Volume 10.1: Foreward
Dear Readers,
We are pleased to announce the publication of the first installment of texts for our 2015–2016 Tenth Anniversary Volume. Articles in this publication center around two themes of interest to contemporary German Studies: digital humanities research and the concept of the barrier. These research prompts for TRANSIT emerged out of conferences and panel style presentations. Our special topic subsection on the digital humanities arose out of continuing discussions inspired by Deniz Göktürk’s 2014 Chicago MLA Panel on “Artistic and Scholarly Practice in the Digital Age.” Earlier versions of the projects assembled here were presented at the 2014 Kansas City GSA Panel on “Digital Humanities and German Studies” organized by Matthew Handelman and David D. Kim. Our subsection on the concept of barriers grew out of UC Berkeley’s 2015 Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference “Barriers,” organized by four graduate students from the UC Berkeley Department of German: Jon Cho-Polizzi, Stephanie Peltner, Alicia Roy, and Cara Tovey.
SPECIAL TOPIC 1:
The Digital German Humanities
The four digital humanities projects showcased here draw out of conversations from the above mentioned 2014 GSA panel on Digital Humanities and German Studies. They consist of a cluster of three articles spearheaded by Professor David D. Kim consisting of a general introduction to the role of digital research in German Studies, as well as two projects:
PROLEGOMENON: Distant Reading and Computational Networking in German Studies
David D. Kim
PROJECT ONE: WorldLiterature@UCLA: Tracking International Publics with Goethe
David D. Kim and Nickolas de Carlo
PROJECT TWO: Patterns of the Anthemion: Discovering Networks of Coincidence in W.G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten
David D. Kim and Mark J. Phillips
Also included is a third project by Matthew Handelman growing out of the same panel discussions:
Digital Humanities as Translation: Visualizing Franz Rosenzweig’s Archive
Matthew Handelman
SPECIAL TOPIC 2:
Barriers
Although the original impetus for this section grew out of Berkeley’s Annual Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference, the scope of research included in the following subsection goes well beyond the presentations at our conference.
Included is a research paper by Professor James A. Schultz originally presented at a previous year’s conference. Although not responding directly to our CFP on Barriers, Schultz’s intervention in medieval studies demonstrates the utilization of pre-modern literature towards overcoming barriers to our own modern conceptualization of sexuality:
Thinking Sexuality Differently: Hartmann von Aue, Michel Foucault, and the Uses of the Past
James A. Schultz
The following three articles respond directly to our CFP on Barriers. They include one paper presented at our conference, as well as two other articles which demonstrate the breadth and relevance of the topic to contemporary research in German Studies:
W oder die translinguale Erinnerung: Cécile Wajsbrot und die deutsche Sprache
Dirk Weissmann
Schwarm und Schwelle: Migrationsbewegungen in Elfriede Jelineks Die Schutzbefohlenen
Silke Felber and Teresa Kovacs
Alley-Grave: The Boundary of the Ghetto in Der Schrei den niemand hört! by Else Feldmann
Christina Färber
The last article included in this subsection is a combined thought piece and literary commentary by Yael Almog on the role of Berlin in contemporary Hebrew literature:
Migration and Its Discontents: Israelis in Berlin and Homeland Politics
Yael Almog
Translation
Our final publication in Volume 10.1 is a translation of Osman Engin’s 1994 short story “Amigo Armado,” originally published in his collection Dütschlünd, Dütschlünd übür üllüs:
Amigo Amado
By Osman Engin
Translated by Tes Howell
This publication is the first of a two-part Tenth Anniversary Volume to be continued in Spring of 2016 with further articles responding to our CFPs on barriers and the digital humanities, as well as a guest-edited special feature by Berkeley alumni: “The Future of the Past.”
I would like to thank the contributors to this issue for their patience and diligence throughout the process of revision and the editors for their meticulous edits and insightful comments.
We would like to remind you that we continue to invite rolling submissions, including translations, articles, and multimedia projects, and we always welcome suggestions for collaborations with guest editors.
We hope you enjoy the first installment of texts for our 2015-2016 volume, and we look forward to possibilities for future collaboration and exchange.
Sincerely,
Jon Cho-Polizzi, on behalf of the editors of TRANSIT