Faculty

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Gail E. Finney Professor of Comparative Literature and German Ph.D. (UC Berkeley), 1980 Email: gefinney@ucdavis.edu Phone: (530) 752-1125 Office: 909 Sproul Hall Office Hours

Research Interests

• Psychoanalysis and literature/film, especially trauma theory
• Turn-of-the-century culture
• Modern drama
• 19^th-century European fiction
• Feminism
• Postwar German women writers
  

Current Projects

• "Female Victimization and Hauptmann's Stylistic Eclecticism," chapter in Gerhart Hauptmann and the Naturalist Drama, ed. Raleigh Whitinger.
• Book entitled: The Dark Side of the Screen: Family Trauma in Contemporary American Cinema

Education

• M.A. and Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 1975, 1980, Comparative Literature
• A.B. Princeton University, 1973, German (summa cum laude)

Academic Positions

• Harvard University, Assistant and Associate Professor of German, 1980-88
• University of California Davis, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, 1988-present
• Harvard University, Visiting Professor of German, Spring 1997

Major Publications

• The Counterfeit Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984.
• Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989, 1991 (nominated for the American Comparative Literature Association's Harry Levin Prize).
• Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy (ed.). New York: Gordon and Breach, 1994.
• Christa Wolf. New York: Twayne/Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1999.
• Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle (ed.). Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2006.

     Selected Recent Articles and Book Chapters

• "Revolution, Resignation, Realism: 1830-1890." The Cambridge History of German Literature. Ed. Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997; in paper 2000. 272-326.
• "Komödie und Obszönität: Der sexuelle Witz bei Jelinek und Freud." The German Quarterly, 70 (Winter 1997): 499-510.
• "The Berlin Wall: Six Years After." Schreiben im heutigen Deutschland: Die literarische Szene nach der Wende. Ed. U.E. Beitter. New York: P. Lang, 1997. 25-34.
• "Of Walls and Windows: What German Studies and Comparative Literature Can Offer Each Other." Comparative Literature, 49 (Summer 1997): 259-66.
• "The Merging of German Unifications: Liminality in Günter Grass's Ein weites Feld." Schwellen: Germanistische Erkundungen einer Metapher. Ed. Nicholas Saul, Daniel Steuer, Frank Möbus, and Birgit Illner. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999. 127-36.
• "True Lies in the Ex-GDR: The Intersection of History and Fiction in the Career of Christa Wolf." History and Literature: Essays in Honor of Karl S. Guthke. Ed. William C. Donahue and Scott Denham. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001.133-44.
• "Women's Comedy and Its Intellectual Fathers: Marx as the Answer to Freud." Literary Friendship, Literary Paternity: Essays in Honor of Stanley Corngold. Ed. Gerhard Richter. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2002. 233-51.
• "Die Schaubühne als oralische Anstalt: Das postmoderne Theater von Ginka Steinwachs." Vol. 59 of Akten des X. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Wien 2000: Gegenwartsliteratur. Ed. Peter Wiesinger. Bern: P. Lang, 2002. 95-100.
• "Queering the Stage: Critical Displacement in the Theater of Else Lasker-Schüler and Mae West." Comparative Literature Studies, 40.1 (2003): 54-71.
• "Poetic Realism, Naturalism, and the Rise of the Novella." The Camden House History of German Literature, Volume Nine: The Nineteenth Century: 1830-1899. Ed. Eric Downing and Clayton Koelb. New York: Camden House, 2005. 117-36.
• "Modern Theater and the Tragic in Europe." A Companion to Tragedy. Ed. Rebecca Bushnell. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 471-87.
• "Performing Vienna: Theatricality in Jelinek's Burgtheater and Bernhard's Heldenplatz." Special issue of German Politics and Society, 23 (Spring 2005): 24-38.
• "What's Happened to Feminism?" Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (ACLA Report 2004). Ed. Haun Saussy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 114-26.
• "The Tectonics of Trauma: 'Father-Daughter Incest in Film." Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma. Ed. Valerie Raoul et al. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007. 89-96.

Honors and Awards

• National Endowment for the Humanities Grant for Independent Study and Research, 1983-84
• American Council of Learned Societies Grant awarded but declined for 1983-84
• Faculty Research Grants, UC Davis, 1988-90, 1991-94, 2000-01, 2003-07
• Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, Berlin, 1989-90
• Faculty Development Awards, UC Davis, Spring 1995, Spring 2002
• Research Fellowship from Davis Humanities Institute, Fall 1999
• DAAD Study Visit Research Grant (declined), 2002
• Distinguished Graduate/Professional Teaching Award, UC Davis, 2007

Teaching Fields/Courses Taught

A wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses in 19th- and 20th-century German and comparative literature, including graduate seminars in German on:

• Poetic Realism in the Light of Modern Literary Theory
• Anti-Aristotelian Drama
• Gender and Comedy
• Turn-of-the-Century Culture
• Narrative and Narrative Theory
• 20^th-century Women Writers

Graduate seminars in comparative literature and Critical Theory on:

• Comedy from Aristophanes to the Present
• Nietzsche and the 20th Century
• Introduction to the Graduate Study of Comparative Literature
• Theories of Comedy and Laughter
• Modernism and Postmodernism
• Trauma: Its Representation in Theory, Literature, and Film