| No Photo | Lorna Martens Professor |
Degrees
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature,
M.Phil. in Comparative Literature,
B.A. in
German Literature,
Interests
As her publications show, Lorna Martens's research interests are wide-ranging. She has worked in areas in Comparative Literature (German, English, French) from the eighteenth century to the present. She nevertheless keeps coming back to the period around 1900; to narrative, poetry, and autobiography, and their theories; and to feminist and women's studies issues. She is drawn to canonical as well as neglected literature, to classic textual analysis and literary history, and to literary, cultural, psychoanalytic, and aesthetic theory. Right now she is working on a topic at the intersection of psychology and literature: childhood memory and its treatment in autobiographical narrative.
Books
The Diary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 307pp. (First history of the diary novel,
concentrating on French, German, and English works; some Russian and Scandinavian; genre theory;
interpretations of major works by writers such as Defoe,
Gide, Rilke, Frisch, Butor, and Doris Lessing.)
Shadow Lines: Austrian Literature from Freud to Kafka (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1996), 291pp. (Literary analysis of major writers of the 1890-1924
period.)
The Promised Land? Feminist
Writing in the German Democratic Republic (
Childhood Memory in
Modernism: Proust, Rilke, and Benjamin (in progress).
Gender and Childhood Autobiography (in progress). (On women's childhood autobiographies worldwide.)
Articles
"
"Irreversible Processes,
Proliferating Middles, and Invisible Barriers: Spatial Metaphors in Freud,
Schnitzler, Musil, and Kafka," in Focus
on
"Secrets, Speech, and
Silence: Stefan Zweig's Concept of Expressive Language,"
"Mirrors and Mirroring:
'Fort/da' Devices in Texts by Rilke, Hofmannsthal, and Kafka," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, 58 (1984),
139-155.
"Saying 'I'", Stanford Literature Review, 2 (1985),
27-46.
"Autobiographical Narrative
and the Use of Metaphor: Rilke's Techniques
in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids
Brigge," Studies in Twentieth
Century Literature 9 (1985), 229-249.
"Geschlecht und
Geheimnis: Expressive Sprache bei Stefan
Zweig," in Stefan Zweig heute, ed. Mark H. Gelber (New York: Peter Lang,
1987), pp. 44-65.
"The Theme of the Repressed
Memory in Hofmannsthal's Elektra,"
The German Quarterly, 60 (1987),
38-51.
"Musil and Freud: The Foreign Body in 'Die Versuchung der
stillen Veronika,'" Euphorion,
81 (1987), 100-118.
"Art, Freedom, and Deception
in Kafka's 'Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,'" Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, 61 (1987), 720-732.
"A Dream Narrative:
Schnitzler's 'Der Sekundant,'" Modern
Austrian Literature, 23, Nr. 1 (1990), 1-17.
"Kunst und Gewalt:
Bemerkungen zu Hofmannsthals Ästhetik," Austriaca, 37 (1993): 155-165.
"'Der Schwung der Figur':
Rilke's Debt to Valéry," Comparative
Literature 47 (1995): 215-234.
"The Hellenistic Age of
Narratology" (reviewing Ann Fehn, Ingeborg Hoesterey, and Maria Tatar,
eds., Neverending Stories: Toward a Critical
Narratology, Semiotica 109-1/2 (1996): 187-193.
"Naked Bodies in Schnitzler's
Late Prose," in "Die Seele ist
ein weites Land": Kritische Beiträge zum Werk Arthur Schnitzlers, ed. Joseph P. Strelka
(Bern: Lang, 1997), pp. 105-127.
"The Institutionalization of
Conflict as an Interpretative Strategy in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams," in Agonistics: Arenas of Creative
Contest, ed. Janet Lungstrum and Elizabeth Sauer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997),
pp. 129-151.
"Ich-Verdoppelung und
Allmachtsphantasien in Texten des frühen Hofmannsthal: 'Erlebnis', Das Bergwerk zu Falun, 'Reitergeschichte,'" in Sprachkunst 33 (2002):215-238.
"Nostalgia
and Childhood Autobiography" (forthcoming in The Proceedings of Eleventh Cultural Studies Symposium "Memory and
Nostalgia"- a Publication of Ege University Faculty of Letters,
Awards
and Fellowships
Faculty
Research Grant, University of Virginia 2007
Sesquicentennial
Associateship 1993-94, 1999-2000, 2005-06
Fulbright
Senior Fellowship to
Guggenheim
Fellowship, 1987-88
Summer
Institute for the Study of Avant-Gardes, Harvard, 1987
Morse
Fellowship, 1981-82
DAAD
Fellowship for dissertation research in
Connecticut
State Scholarship 1972-75 (summer stipend)
Fulbright
Grant to
Woodrow
Wilson Fellow 1969-70
Phi Beta Kappa 1969