 Professor
German and Romance Languages and Literatures
The Johns Hopkins University
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore MD 21218 Telephone: 410-516-7512
Email: rtobias@jhu.edu
Office: Dell House 501D
Office Hours: Wednesday 11am-1pm,
or by appointment
Curriculum Vitae
Article
ROCHELLE TOBIAS received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1996, where she studied German, French and English literature from the 18th to 20th centuries with a special emphasis on modern poetry. She joined the faculty of the German Department at Hopkins in 1996. Professor Tobias’ research has focused on the intersection of literature, philosophy and religion in the twentieth century. She is particularly interested in modern poetics and the tension between immanence and transcendence in the works of such poets as Rilke, George, Trakl and Celan. In addition she has worked extensively on the notion of redemption and utopia in German-Jewish culture and thought. Professor Tobias has held research fellowships from the American Association of University Women and the German Academic Exchange Service. She is the author of The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006). She also has a manuscript on the vexed relationship between life and literature in modern fiction forthcoming with the University of Nebraska Press. The study, entitled Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Literature in the Twentieth Century, examines novels by Mann, Rilke, Walser, Sebald, and Bernhard with the eye toward the questions that these works raise for narratology and theories of the novel. Professor Tobias is currently working on a study of aesthetic culture that explores poetry by George, Hofmannsthal, and Rilke and essays by Adorno.
Selected Publications: The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan: The Unnatural World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. Further information is available at http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/8849.html "Romantic Irony and the Modern Lyric: Szondi on Hofmannsthal." Telos 140 (Fall 2007), 131-46.
"The Double Fiction in Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten." The German Quarterly 79:3 (Summer 2006), 293-307.
"The Homecoming of a Word: Mystical Language Philosophy in Celan’s ‘Mit allen Gedanken.’" Placeless Topographies: Jewish Perspectives on Literature of Exile, ed. Bernhard Greiner (Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2003), 175-85. "March 27, 1329: Pope John XXII condemns portions of Meister Eckhart’s work as heretical." The New History of German Literature, eds. David Wellbery et al (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). "A Doctor’s Odyssey: Sickness and Health in Kafka’s ‘Ein Landarzt.’" The Germanic Review 75:2 (Spring 2000), 120-131. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism, Vol. 60, ed. Justin Karr. "Das Gesicht der Dinge." Gedichte von Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. Wolfram Groddeck (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), 104-121 Course Syllabus: 213.252 Freshman Seminar: What is a University? 213.672 Literature of Terror, Terror of Literature
| 
