostpolitik and Vietnam, for the emergency laws and Chile, abortion and Biafra, nuclear energy, Nicaragua and rearmament, always to hand whenever the world's conscience was called for' (p. 223), Germany's intellectuals had failed the nation once again. The Spiegel article invokes a trope of failure and betrayal that has been a habitual feature of German intellectual life in both the Federal Republic of Germany and its now defunct socialist other half, the German Democratic Republic. In West Germany attacks on the integrity and politics of intellectuals were made with predictably regularity under the conservative governments of Adenauer and Erhard in the 1960s,
Manchester University Press eBooks, Mar 31, 2017
Der Band lotet die Reichweiten, Spielräume und wechselnden Konjunkturen des Herkunfts-Begriffs be... more Der Band lotet die Reichweiten, Spielräume und wechselnden Konjunkturen des Herkunfts-Begriffs bei der Generierung von Selbstbildern und Fremdentwürfen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur aus. Dazu zählen u.a.: Migrantenliteratur, Väterliteratur, Nachwendeliteratur, die Ruhrgebietstrilogie von Ralf Rothmann, Botho Strauß’ Erinnerungsbuch Herkunft.
SÜNDENthEoloGIE uND roSENroMaN-KrItIK Variationen der Sündenordnung im PèlerinageCorpus des Guill... more SÜNDENthEoloGIE uND roSENroMaN-KrItIK Variationen der Sündenordnung im PèlerinageCorpus des Guillaume de Déguileville In der frühen Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts, genauer um 1330/31, hat Guillaume de Déguileville, ein Zisterzienser der Abtei Chaalis (bei Senlis), mit der Traumallegorie Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, 1 einer Art geistlicher Umschreibung des berühmten Rosenromans, 2 eine geistli che Summe des menschlichen Lebens verfasst, der im europäischen 1 Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine de Guillaume de Deguileville. Hrsg. von J. J. Stürzinger. London 1893 (Roxburghe Club). Engl. Übersetzung, mit einer Zusammenstellung der Überlieferung des Textes und seiner europäischen Adaptationen: ders.: The Pilgrimage of Human Life (Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine). Übers. von Eugene Clasby. New York und London 1992 (Garland Library of Medieval Literature 76,B). 2 Zur intertextuellen Relation der beiden Traumallegorien, Rosenroman und Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, vgl. vor allem Steven Wright: Deguileville's
Teaching European History and Memory through the Eurovision Song Contest during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Routledge eBooks, May 17, 2022
Research Intersections in Language Studies
Language Policy, 2020
Language studies in Australian universities have weathered considerable crises over the last two ... more Language studies in Australian universities have weathered considerable crises over the last two decades, and they have done so possibly better than in most English-speaking countries. Many language and culture programs have proved astoundingly resistant, and undergraduate numbers are not only stable, but over the last decade they have been on the rise in many places. Our disciplinary home bases continue to expand to include other areas of the humanities such as film studies, cultural history and socio-linguistics. Recent changes in the higher education sector, such as the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Engagement and Impact Assessment (EIA), present us with a further set of challenges. One way forward, which can capitalize on our transdisciplinarity, is offered by Ottmar Ette, who suggests that we reconceptualize the humanities in terms of what kind of knowledge they produce, and how. In considering this approach, I will explore strategies for developing research collaborations across schools and faculties with cognate and complementary disciplines.
Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2017
Dutch Golden Age and that the ability of societies to be resilient and adapt to such challenges s... more Dutch Golden Age and that the ability of societies to be resilient and adapt to such challenges should feature more prominently in environmental histories of climate change. The author engages with concept of a 'global crisis' during the seventeenth century put forward by Geoffrey Parker (who has principally been concerned with political developments including the Dutch Revolt), which some historians have taken issue with. He goes on to contrast the Dutch and Japanese experiences of the Little Ice Age, pointing out that the former explored and mapped the world in exploiting it, whereas the latter remained isolated and grew its domestic economy. A short final section considers lessons from the past including how even moderate changes in climate highlight the complex relationship between climate change and human activity, the effects of which can affect societies differently depending on human activities and their respective environments. The last forward-looking lesson is perhaps the most important: whilst moderate changes in climate have clearly influenced the course of human history, as illustrated by how Dutch citizens responded to floods, storms and severe winters during the Little Ice Age, future climate change may see, for instance, even greater temperature changes raising questions as to how we as a society, globally respond. Overall this book successfully brings together different methodological approaches, draws on a variety of source material and provides an engaging historical narrative which embraces a wide range of subject areas. It shows how between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the republic successfully coped with the challenges of climate change, achieving its apogee economically, socially and culturally regardless of extremes of temperature and precipitation. There is a helpful glossary of climate terms, several maps, an appendix outlining how temperatures and journey statistics were calculated and information about the Danish sound tolls registers, along with an extensive bibliography detailing archive sources, and online and published primary and secondary sources. Offering an exemplar of how climate and the environment more generally can be integrated into national histories, it will be of interest to historians of the Dutch Republic and Europe as well as environmental historians, particularly those interested in the relationship between weather, climate change and human society.
Citizen informants, glitches in the system, and the limits of collaboration
Lessons Learned: Teaching European Studies in Full Eurovision
The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) has by now become well established as a subfield of academic en... more The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) has by now become well established as a subfield of academic enquiry in a rapidly expanding array of disciplines, ranging from international relations, history, media and communication studies, cultural studies, gender studies and ethnomusicology, among others. Rather surprisingly, however, this appreciation of the multifaceted nature of Eurovision has so far had little or no impact on curriculum development in formal teaching contexts in Europe (Cremona, The Eurovision Song Contest Within Formal Learning Contexts: A Critical Multimodal Interpretation of Possible Inter-Disciplinary Connections. Symposia Melitensia 14: 152, 2018). One might reasonably expect that in Australia there would be a similarly low uptake of Eurovision in teaching, especially given the fact that Australia has only participated in ESC as a contestant nation since 2015. It is an entirely fortuitous coincidence that the first offering of a subject devoted primarily to Eurovision...
Research Intersections in Language Studies
Language studies in Australian universities have weathered considerable crises over the last two ... more Language studies in Australian universities have weathered considerable crises over the last two decades, and they have done so possibly better than in most English-speaking countries. Many language and culture programs have proved astoundingly resistant, and undergraduate numbers are not only stable, but over the last decade they have been on the rise in many places. Our disciplinary home bases continue to expand to include other areas of the humanities such as film studies, cultural history and socio-linguistics. Recent changes in the higher education sector, such as the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Engagement and Impact Assessment (EIA), present us with a further set of challenges. One way forward, which can capitalize on our transdisciplinarity, is offered by Ottmar Ette, who suggests that we reconceptualize the humanities in terms of what kind of knowledge they produce, and how. In considering this approach, I will explore strategies for developing research collab...
Germany as Good European: National Atonement and Performing Europeanness in the Eurovision Song Contest
Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956, 2019
The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) can serve as a powerful vehicle for cultural diplomacy. This ch... more The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) can serve as a powerful vehicle for cultural diplomacy. This chapter argues that Germany uses the contest to disavow a distinctly German form of national identity, to craft a post-national identity and to embrace ideas of European citizenship. This manifests itself in the idea of Germany as a ‘Good European’ both in the context of the EU and NATO and the ESC. Germany has used a discrete style of nation-branding through the history of its participation in the ESC, and seeks to be a ‘good sport’ in the competition when it loses. In return, the ESC offers ample opportunity for Europe to either affirm or deny Germany’s self-image as the Good European, through voting and placings.
The Romancing of Collective Creativity: The ‘Bitterfelder Weg’ in Brigitte Reimann’s Letters and Diaries
Dichtung und Wahrheit eines Stasi-Informanten in Annekatrin Hendels Dokumentarfilm Vaterlandsverräter (2012)
Monatshefte, 2018
History and memory both have contributions to make to mastering the communist past, and yet, in r... more History and memory both have contributions to make to mastering the communist past, and yet, in relation to the GDR regime’s perpetrators—such as Stasi officers and informants—they cannot be considered equal partners. Documents from the Stasi archives (BStU) have generally been regarded as more reliable in ascertaining the truth about the past, while memory of collaborators, which often contains more fiction than fact, has been viewed with far more suspicion. Annekatrin Hendel’s documentary, Vaterlandsverräter (2012), about writer Paul Gratzik who was an informer for the Stasi, invokes the “evidentiary authority” (Baron) of the Stasi archive while also giving space to perpetrator memory. This article examines the role of the Stasi files as “testimonial objects” in eliciting a confession from Gratzik and how the confession is staged around the files’ “foundness.” The article argues that the authority of the archive is invoked not to elicit the truth about Gratzik but to probe the pas...
A history of the case study
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Books by Alison Lewis
Articles & Chapters by Alison Lewis
Papers by Alison Lewis