Cross-Disciplinary Lectures in Germanics
Winter 2019

Marianne Stecher (Scandinavian Studies, UW)

Professor Stecher will lay out the theoretical groundwork of her current book project (Nordic War Stories) with an eye to the shifting preoccupations of WWII scholarship and representation. She will survey the different fates (occupation, resistance, neutrality, military engagement) experienced by the five Nordic countries in the periphery of World War II and the principal historiographical narratives negotiated in the postwar decades, which serve as the basis for postwar literature and recent media dealing with WWII. Finally, as an example, she will offer a short reading of the 'war film' in recent Danish cinema focusing on two productions from 2015.

Reception to follow

Marianne Stecher's teaching and research in Scandinavian Studies examines questions of authorship, culture, history, literary representation, and war by employing cultural memory study, New Historicisms, feminist criticism, and postcolonial history. Her recent monograph is The Creative Dialectic in Karen Blixen's Essays: Gender, Nazi Germany, and Colonial Desire (U of Chicago Press, 2014). Further, Professor Stecher has published two reference works on Danish writers from the 16th to the 20th Centuries; articles and book chapters on H.C. Andersen, Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), Knut Hamsun and P.O. Enquist; and a monograph on the documentary narratives of Thorkild Hansen. Her forthcoming book is a collaborative project, Nordic War Stories: World War II as Fiction, Film, and History (Berghahn Books, 2020), an edited collection including contributions by eighteen Nordic and North American scholars.