Matching Items (3)
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- All Subjects: Germany
- Creators: Ghanem, Carla
Description
Approaches to Holocaust representation often take their cues from both academic and public discourse. General opinion demands serious engagement that depicts the full range of the brutality and inhumanity of the genocide and the victimization of targeted groups perpetrated by the National Socialists. Such a treatment is considered necessary to adequately represent the Holocaust for generations to come. The analysis of four texts will show that humor is not only appropriate but is also an important addition to Holocaust discourse. This study argues that humor plays an important role as a stylistic tool for discussing the Holocaust as well as for its remembrance and representation. Jurek Becker's novel Jakob der Lügner and Ruth Klüger's autobiography Weiter Leben: Eine Jugend are witness-texts by Jewish authors. Humor in these two works helps the authors engage and work their experiences. Klüger's autobiography also utilizes humor to critically engage in the discussion of Holocaust representation. This study also analyzes two non-witness Jewish texts: the stage play Mein Kampf by George Tabori and the feature film Mein Führer, die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler by Dani Levy. These two works utilize overt humor to challenge established Holocaust representations. Drawing on ideas from Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Giorgio Agamben, the core argument of this study demonstrates humor performs two main functions in the Holocaust literature and film chosen for this investigation. First, it restores a potential loss of dignity and helps victims endure the incomprehensible. Second, it challenges the prevailing truth and the established order.
ContributorsMeirich, Hanni (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Ghanem, Carla (Committee member) / Holian, Anna (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Disability is a label accompanied by a multitude of misconceptions and stereotypes. During various periods in Germany, attitudes towards disability have ranged from disgust and fear, to acceptance and inclusion. Being disabled in Germany once meant certain isolation; at the hands of the Nazi regime, it was met with almost certain premature death. Since those darker days of Germany's history, the country has become one that now affords its disabled citizens with the same rights as the non-disabled population and seeks to create a barrier-free environment. This study examines these perceptions of disability in Germany from the 1920s through the first decade of the 21st century. In order to accomplish this goal, cinema is used to provide insights into contemporaneous ideas about disability. By drawing upon analyses of six films that span the course of nearly 80 years, careful examination of disability portrayals reveal philosophical shifts in how the German people interpret disability. When analyzing these films, aspects of physical and mental disability are brought to the surface and discussed in terms of their sociopolitical and philosophical implications. To provide a social and cultural framework that gives significance to the changes in these cinematic roles, a historical survey of the German disability rights movement is folded into the discussion. The films explored in this study serve as culturally important visual aids that illustrate positive changes for the disabled living in Germany. Although not directly influencing cinematic portrayals of disability, the German disability rights movement that arose in the postwar period shaped ideas about disability and allowed disabled Germans to be accepted and included in society. With these rights now available disabled Germans are able to lead a self-determined life and portray themselves as equals.
ContributorsJackson, Anthony James (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Alexander, John (Committee member) / Ghanem, Carla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
Description
Code-switching, a bilingual language phenomenon, which may be defined as the concurrent use of two or more languages by fluent speakers is frequently misunderstood and stigmatized. Given that the majority of the world's population is bilingual rather than monolingual, the study of code-switching provides a fundamental window into human cognition and the systematic structural outcomes of language contact. Intra-sentential code-switching is said to systematically occur, constrained by the lexicons of each respective language. In order to access information about the acceptability of certain switches, linguists often elicit grammaticality judgments from bilingual informants. In current linguistic research, grammaticality judgment tasks are often scrutinized on account of the lack of stability of responses to individual sentences. Although this claim is largely motivated by research on monolingual strings under a variety of variable conditions, the stability of code-switched grammaticality judgment data given by bilingual informants has yet to be systematically investigated. By comparing grammaticality judgment data from 3 groups of German-English bilinguals, Group A (N=50), Group B (N=34), and Group C (N=40), this thesis investigates the stability of grammaticality judgments in code-switching over time, as well as a potential difference in judgments between judgment data for spoken and written code-switching stimuli. Using a web-based survey, informants were asked to give ratings of each code-switched token. The results were computed and findings from a correlated groups t test attest to the stability of code-switched judgment data over time with a p value of .271 and to the validity of the methodologies currently in place. Furthermore, results from the study also indicated that no statistically significant difference was found between spoken and written judgment data as computed with an independent groups t test resulting in a p value of .186, contributing a valuable fact to the body of data collection practices in research in bilingualism. Results from this study indicate that there are significant differences attributable to language dominance for specific token types, which were calculated using an ANOVA test. However, when using group composite scores of all tokens, the ANOVA measure returned a non-significant score of .234, suggesting that bilinguals with differing language dominances rank in a similar manner. The findings from this study hope to help clarify current practices in code-switching research.
ContributorsGrabowski, Jane (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Macswan, Jeff (Thesis advisor) / Ghanem, Carla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011