Lynn Wolff

Biography

Ph.D. and M.A., German, University of Wisconsin-Madison

B.A., German and Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Lynn L. Wolff’s teaching and research interests encompass modern German literature and culture, in particular the relationship between literature and historiography, the representation of the Holocaust, theories of translation, practices of intermediality, and concepts of world literature. These interests are reflected in her first monograph W.G. Sebald’s Hybrid Poetics: Literature as Historiography (Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter 2014), which explores the emergence of a new hybrid discourse of literature as historiography while illuminating the interplay of aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics in twentieth-century literature in German. It is the first monograph to examine Sebald’s œuvre in its entirety, including unpublished archival material held at the Archive of German Literature in Marbach and the Harvard Houghton Library. 

She has also written on other contemporary authors, including Marcel Beyer, Wilhelm Genazino, Nora Krug, Per Leo, Katja Petrowskaja, and Bernhard Schlink. Her articles and review essays have appeared in Gegenwartsliteratur, Eurostudia – Revue Transatlantique de Recherche sur l’Europe, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL), Journal of European Studies, Modern Language Review, and Monatshefte.

Her current book project explores the visual dimension of Holocaust testimony through an investigation of works that exhibit complex text-image relationships. Broadly defined as “graphic narratives,” these works offer new ways to consider how memory and trauma – experiences that challenge discursive modes of representation – are captured in visual forms and made (il)legible. The project further investigates how experience is ‘translated’ into word and image, how subjectivity and narrative voice are visualized, and how such visual texts reach a wider readership.

Prior to joining the department, Lynn was an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow and taught in the Department of Modern German Literature at the Universität Stuttgart. She has also taught German language, literature, and culture at Middlebury College’s Summer German School, where she also co-hosted the German School’s weekly radio program. At MSU, Lynn is also affiliate faculty in the Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel.