Dr. Thorsten Carstensen: "Learning from John Ford: History, Time, and Geography in the Novels of Peter Handke"

On 17 May 2018, Thorsten Carstensen, Ph.D., visited the Center for German-American Educational History and gave a lecture on "Learning from John Ford: History, Time, and Geography in the Novels of Peter Handke" in our lecture series Public History, Popular History or Historical Edutainment - Representations of German and American History in Theatre, Cinema and Television (Summer Term 2018).

Dr. Carstensen is associate professor of German in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). He holds an M.A. degree from the University of Freiburg (2006) and a Ph.D. degree from New York University (2012). At IUPUI, he teaches courses on modern German and Austrian literature, German cinema, and translation studies.

In his interdisciplinary research on German-language literature, Dr. Carstensen combines a focus on theories and critiques of modernity with an emphasis on the development of the Austrian novel from Adalbert Stifter to the present. His first book, Romanisches Erzählen: Peter Handke und die epische Tradition (Göttingen: Wallstein 2013), investigates Handke’s travelogues against the backdrop of his refashioning of the epic tradition. Its main focus concerns Handke’s appropriation of the forms and imagery of Romanesque architecture and sculpture. By analyzing Handke’s ekphrastic writings on churches in Spain and France, the book brings to the fore key aspects of Handke’s aesthetics, arguing that the author’s narrative strategies serve to establish constellations of meaning that conflate past and present in the mythic image of a longue durée.

Dr. Carstensen’s other publications include a co-edited volume (Die Literatur der Lebensreform. Kulturkritik und Aufbruchstimmung um 1900, Bielefeld: transcript, 2016; with Marcel Schmid), as well as articles on Hermann Broch, Thomas Bernhard, Ernst Jünger, J.M. Coetzee, and Paul Auster. In addition, he has also published on Hollywood cinema. Currently, he is working on a book manuscript on architectural discourses in modern German-language literature.

The Center for German-American Educational History (CGAEH) and the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI are working on a close cooperation with each other. In particular, the CGAEH and the IUPUI will seek to establish a student exchange program.