Carl Niekerk
Ph.D. Washington University
Associate Professor - Undergraduate Advisor
Office: 3122 Telephone: 333-7654

Research Interests:
18th-century & 20th-century German literature (especially Austrian and GDR literature), literary and cultural theory, comparative Dutch studies

Biography | Publications | Courses

Biography

Carl Niekerk received his MA in German from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in 1987 and his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1994. He has lived in the United States since 1989. After working at Westminster College (Fulton, Missouri) and the University of Akron (Ohio), Prof. Niekerk joined the faculty of the University of Illinois in 1997.

“At the University of Illinois, I was hired to teach and do research in modern and contemporary literature, culture, and intellectual history. I am a specialist in eighteenth-century German literature and literary / cultural theory, and I have additional interests in twentieth-century Austrian literature and culture and comparative Dutch studies. I have finished a book manuscript that looks at the importance of early Anthropology and Natural History for the eighteenth-century Physics professor, essayist, and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and I currently am working on a book-length study on music, philosophy, and literature in Vienna around 1900.

I find the eighteenth century interesting, because in my view it represents the beginning of a ‘modern’ view of the world. Intellectuals were trying to find original answers to century-old questions. They tried to think for themselves rather than rely on ‘tradition’; they attempted to write in ways that could be understood by everybody. Suddenly, people became much more aware of the fact that the world was bigger than their immediate surroundings. Travel narratives were in demand and toward the end of the eighteenth century, ‘anthropology’ became a very popular field of inquiry. At the same time, it is in the eighteenth century that some of the problems resulting from living in a modern world are starkly revealed; modern racism and anti-Semitism have their roots in some eighteenth-century theories.

In my courses, I try to recreate some of the sense of wonder that results from an encounter with the new and the different. A number of my courses, both for undergraduate and graduate students, have dealt in one way or another with the ways in which different cultures and value systems encounter each other, and, ideally, learn to communicate with one another and to negotiate their differences. This coming year I will teach a Discovery Course on the ‘History of Sexuality.’ In the first part of the class we will discuss literary texts and films that allow us to reconstruct Western constructions of sexuality since 1800, while in the second part of the class we turn our attention to South-East Asia and look at non-Western constructions of sexuality. This class allows me to work with very interesting texts and films, some of them quite famous, some of them not very well known. In class we discuss a broad range of topics. Students often come up with original insights.”

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Publications

Doctoral Thesis          

Bildungskrisen:  Die Frage nach dem Subjekt in Goethes Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten

Books

Zwischen Naturgeschichte und Anthropologie:  Lichtenberg im Kontext der Spätaufklärung.  Tübingen:  Niemeyer, 2005.  Studien zur deutschen Literatur, vol. 176; Series eds.:  Wilfried Barner, Georg Braungart, and Conrad Wiedemann.  Pp. 396.

Bildungskrisen:  Die Frage nach dem Subjekt in Goethes ‘Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten.’  Tübingen:  Stauffenburg, 1995.   Stauffenburg Colloquium, vol. 38.  Pp. 172.

Books and Journal Issues Edited or Co-Edited
Special issue of JEGP on the ‘German Late Enlightenment’ (Vol. 102, No. 3, July 2003), with contributions by Katherine Arens, Kai Hammermeister, Almut Spalding, and Heidi Schlipphacke.

One Hundred Years of Masochism:  Literary Texts, Social and Cultural Contexts, eds. Michael C. Finke and Carl Niekerk, foreword Sander L. Gilman. Series:  Psychoanalysis and Culture, vol. 10; Series eds.:  J.J. Baneke, H. Hillenaar, H. de Jong, K. Nuijten, E.M. Wiersema, and W. Schönau.    Amsterdam, Atlanta:  Rodopi, 2000.  Pp. 215.

Chapters in Books
“Romanticism and Other Cultures,” to be published in Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism, ed. Nicholas Saul.  Cambridge:  Cambridge UP, 2007.  16 Pp.

“Mahler, Rembrandt, and the Dark Side of German Culture,” to be published in the anthology Northern Light / Northern Darkness? Rethinking Modernism: Art and Politics in Northern Europe, 1890-1950, eds. Patrizia McBride and Richard McCormick.  New York: Palgrave, 2006.  20 Pp.  Dutch version:  ”Mahler en Rembrandt,” De Gids 170.2 (February 2006):  166-174.

“Casanova’s Radical Enlightenment,” in:  Practicing Progress:  The Promise and Limitations of Enlightenment.  Festschrift for John A. McCarthy, eds. Richard E. Schade and Dieter Sevin.  Amsterdam / New York:  Rodopi, 2007.  75-92.

“‘Gute Freunde aller Orten’  Lichtenbergs Sicht der Nicht-Europäer,” in:  Literaturwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft:  Interkulturalität und Alterität — Interdisziplinarität und Medialität — Konzeptionalisierungen und Mythographie.  Akten des X. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Wien 2000, Bd. 9, ed. Peter Wiesinger.  Frankfurt a.M.:  Peter Lang, 2003.  217-222.

“Men in Pain:  Disease and Displacement in Kleist’s Der Findling,”  in:  Kleists Erzählungen und Dramen.  Neue Studien, eds. Paul Michael Lützeler and David Pan. Würzburg:  Königshausen & Neumann, 2001.  107-119.

(Together with Laurie R. Johnson) “German Poetry 1750-1850,”  The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. Peter France.  Oxford:  Oxford UP, 2000.  309-313.

“Race and Gender in Multatuli’s Max Havelaar and Love Letters.”  One Hundred Years of Masochism:  Studies in the Culture of Psychoanalysis (see Books Edited or Co-Edited) 171-190.

“Vom Kreislauf der Geschichte.  Moderne, Postmoderne, Prämoderne:  Christoph Ransmayrs Morbus Kitahara.”  Die Erfindung der Welt:  Zum Werk von Christoph Ransmayr, ed. Uwe Wittstock.  Frankfurt a.M.:  Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, March 1997.  Fischer Taschenbuch 13433.  158-180.

Articles
”Mahler’s Goethe,” accepted for publication by Musical Quarterly (Oxford UP), Pp. 33.

“Man and Orangutan in Eighteenth-Century Thinking:  Retracing the Early History of Dutch and German Anthropology,” Monatshefte 96.4(2004):  477-502.

“Mahler contra Wagner:  The Philosophical Legacy of Romanticism in Mahler’s Third and Fourth Symphonies,” German Quarterly 77.2 (2004):  189-210; a shorter version was published in:  Sound Matters:  Essays on the

“Der anthropologische Diskurs in Lessings Nathan der Weise,” Neophilologus, 88 (2004):  227-42.

“Rethinking a Problematic Constellation:  Postcolonialism and its Germanic Contexts (Pramoedya Ananta Toer / Multatuli),” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, special issue on Comparative (Post)Colonialisms, 23.1 & 2 (2003):  58-69.

“Spätaufklärung — Rethinking the Late Eighteenth Century in German Literary History,” JEGP, 102.3 (July 2003): 317-35.

“Wieland und die Irrwege der Aufklärung.  Öffentlichkeitskritik in der Geschichte der Abderiten,” Lessing Yearbook XXXIII, 2001:  233-59.

“Lessing in the Netherlands:  The Case of Theodorus Cornelis van Stockum,” Lessing Yearbook XXXII, 2000.  Proceedings of the Lessing Society Conference  »Lesssing International — Lessing Reception Abroad« held at Vanderbilt University, Nashville Tennessee, 28-31 October 1999:  179-94.

“Kleists Männer, ihre Sexualität und die Nation.”  Weimarer Beiträge, 45.4 (1999):  569-83.

“Foucault, Freud, Musil:  Macht und Masochismus in den Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß.”   Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie,  116.4 (December 1997):  545-66.

“Sexual Imagery in Goethe’s Faust II.”   Seminar, 33.1 (February 1997): 1-21.

“‘Individuum est ineffabile.’  Bildung, der Physiognomikstreit und die Frage nach dem Subjekt in Goethes Wilhelm-Meister-Projekt.”  Colloquia Germanica, 28.1 (1995):  1-33.

“Der Umgang mit dem Untergang:  Projektion als erzählerisches Prinzip in Thomas Bernhards Untergeher.”  Monatshefte 85.4 (1993):  464-77.

Other
Essay:  “Why Hermeneutics?  Rereading Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode,” Monatshefte 96.2 (2004):  163-68.

Essays on “Germanic Review” and “New German Critique,” in:  German Studies in the United States.  A Historical Handbook, ed. Peter U. Hohendahl.  New York:  MLA, 2003.  366-377.

Diskussionsbeitrag, Lessing Yearbook XXXII, 2000:  422-24.

Lexicon Entries on “Cynical Reason,” “Manfred Frank,” “Jürgen Habermas,” and “Neostructuralism,” in:  Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, eds. Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist.  New York, London:  Routledge, 2001.  77-78, 135-136, 168-169, and 263.

Essay:  “Grenzüberschreitungen:  Cees Nootebooms Berliner Notizen,” Neue Rundschau 104.1 (1993):  162-64.

Invited Lectures and Invited Conference Presentations
“Man and Ape in 18th-Century Thinking:  Retracing the Early History of German Anthropology,” German Department, University of Wisconsin/Madison, March 28, 2003.

“Mahler, Rembrandt, and the Jewish Question,” Mahler and his World, 13th Bard Music Festival, Bard College, Annandale-on Hudson, New York, August 2002.

“Lichtenberg im Kontext der naturgeschichtlichen Debatten seiner Zeit,” University of Regensburg, June 2000.

“Men in Pain:  Displacement in Kleist’s Der Findling,” Fifteenth St. Louis Symposium on German Literature, Washington University, April 2000.

“Lessing Reception in the Netherlands:  A Case Study on Th.C. van Stockum,” Lessing International - Lessing-Reception Abroad.   Vanderbilt University, October 1999.

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Recently Taught Courses

• GER 573: Goethe’s Modernity
• GER 575: National Memory and Identity: Austrian Literature of the Twentieth Century
• GER 570: Postcolonial Theory and its Germanic Contexts
• GER 471: Overview: Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century Literature
• GER 211: Advanced Conversation and Composition 1
• GER 199: History of Sexuality and Literature (before and after Freud)(Discovery Course)
  

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