Dr Georgina Paul, M.A., D.Phil.
Associate Professor in German, Fellow of St. Hilda's College
Research
Georgina Paul works principally in the field of contemporary German literature. She specialises in the literature of the GDR (East Germany) and literature post-unification, and has published some important essays on Christa Wolf in particular. She also has a lively interest in gender issues - how gender is theorised, what it means to be a gendered subject, and how this is represented and reflected upon in literary texts. She is a published translator, both of scholarship and of contemporary poetry.
Teaching
German language and literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, with particular interests in the politics and literature of the post-1945 period in the Federal Republic, the GDR, and in Austria, and in literature by women. Modern prescribed authors offered include Christa Wolf, Elfriede Jelinek, W. G. Sebald.
Graduate Teaching
She has in the past supervised successful doctoral theses on women writers of the Expressionist period, on the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, the contemporary writer Anne Duden, and on German literature in translation post-1990, as well as Masters work on Elfriede Jelinek, the Turkish writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and on theoretical approaches to contemporary writing by women. She is currently supervising DPhil students working on popfeminist writing in the US, UK and Germany, and responses in contemporary German poetry to the 20th-century avant-garde 'tradition'.
Publications
Books
Perspectives on Gender in Post-1945 German Literature, Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009)
Editor, An Odyssey for Our Time: Barbara Köhler's Niemands Frau, German Monitor, vol. 78 (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2013)
Editor, with Helmut Schmitz, Entgegenkommen: Dialogues with Barbara Köhler, German Monitor, vol. 48 (Amsterdam, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000)
Articles/chapters in books
'Gender in GDR Literature', in Re-reading the GDR, ed. Karen Leeder, Cambridge: CUP, forthcoming 2014
'Christa Wolf's Medea. Stimmen', in The Novel in German since 1990, ed. Stuart Taberner, Cambridge: CUP, 2011, 64-78
'The Terrorist in the Theatre: Elfriede Jelinek's / Nicolas Stemann's Ulrike Maria Stuart (2006)', Festschrift for Elizabeth Boa, German Life and Letters LXIV No. 1 (2011), 122-132
'The Privatization of Community: The Legacy of Collectivism in the Post-Socialist Literature of Eastern Germany', Oxford German Studies Volume 38, Number 3, 2009 , 288-298 www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/ogs/2009/00000038/00000003/art00007
'Ismene at the Crossroads: Gender and Poetic Influence', in Flaschenpost. German Poetry and the Long Twentieth Century, ed. Karen Leeder, Special Number of German Life and Letters (LX No.3, 2007), 430-446, Article Weblink
'Unschuld, du Licht meiner Augen: Elke Erb in the company of Friederike Mayröcker in the aftermath of German unification', in Schaltstelle: Contemporary German Poetry in Dialogue, ed. Karen Leeder (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 139-62
'Multiple refractions, or winning movement out of myth: Barbara Köhler’s poem cycle “Elektra. Spiegelungen”', German Life and Letters, LVII No.1 (2004), 21-32, Article Weblink
'An Easter of Words: Steps Towards a Reading of Anne Duden’s Steinschlag', in Anne Duden: A Revolution of Words. Approaches to her Fiction, Poetry and Essays, ed. Heike Bartel and Elizabeth Boa (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2003), 123-148
'“Ich, Seherin, gehörte zum Palast”: Christa Wolf’s literary treatment of the Staatssicherheit in the context of her poetics of self-analysis', in German Writers and the Politics of Culture: Dealing with the Stasi, ed. Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 87-106
'Schwierigkeiten mit der Dialektik: Zu Christa Wolfs Medea. Stimmen', German Life and Letters, L No. 2 (1997), 227-240, Article Weblink
With Godfrey Carr, 'Unification and its Aftermath: The Challenge of History', in: German Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. Rob Burns (Oxford: OUP, 1995), 325-348
'“Ich meine nichts, was könnte gestrichen werden”: Christa Wolf’s ‘Brief über die Bettine’', in Christa Wolf in perspective, ed. Ian Wallace, German Monitor, vol. 30 (Amsterdam, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994), 25-40