Forum: Is Literature Still Central to German Studies?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This question was posed in our last issue by Frank Trommler. We published a number of initial responses in GQ 80.1 and are pleased to offer five new contributions. These as well as other responses can be viewed at our website, germanquarterly.aatg.org. Readers are invited to send their thoughts on the topic to «german.quarterly@ duke.edu»; we promise to react. JANE V. CURRAN Dalhousie University Start with the learner, not with the Such advice is all well and good, but we still need to get to the discipline. Perhaps discipline is a misleading term, though. It has connotations of self denial, drudgery, and unquestioning obedience to senseless regulations. Discipline is definitely a requirement for learning a language: memorization, careful analysis and attentive listening are essential, while curious inquiry has to be kept at bay. Sometimes there is an explanation for a rule; more often you just need to find a crutch to help remember it. Genuine love for a language can be kindled under these harsh conditions. Admiration for its expressions, its grandeur, poignancy, humor, paradox and inspiration follows. There are two conflicting movements in German Studies. One points in the direction of compromise, urges us to view mastery of the language as essential, but links it with practical aids that offer only transitory entertainment. The other holds that defeatism and compromise ought not to be watchwords of higher learning. What possible benefit can ensue from denying young minds access to finely crafted emotion in medieval love poems, engaging moral dilemmas in Enlightenment theater, new ways of interpreting nature and society in realism and symbolism, the provocations of the twentieth century? Amazement lies ahead for hungry minds, leads them into unanticipated realms, filled with unimagined delights. Young people seeking more of what is available on the High Street don't need to come to university. Many come with the firm intention of studying psychology or linguistics. Their conversion, their epiphany, comes from the profound beauty of Holderlin's verses, the thought-provoking Kafkaesque conundrums, or the poised and finely crafted irony of Thomas Mann's stories. As Goethe's poet in Faust, Vorspiel auf dem Theater, says: Was glanzt ist fur den Augenblick geboren / Das Echte bleibt der Nachwelt unverloren. ALBRECHT CLASSEN University of Arizona The centrality of literature is not at stake in the current culture war, and never has been. At stake are, rather, our theoretical underpinnings and methodological approaches, our willingness to allow heteroglossia to determine our professional discourse, and also historical perspective as such. Gryphius was not a Shakespeare, but he still had powerful messages contained in his sonnets that continue to contribute highly meaningfully to the anti-war movement today. Medieval literature proves to be as relevant to our current student generation as eighteenth-century novels or poems. It all depends on how we embrace these texts and whether or not we can unearth their deeper messages. Old High German literature is constituted by every text that has survived, including genres such as charms, oaths, laws, hymns, prayers, etc. Despite many discussions about the discovery of fictionality by authors such as Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strafiburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Mechthild von Magdeburg, to name just a few, there are no medieval, and by the same token, early modern, texts that do not reflect a significant bricolage of genres, combining scholastic, theological, geographical, philosophical, and literary discourses often within the same text. Wolfram's Parziva! includes long lists of names concerning the lapidary sciences and astrology, and also medical information. Sixteenth-century literature equally consists of such a variety of narratives, including travelogues, sermons, hymns, cookbooks, and the numerous instructional books in the artes mechanicae (warfare, husbandry, architecture, etc. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".